Now the colored man was entitled to all the rights and privileges enjoyed by white men in the State and the United States. — George A. Hackett
If the name George Hackett is not already familiar to you, consider it a consequence of how our city’s history too often overlooks a pantheon of activists who led Black Baltimoreans beyond the threat of colonization and into the possibility of voting rights. In an earlier generation, men like William Watkins resisted the calls to migrate to Liberia, insisting that they were citizens in the land of their birth, the United States. The next generation included men like Hackett who defeated some of colonizations’ most draconian schemes and pressed forward to realize voting rights after the Civil War.
You may have encountered Hackett before. His portrait hangs on a wall at Baltimore’s Douglass-Myers Museum. His grave marker long sat, toppled over, in Baltimore’s Laurel Cemetery, today located in Johnsville, Maryland. His service aboard USS Constitution, as steward to the Commodore, earned him recognition by the USS Constitution Museum. Skimming early issues of the Baltimore Sun, you’ll find Hackett mentioned there as a AME Church Deacon, an enterprising coal dealer, a husband and father, and a tireless advocate for Black freedom and citizenship. When historian and Library of Congress bibliographer Daniel Murray developed his plans for an “Encyclopedia of the Colored Race,” he compiled extensive notes on Hackett’s life and career. 1
As an activist in 1860 — in pre-Civil War and slaveholding Maryland — Hackett helped defeat a proposal that would have made colonization the law. Legislators in Annapolis proposed that migration to Liberia or elsewhere beyond the state should be compulsory rather than voluntary for free Black Marylanders. They would be required, the bill’s sponsor Curtis Jacobs urged, to leave the state permanently or be enslaved. For free Black Baltimoreans like Hackett, who numbered about 25,000 in 1860, it was a devastating prospect.2
That season, Hackett became one of Maryland’s first Black lobbyists as he worked to defeat Jacobs’ scheme. He collected petition signatures in Baltimore, proof that among the residents of his city were hundreds and more who stood against a change that would devastate the community that he and so many others had built against the odds. When it came time to present the petition at the State House in Annapolis, Hackett did not rely upon a duly elected lawmaker or another white agent. Instead, he carried the document and his message personally, confronting Jacobs. The lawmaker’s offense at finding a Black man in the door of the legislative chamber nearly brought the two to blows. They eventually met up in Baltimore and debated the substance of the bill.
The Jacobs bill was defeated that spring of 1860, but Hackett did not sit down. Winning the right to remain in Maryland was just the beginning of his ambitions and, at the war’s end, Hackett fought for the citizenship rights of Black Marylanders, including their right to vote. He joined the party of Lincoln and of the radicals in Congress, the Republicans. He signed on as a delegate to the so-called “colored” conventions, first among the border states in 1868 and then in 1869 at the National Convention of Colored Men in Washington, DC.
Hackett put his lobbying skills to use as part of a delegation that visited the US Senate Judiciary Committee to encourage it to propose a 15th Amendment to the Constitution, a change that aimed to ensure Black voting rights. Hackett’s last public acts in the months before his death in April 1870, at 61, were devoted to winning the right to vote in Maryland. He lived just long enough to see the 15th Amendment ratified and to propel his state, Maryland, on to a new struggle over the power of Black men at the ballot box, the statehouse, and beyond.
For George Hackett, 1870 was a year of consequence. Ratification of the 15th Amendment fueled the ambitions of Black Baltimoreans for political rights. That touchstone moment challenged the city and the nation to realize a new inter-racial democracy. Hackett called for a Baltimore in which residents, Black and white alike, enjoyed political rights and exercised authority in all spheres of governance. In that very same year, Johns Hopkins, the trustees of the new hospital that was to bear his name, and the city as a whole were embroiled in another touchstone struggle: where to site the new facility, one “for the reception of patients without regard to creed, race, or color — the whites to be separated from the blacks by a brick wall,” as one news report put it.3
These two visions for Baltimore’s future set the city at a crossroads. Would it become a place of shared governance without regard to a color line, or was Baltimore’s future one that would be shaped by walls, real and figurative, that kept Black and white residents separate? Neither George Hackett, who died in 1870, nor Johns Hopkins, who passed away shortly thereafter in 1873, lived to lead Baltimore as it developed a new, post-slavery order. And still, their two visions echoed through the city for decades to come. Perhaps on some days you hear them still.
— MSJ.
Historians have long noted Hackett and his influence on life in Baltimore City. See, Leroy Graham, Baltimore: The Nineteenth Century Black Capital (Washington: University Press of America, 1982); Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (University of Illinois Press, 1997); Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Dennis Patrick Halpin, A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and Its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Martha S. Jones, “George Hackett, Baltimore’s Birthright Citizen,” Black Perspectives, August 3, 2021.
“The Johns Hopkins Hospital—Large Meeting of Citizens,” Sun, September 20, 1870.