esolved, that we view with detestation every attempt to silence the FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, by a system of terror and proscription,” so wrote the fiery Alexander Contee Hanson about the uproar in Baltimore. A Federalist printer in the Democratic-Republican city of Baltimore, Hanson’s editorializing against the War of 1812 had provoked America's worst riot to this point.

The senseless brutality of the Baltimore Riot aimed at fellow citizens (war heroes included) challenges the traditional narrative of an America society governed by rational debates culminating in publicly sanctioned laws. Through Hanson's newspaper and the riot, this site explores the nature of the public sphere and what this nature reveals about the development of America’s broadening political culture.

Current historiography has defined the public sphere as facilitating the democratization of political participation through “rational discourses” —be it print centered or ritual centered.

owever, the Baltimore Riot shows the real limitations of the public sphere as a “tool” of democratization. This paper seeks to balance the emphasis on rational discourses in the Early Republic by noting the irrationality, hysteria, and paranoia that also existed and influenced the life of the young nation. The Baltimore Riot of 1812 in response to Alexander Contee Hanson’s Federal Gazette, reveals that though rational discourse in print media was seeking to establish itself as a democratizing force in society, it remained subject to the irrationality of passions, triggered by unresolved tensions over the nature of society and government in the young United States.