Thomas Swann: political acrobat and entrepreneur

Abstract

Thomas Swann (1805-1883), son of a prominent lawyer in the District of Columbia and educated at the University of Virginia, began his career in 1833 as the Secretary to the Neapolitan Claims Commission in Washington. His marriage to Elizabeth Gilmor Sherlock a year later marked his entrance into Baltimore society and into the affairs of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. After participating in the B & O's struggles with the Virginia legislature in the late 1840's, Swann became president of the railroad and supervised its extension from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia, on the Ohio River.

Three years after leaving the B & O, Swann entered politics in 1856 as the Know-Nothing Mayor of Baltimore. From 1856 to 1860 he made numerous improvements, establishing the city's first public police department, fire department, streetcar system, and larger park. With the corning of the Civil War, Swann left the Know-Nothing Party and began a decade of numerous shifting political alliances, in which he was a bellweather in anticipating the wave of the future. In 1864 Swann won election as Governor of Maryland on the Unionist ticket. In 1867 the Maryland legislature elected him to the United States Senate, but he declined the honor knowing the Republican majority in that body would refuse to seat him because of his shift to the Conservative Alliance formed by non-Radical Unionists and Democrats. After a second unsuccessful attempt for the Senate, Swann was elected in 1868 to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in which body he served for ten years. He retired from politics in 1879 to his country estate, Morven Park, in Loudoun County, Virginia, where he died on July 24, 1883.