Herbert Baxter Adams and the Study of Local History

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ON ARRIVING AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY when it opened in fall of 1876, Herbert Baxter Adams's first task was to find something to do. A dapper young man of boundless ambition, his Heidelberg Ph.D. fresh in hand, Adams had title of Fellow, a new position in America calling chiefly for pursuit of research. In recruiting Johns Hopkins's original faculty, President Daniel Coit Gilman had failed to locate a professor of history or of social science. Instruction in history was placed in charge of a part-time associate, Austin Scott, who commuted from Washington where he was assistant to great George Bancroft. Bringing over to Baltimore some books and manuscripts from Bancroft's library, Scott put his students to work on genesis of famous Ordinance of 1787. Adams was already formulating for himself a large agenda rooted in his graduate studies in Germany, but he could not resist an opportunity to be useful and to make a place for himself at Hopkins.'I Plunging into Scott's documents, he focused unerringly on a problem of special interest to Marylanders. The result was a paper entitled Influence in Founding a National Commonwealth, which Adams read to Maryland Historical Society in 1877 and later described, with characteristic satisfaction, as the first original work done in historical department of Johns Hopkins University. 2 Adams had discovered that Maryland's delegates to Continental Congress framed first formal proposal empowering Congress to define western boundaries of several states. According to Maryland plan, Congress should erect new independent states in transmontane region, where charters of some of original states created vast, conflicting claims. Adams's paper traced what he called the sturdy opposition of [Maryland] to grasping claims of Virginia and larger States until, in 1781, Maryland's demands were satisfied sufficiently to permit ratification of Articles of Confederation. Thus, young