Page 5 - Baltimore_Sun_Editorial

Though born and raised a Northerner, Abell, who was white, had strong Southern sympathies,
and his newspaper perpetuated and profited from the brutal enslavement and sale of Black people
up to and through the Civil War. At the time, Baltimore acted as a hub for the slave trade, with
dealers bringing captive people into Maryland, imprisoning them in pens around the city’s
harbor, then transporting them on packet ships down the Chesapeake Bay to Southern markets.
The Sun profited from the misery, running advertisements from dealers and others.

One ad from October 1849, placed by an Elkridge man, offered $300 for the return of a 30-year-
old “bright, Mulatto Negro Woman, named MATILDA,” who escaped in a horse carriage with
her husband, a free man, and five children, ages 10 months to 10 years. On the same page, a 12-
year-old girl is offered for sale. The ad reads: “She is honest, healthy and active; well acquainted
with house work. A good home is wanted for her. Apply at the Sun office.”

Slavery and attitudes toward it would
politically divide the country over the next
several years, with a new anti-slavery
Republican Party quickly gaining supporters
in the North and detractors in the South. By
1860, most Southern states were promising to
secede from the Union if Republican
Abraham Lincoln won the presidency, which
he did in November of that year. The Sun
strongly criticized Lincoln’s election,
claiming the new president would “rule with
authority” over slave states that rejected “his
principles and avowed policy as in direct
conflict with their constitutional rights.”

Though Maryland was a slave state, it voted
against secession, which put it on the Union
side by default. Once the Civil War began, 19 Oct 1849, Fri The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore,
with four times as many Maryland men Maryland) Newspapers.com
fighting for the Union as the Confederacy,
and under threat of jail from federal
authorities, Abell held off from both pro-Confederate and anti-Lincoln commentary in The Sun.
After the war ended and the Union won, the paper accepted the outcome as a practical matter.
But instead of focusing on integration, it frequently sought to advance segregation and cement
the idea that Black citizens were second-class at best.

‘Purify the electorate’

In 1887, as Jim Crow laws were put in place to counter gains made by Black Americans during
Reconstruction, a Sun news brief hailed the unveiling of a memorial to Roger B. Taney. He was
the U.S. Supreme Court chief justice from Maryland who wrote the infamous 1857 Dred Scott
decision claiming that Black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to

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