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Rhoda M. Dorsey
chants turned to privateering and to trading out of other ports but these proved poor substitutes for the regular trade. The best of the wartime boom for Baltimore, then, had ended long before the war itself was over.
Throughout these years, the general pattern of trade remained the same. Native flour, grain, and tobacco were exchanged for West Indian and European goods, and West Indian goods were imported, to be immediately reexported as neutral goods. Port entry figures show that the biggest part of Baltimore's foreign trade was with the West Indies. In 1799, of 576 total foreign entries, 412 were from the West Indies and 126 from Europe; the following year, of 469 total foreign entries, 308 were from the West Indies and 133 from Europe. The majority of the European entries in these years came from Hamburg, Bremen, Liverpool, and London. There was, in addition, a small but steady trade with the Far East and East Indies, usually bringing in about 10 entries a year.
The merchants carrying on this trade were a relatively small group and many of them were newcomers to Baltimore. The older core of the merchant group, such as the Smiths and Purviances, had come from Pennsylvania; the newer merchant houses were established by immigrants from abroad: from Ireland during and after the Revolution came Patterson, Oliver, Wilson, McKim, and Brown; from Scotland, Gilmor; from Germany, Van Kapff, Brune, Mayer, and Brantz; and from Holland, Valck. In background these merchants were dissimilar; some arrived with capital, some worked up from nothing; some came with mercantile training and as part of a going mercantile establishment, others did not; but all were attracted by the opportunities for the ambitious in Baltimore at this time.
In the light of some other comments made in this conference about the relative economic importance of German and Irish immigrants, it may be interesting to note the Baltimore experience. The Germans, it has been said, arrived with training, connections, and capital; the Irish with little of any of these, but it was the Irish who prospered and the Germans who failed. Like most generalizations about nationalities, this is not wholly accurate, but by the end of the period under discussion, there was only one large German commercial house still in continuous existence, while the Irish houses of this kind were numerous.
Because the merchant group was small, some of the particular
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