The Board of Regents reorganized with Ashton Alexander, M.D., as Provost, and employed distinguished counsel to plead the case for them in the courts.  The Legislature authorized the Court of Appeals to try the suit, and Maryland’s Dartmouth College Case was decided in June, 1838, entirely in favor of the Regents.  The court held that the act of 1825 was void, since it was “a judicial act, a sentence that condemned without a hearing.  The Legislature has no right, without the assent of a Corporation, to alter its charter, or take from it any of its franchises or property.”  The Trustees would not yield at once and, in March, 1839, presented a petition to the Legislature, praying it not to pass an act requiring them to give up the property to the Regents.  The memorial was referred to a joint committee, which reported a bill restoring the property to the Regents.  The bill was enacted and the Regents have since ruled.  During the supremacy of the Trustees, the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences was organized.  They contemplated activity in 1821, and issued a circular, which drew down on them the wrath of Professor Hoffman, inasmuch as they “contemplated ‘academic’ instruction” not intended by the charter.  The founders, he said, intended that instruction should be conveyed by lectures and that no other form of instruction should be allowed.  The discussion which followed seems to show that he had the idea of having work carried on, like that done by graduate students to-day.

But nothing was done, apparently, until Baltimore College was annexed in 1830.  That institution was chartered on January 7, 1804,[20] and was the development of an academy kept by James Priestley, the first president, on Paul’s Lane (St. Paul Street).  “It was hoped that it would, together with the other valuable seminaries of education in the same city and in the State, become adequate to the wants and wishes of our citizens,” and from the proceeds of a lottery, the grant of which was an easy way for a State to be benevolent, a plain but convenient building was erected on Mulberry street.[21]

It is very doubtful if it ever graduated any students, and we learn in 1830 that “the celebrity and, in some cases, the superior existing advantages of other institutions have prevented the accomplishment of this object.”  Still a school had been kept up continuously, and from time to time, we catch glimpses of its lectures, &c.  In January, 1830, a joint petition of the Trustees of the University of Maryland and of Baltimore College to the Legislature “proposed the charter of Baltimore College shall be surrendered to the State, on the condition that the property belonging to the college shall be invested in the trustees of the University of Maryland.”  The petition was granted,[22] and in 1832, we learn that “the Baltimore College *** has now been merged in the University of Maryland and constitutes the chair of Ancient Languages."[23]