12. Maryland

Virginia, as we have seen, was England’s first chartered colony and the first royal colony in America. The remaining type of English colony was the proprietary, and the first proprietary colony was founded in the early seventeenth century, just north of the Virginia border.

A proprietary grant was a far more feudalistic device than the chartered company. For a company, being a joint venture of capitalists, was bent on parceling out land to its shareholders, on earning rapid profits rather than acting as a long-time or permanent feudal landlord. But the gift of a huge tract of land to a single proprietor was a more enticing invitation to feudalism to come to American shores.

The first American proprietary was a grant of land in 1632 by King Charles I to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. The grant was carved out of Virginia territory and extended from the Potomac River north to the fortieth parallel, including (but rather larger than) the present boundaries of Maryland. The king reserved for himself but one-fifth of the gold and silver that might be mined each year in the province. Otherwise, Lord Baltimore was as free to govern in his vast domain as the king was in England. The king even expressly granted the power to levy any taxes on Maryland, so named in honor of the English queen Henrietta Maria. The charter granted to Lord Baltimore ownership of all the land, minerals, rivers, and fisheries in the area as well as the right to confer titles, incorporate cities and towns, levy taxes, erect churches and feudal manors, and constitute courts. This was a veritable feudal government—a “Palatinate” as existed in Europe, specifically like the Palatinate of Durham in England. One important limitation on Calvert’s absolute rule, as in the case of the king himself, was that he could levy taxes only with the consent of an Assembly representing the freemen, or landholders, of the province.

The first settlement in Maryland was made in 1634 by two small ships, the Ark and the Dove, carrying about 220 people and landing at St. Marys, near the mouth of the Potomac. From the first, Roman Catholicism was a uniquely important issue in this colony. For Calvert’s father, George, the first Lord Baltimore and a leader of the monarchial party in England, had turned Catholic after receiving a promise of the grant. From the first, Cecilius wanted to make Maryland a haven from persecution for Catholics in England. But, eager to encourage settlement (for without settlers there would be no profit from his feudal domain), Calvert made no religious test for settling in the colony. As a result, Protestants outnumbered Catholics among the settlers by nearly ten to one from the beginning—with the Protestant faith predominating among the poorer classes and Catholicism among the gentlemen. Both Protestants and Catholics enjoyed full religious liberty and there was no established church in the colony.

Early relations with the Indians were peaceful, with the land acquired from them by voluntary purchase rather than by force. This peaceful coexistence was assured by Calvert’s simple expedient of instructing his men to deal fairly with the Indians. Indeed, the largest wigwam in St. Marys was after purchase consecrated as a church by the two Jesuit priests of the first expedition.*

The land system, however, in keeping with the vast feudal powers given to Calvert, was established on the most rigidly feudal lines in America. Calvert early advertised that every settler who would finance the transport of five other settlers to the colony would receive a grant as “Lord of the Manor” of 2,000 acres of land—not outright, however, or in fee simple, but as a feudal tenancy with a quitrent of 400 pounds of good wheat per year to the proprietor. The manor lords, most of them Catholic, in turn rented their land to smaller planters in exchange for rent in produce. This restrictive method of allocating land or landownership decidedly hampered the growth of the entire colony during the seventeenth century. Furthermore, Calvert gave vast estates as manors to his friends and relatives.

The first governor of the colony was Calvert’s brother, Leonard, and Calvert appointed a Council to advise his brother. While the Calverts tried to keep representative government to a minimum, an Assembly soon developed, after persistent pressure from below on the proprietors. The proprietor and the Assembly soon quarreled over the extent of their relative powers, the proprietor claiming the sole right to initiate legislation, which the Assembly could then reject. The Assembly, with the power to hold up the enactment of laws, refused to consent to any imposition of a code by Calvert and thus won the fight to initiate legislation.

