The most serious cause of difference was not the question of slavery, for Baltimore was, it has been said, “the paradise of the free colored population.” In 1789, Samuel Chase, Luther Martin, Dr. George Buchanan, and in fact most of the leading men of that day, formed one of the earliest of American abolition societies; and to the same cause, in later times, Charles Carroll of Carrollton lent his influence and William Pinkney his eloquence. The most powerful stimulus to secession lay in the policy of Lincoln’s administration. While the attack upon the Sixth Massachusetts was the work of the mob, the passage through Maryland of the Northern troops made sympathy with the South temporarily predominant. The excitement subsided; the city, like the State, was held for the Union, but the military policy of the national Government inaugurated a period of bitter oppression to those whose hearts were across the Potomac. Newspapers were suppressed, all exhibitions of sympathy with the Southern cause were rudely brought to an end, and the personal liberty of the individual was destroyed by the suspension of the _habeas corpus_--a suspension which henceforth estranged the executive and the judicial heads of the nation. Yet in spite of this military policy, or, more properly, because of it, the Union sentiment increased, and in 1864, in the city where four years before each of his three opponents had been nominated for the Presidency, the Union-Republican convention chose as its candidate for a second term the President, Abraham Lincoln. * * * * * With the development of the policy of internal improvement began the modern city. In spite of financial crises, periods of bitter political disturbance and the shock of the Civil War, the expansion begun by the uniting of Baltimore town first with Jonas town and then with Fell’s Point, has been continued over the neighboring hillsides to the north, east, and west, until the hamlet of two hundred inhabitants has now become the city of more than half a million souls. With this numerical increase has come a proportionate commercial development; the advantageous situation of “the northernmost southern and the westernmost eastern city” is as potent a factor in its life to-day as it was of old. In the higher things, also, that enrich the life of a great city, progress has been no less constant. The schoolmaster, to whom, in 1752, “encouragement” was offered by advertisement in the Maryland _Gazette_, has been succeeded by a thorough system of public education, while the ideas that found expression in the “Stevenson’s Folly,” and the “Murphy’s Circulating Library” of a century ago, have subsequently inspired the foundations of McDonogh, Shepard, Watson, White, Wilson, Peabody, Hopkins and Pratt.