The November presidential elections are right around the corner. In Baltimore that means the political machines will rev up in order to turn out the vote. The D’Alesandros, the EDO, the Currans, and of course Owe’Malley are some of the more famous Baltimore political machines. However, they have nothing on the Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs.

In the early to mid 19^th Century waves of Irish and German immigrants (nearly all Roman Catholic) swelled Baltimore’s population increasing it from 80,000 to well over 200,000. The Jacksonian zeitgeist of patronage politics, typical of that era, induced the local Democratic Party bosses to view the new arrivals as potential votes and hence lavish them with jobs and preferential treatment. This gave rise to a very ugly strain of nativism, embodied in the American Party more commonly known as the “Know Nothing” Party. The late Johns Hopkins historian John Higham's book Strangers in the Land is perhaps the seminal work on the subject and was required reading in graduate school.

The Know Nothing’s organized their party apparatus around “political clubs” like the Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs. If you define political clubs as thuggish street gangs then the Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs met the criteria. Both were violent Baltimore street gangs that operated in the half decade prior to the Civil War. The Plug Uglies formed around the Mt. Vernon Volunteer Hook and Ladder Company and operated on the West Side. Contrary to Martin Scorsese and Herbert Asbury the Plug Uglies were not a “Gang of New York”, they were a Baltimore gang and part of the reason Baltimore is known as “Mobtown.”

In late-1850s Baltimore winning elections meant controlling the streets:

Election rallies were massive provocations, mixing theatrical spectacle with guerrilla warfare, Fourth of July pageantry with thuggery. The American clubs regularly held torchlight processions or grand illuminations featuring floats, fireworks, effigies, banners, speeches, and songs. Because the party that ruled the streets held sway at the polls, partisans regularly marched through opposing wards. They also infiltrated opposition rallies, where they threw the crowd into disarray by jabbing bystanders with the easily concealed shoemaker's awl, similar to a short ice pick. So beloved was the lowly awl that shortly before the presidential election in 1859, the American clubs engaged blacksmiths to forge them en masse, handed out flyers announcing their distribution, and incorporated the awl's image into club banners. A favorite featured “the figure of a man running, with another in pursuit, sticking him with an awl.” At the polling places, the Plug Uglies strapped awls to their knees, surrounded suspect voters and “awled” them into retreat. “Come up and vote; there is room for awl!”

The Blood Tubs got their name because of their electioneering practice of dunking political opponents in tubs of slaughterhouse blood.

Voters in antebellum Baltimore did not use secret ballots they brought their distinctive ballots with them to the polling place. In the case of the Know Nothings they had easy-to-spot garish stripped ballots. Voters arriving at the polls with opposition ballots were met by the Plug Uglies and the ubiquitous awl.

Another infamous Plug Ugly/Blood Tub campaign tactic was “cooping.” Cooping involved kidnapping fresh immigrants, vagrants, or sailors on shore leave and holding them in squalid cellars or sheds called “coops.” There the Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs would persuade their captives to vote Know Nothing by filling them with whiskey, beating them or dropping them into the aforementioned tub of gore before being dropped off at the polls to vote several times.

Peter Fitzpatrick testified that he was kept in Plug Ugly Raz Levy’s coop, where he recalled that a fellow captive, a German immigrant “had a large beard, and Crab Ashby took a candle and . . . burnt it off.” In 1858, John Justus Ritzius recounted being forced to vote sixteen times in several wards. Given that a single coop might hold as many as ninety captives, the potential for inflating the turnout was prodigious. That year, independent mayoral candidate Colonel Schutt ran against Know Nothing incumbent Thomas Swann. Observing that attempts to vote for him promised “loss of life and the general disorder of the city,” the civic-minded Schutt made what is perhaps the earliest concession speech in American history, bowing out of the race at noon on Election Day.

Rumor has it that Edgar Allan Poe was cooped just before he died.

Contemporary Baltimore political machines are much more evolved and humane; they now provide free transportation in order for their constituents to vote several times.

The American Party was called the Know Nothings because that was their standard answer in response to questions about their savage practices, “I know nothing.” Throw in appropriate Hogan’s Heroes quip here.

The onset of the Civil War marked the eventual decline of the Know Nothings and the end of the Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs. Politicians who used the gangs could no longer be associated with them due to rising public outrage at their violence. The governmental and electoral reforms that followed formed the nascent structure that evolved into our modern municipal government apparatus.

Violence marked Know Nothing Mayor, Thomas Swann’s two terms in office and he owed his victories to two election riots. However, interestingly enough, Swann replaced the Plug Ugly volunteer fire units with a professional fire service, equipped it with steam powered engines, oversaw the beginnings the Baltimore street car system, and built Druid Hill Park. Swann would later join the Democratic Party and ascend to the governor’s mansion in Annapolis.

Even though the violence in Baltimore’s political processes is gone, unfortunately the patronage and corruption remain.