At first, all the landowners sat in the Assembly, but soon the representative principle was adopted. In 1650, the Assembly turned into the familiar two-house type: the Council sitting as the upper house and the elected members as the lower. The governor and the proprietor, who appointed the governor, had veto power over all legislation and the governor could also dissolve the Assembly at will. However, the Assembly assured its continuing existence by refusing to grant taxes for more than a year at a time. The supreme judicial power, as in Virginia, was vested in the governor and the Council, although eventually this provincial court set up subsidiary county courts for minor cases and judges, appointed and removable by the governor, were appointed as higher courts.

We have already alluded to the conflict between Lord Baltimore and William Claiborne, a Virginian who had established a trading post on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay. This quarrel was embittered by Claiborne’s virulent anti-Catholicism, which had spurred him to play a leading role in ousting Calvert from Virginia, before the founding of the Maryland colony. With Claiborne refusing to recognize Calvert’s overlordship of Kent Island, Calvert moved to assert his dominion over Claiborne, wielding his land grant as his claim. The conflict was punctuated by a naval battle between the ships of Lord Baltimore and of Claiborne. Finally, the king decided the issue by ruling in Lord Baltimore’s favor.

In the mid-1640s, as the Puritan Revolution arose in England, Lord Baltimore sided with the king, and Leonard Calvert received privileges (or “letters of marque”) from the king to capture vessels belonging to Parliament. On the other hand, the Protestant tobacco trader, Capt. Richard Ingle, a friend of Claiborne’s, received a similar commission from Parliament. The governor ordered Ingle’s arrest for high treason in denouncing the king, whereupon Ingle escaped and in 1645 mounted a successful attack on Maryland. Captain Ingle took the opportunity, “for conscience’” sake, to plunder and pillage “papists and malignants,” seizing property and jailing his enemies. The venerable Father Andrew White, a Jesuit missionary who had arrived on the first ships to land in Maryland, was sent to England in irons to be tried for treason. Happily, the old missionary was acquitted.

In the meanwhile, Claiborne took the opportunity to retrieve Kent Island from Maryland’s seizure. Under Ingle’s attack, Leonard Calvert escaped to Virginia, from where Berkeley helped him to recapture Maryland and Kent Island.

Returning to England, Ingle almost succeeded in revoking Maryland’s charter, but Calvert retained it by taking pains to placate Parliament. Calvert, for example, encouraged a group of Dissenters exiled from Virginia to settle in Maryland, a little further up the Chesapeake Bay from St. Marys, in what is now Annapolis. Furthermore, after Leonard Calvert died in 1648, Lord Baltimore appointed the Protestant William Stone as governor. He required the governor to take an oath not to violate the free exercise of religion by any Christians, specifically including Roman Catholics. Subsequently, in April 1649, the Maryland Assembly passed the famous Toleration Act, which guaranteed all Christians the free exercise of their religion. However, tolerance and religious liberty went only so far and the death penalty was levied against all non-Christians, including Jews and Unitarians. Neither did toleration extend to freedom of speech, for any use of such religious epithets as “heretic” and “popish priest” was outlawed. Also prohibited on the Sabbath were swearing, drinking, unnecessary work, and disorderly recreation. Actually, the much vaunted Toleration Act was a retreat from the religious liberty that had previously prevailed in Catholic-ruled Maryland, and was a compromise with the growing spirit of Puritan intolerance.

Charles II, still in exile, embittered by what he regarded as acts of treachery by Lord Baltimore, deposed him and appointed instead Sir William Davenant as royal governor, for Baltimore “did visibly adhere to the rebels in England, and admit all kinds of sectaries and schismatics and ill-affected persons into the plantation.” Davenant sailed from France to try to seize Maryland but was himself captured by the English.

