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Bill Thayer

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A Contemporaneous Account
of the Baltimore Riot of 1812
printed September 1 of that year

Or as the original title-page puts it:

AN
EXACT AND AUTHENTIC
NARRATIVE,
OF THE EVENTS WHICH TOOK PLACE IN
BALTIMORE, ON THE 27th AND
28th OF JULY LAST.
CAREFULLY COLLECTED FROM SOME OF
THE SUFFERERS AND EYE-WITNESSES.
TO WHICH IS ADDED
A NARRATIVE OF
MR. JOHN THOMSON,
ONE OF THE UNFORTUNATE SUFFERERS, &c.

The direful Mob was heard to shout,
We'll drink their blood! we'll root them out!

PRINTED FOR THE PURCHASERS,
September 1, 1812.

Table of Contents

The various sections of the pamphlet run on with no page breaks. To make the text clearer and the webpages shorter, I've divided them up as follows:

My Short Title
Linked to the Text

Original Title

Page

Montgomery County Deposition

Deposition before the Justice of the Peace for Montgomery County, Rockville, Md., Aug. 12, 1812

3

Thomson Narrative

Narrative of Mr. John Thomson, one of the persons intended to be massacred with General Lingan and others, in the gaol of Baltimore, on Tuesday, the 28th of July last.

36

Sprigg Narrative

Extract from the narrative of Otho Sprigg, Esquire, one of the gentlemen who defended the house in Charles Street, Baltimore.

49

August 1st Letter

Extract of a Letter from one of the meritorious, though unsuccessful defenders of the freedom of the press at Baltimore, to his parents, dated August 1, 1812.

55

Hanson Letter

Extract of a letter from A. C. Hanson, Esquire, (one of the Editors of the Fed Repub.) dated near Baltimore, August 3d, 1812.

63

Georgetown Meeting

Town Meeting. Georgetown

65

Prince George's County Meeting

Meeting in Prince George's County.

68
[decorative delimiter]

Technical Details

Edition Used, Transcription

The text reproduced here is that of a pamphlet published in Baltimore in 1812. It is in the public domain. This transcription, by Eugene H. Leache, is based on page images of that pamphlet at the American Memory project of the Library of Congress (digital id: "lhbcb 20045"; see also the American Memory homepage). The original spellings and abbreviations have been retained.

Proofreading

This transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are therefore shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme. Should you spot an error, however . . . please do report it.

As might be expected, the 1812 pamphlet seems to have been printed in a hurry and not too well proofread, if at all. Where there were manifest errors — only in terms of the standards of the period, of course — I fixed those I could, marking the correction each time with one of these: º. If for some reason I could not fix the error, I marked it º: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles. Inconsistencies in punctuation have been corrected to the author's usual style, in a slightly different color — barely noticeable on the page, but it shows up in the sourcecode as <SPAN CLASS="emend">.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is indicated by local links in the sourcecode: so far, that's just like any other text on my site. In this case, I've also made the pagination apparent in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ): it's hardly fair to give you "pp53‑56" as a reference and not tell you where p56 ends. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.



[image ALT: A graphic pattern of sharply oblique spikes. It is a graphic variation on the 18c arms of Baltimore.]

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is an angry graphic variation on the coat-of‑arms of the Lords Baltimore, which up to the time of the Revolutionary War served as the city's arms and flag.


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Site updated: 30 Sep 06