After the “Jew Bill” got by, Baltimoreans paid more attention to Lundy’s journal. There was talk of “outside influence”; and one day Austin Woolfolk, a notoriously mean slave-trader, beat up the editor on the street and nearly killed him. The city’s business was expanding. Shipbuilding had started in the Colonial days. With the new roads bringing in products from the west, merchants were soon making shipments in their own vessels and the town’s prominence as a seaport was assured. By 1810 the city had become the third largest in America. The population had quadrupled since the Declaration of Independence, mainly because of the maritime business. Baltimore clippers brought coffee from South America, tea and opium from China, and slaves from Africa. It was well known that smuggling sprang up, after the importation of African slaves was made a felony. By 1826 the interstate traffic was enormous. Boatloads of slaves, manacled together, were conveyed in sailing vessels along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts to New Orleans, great slave mart of the South. These cargoes of living freight were listed openly in the papers with the regular shipping news. Law or no law, the great city of Baltimore had little patience with “loose talk” about so lucrative a market. A meddling outsider, William Lloyd Garrison, was thrown in jail. Publication of the _Genius_ ceased, and all copies of the incendiary journal were destroyed. At least that’s what the merchants thought. But old marked sheets had a way of turning up in the queerest places! Even as a child--a slave child, following his young master from place to place--Frederick had not been wholly unaware of the swelling, pushing traffic of the growing city. As he sat on the school steps waiting for Tommy to come out, he watched heavy carts go by on their way to the wharf. Sometimes one would get stuck in the mud; and then, while the mule pulled and backed, the “furriners” yelled funny-sounding words. A stalk of sugar cane dropped from the load made a good find. If it was not too large, Frederick would hide it until night. Then he and Tommy would munch the sweet fiber, the little master in his bed, the slave stretched out on the floor. The day came when the growing boys slipped off to the wharves where vessels from the West Indies discharged their freight of molasses, to gorge themselves on the stolen sweet, extracted on a smooth stick inserted through a bunghole. Frederick had seen coffles of slaves trudge through Baltimore streets--men and women and sometimes little children chained together. The boys always stopped playing and stared after them.