Walking the tightrope of religious liberty between the demands of Parliament and those of the Crown was a difficult feat, and in 1651 the rulers of Maryland fell off. The Catholic royalist deputy governor, Thomas Greene, foolishly decided to recognize Charles II in the same year as the legitimate ruler of England. This proclamation naturally angered Parliament and precipated severe reaction. The following year Parliament sent to the Chesapeake colonies commissioners, of whom the angry Claiborne was one, to subdue the recalcitrants. After settling matters in Virginia, the commissioners proceeded to Maryland, where they removed the governor and ousted the proprietary. Governor Stone was reinstated, but he, in turn, persisted in trying to reinstate the authority of the proprietor. He compounded his difficulties by insisting on imposing an oath of allegiance on Lord Baltimore. The oath offended Puritans. Stone then denounced the Puritans and the commissioners as fomenters of sedition. The result was the capture of St. Marys by the commissioners in 1654, and their appointment of a Puritan Council and of Capt. William Fuller as governor. Catholics were now excluded from voting and from the Assembly, and the Toleration Act as well as the rule of the proprietor were canceled. A law of 1654 declared that “none who professed and exercised the popish religion could be protected in this province.” The law disfranchised not only Catholics, but also Anglicans. The Puritans made it clear that freedom of worship would now be extended only to Protestants free of either “popery or prelacy.”

Former governor Stone now raised his insurrectionary army loyal to the proprietary, and in 1655 attacked Providence, the principal Puritan settlement in Maryland. The erstwhile governor was crushed by a force of Puritan planters, Stone was imprisoned, and several of his followers executed, even though they had been promised their lives before surrender. Calvert, however, proved extremely agile and managed to convice Cromwell and Parliament that religious toleration and hence his own rule should be reestablished. Calvert was permitted to appoint a new governor in 1656 and this governor, Josiah Fendall, joined with the Puritans in agreeing to establish religious toleration, including toleration for Catholics.

With the death of Cromwell, Fendall tried to seize the opportunity to liberalize the colony further by casting off proprietary rule and submitting himself to appointment by the Maryland Assembly. The restoration of Charles II, however, ended such hopes for the remainder of the century, and Baltimore moved swiftly to crush this move for independence, appointing Philip Calvert as governor.

After the Restoration, tensions and grievances accumulated in Maryland somewhat as they did in Virginia. Falling tobacco prices, the crippling effect of the English Navigation Acts, the raising of the quitrents—each conduced to this effect. In Maryland, too, suffrage was restricted to freeholders in 1670; furthermore, proprietary rule aggravated the problem of quasi-feudal landholdings. Moreover, anti-Catholic sentiment grew among the Protestant masses and focused both against the proprietor and against religious toleration. Another important grievance: the Calverts had tampered with the election to the burgesses in 1670 and after that, in imitation of Berkeley, suspended elections until 1676. The ambivalence of religious toleration in Maryland may be seen in its treatment of the Quakers. Quakers were people who had no priests, declined to swear oaths, and refused determinedly to fight or bear arms. They were, accordingly, highly unpopular wherever adoration of the state ran high. They proclaimed, indeed, that they were “governed by God’s laws and the light within and not by man’s laws.” In Maryland the Quakers were steadily persecuted; forty were publicly whipped within one year. Finally the Quakers were branded as “rebels and traitors,” and in a law of 1659 Maryland ordered their expulsion from the colony. The law decreed that “any of the vagabonds or idle persons known by the name of Quakers, who should again enter the province, should be whipped from constable to constable out of it.” The proprietary, however, soon ceased to enforce the law, and before long many Quakers were reestablished in the colony. When the founder of the Quakers, George Fox, visited Maryland in 1672, he welcomed the full religious liberty in the province and rejoiced in the number of public officials who had been converts.

Maryland’s economy and social structure developed in a way similar to neighboring Virginia’s. After a brief period of growing subsistence crops of maize, pork, and vegetables, the colony turned to specialization in tobacco. A large tobacco plantation society and economy, in short, prevailed in the whole Chesapeake Bay area, Maryland as well as Virginia. The plantations were located in the fertile river plains of the coastal tidewater region, and trade was oriented to London and Bristol. Again, quasi-feudal land allocation led to large plantations, although small up-country farms growing subsistence crops and tobacco were more numerous but not dominant in the colony. Once more, the land was extensively settled and thinly populated. The labor base for the plantations was indentured service and Negro slavery.

Perhaps the major economic and social difference between Maryland and Virginia was Maryland’s far more feudal structure. The land was kept in a hierarchy of overlordships and tenancies, with the Calverts owning all the land and collecting a quitrent from all the landholders, while the manor lords of the vast estates given to them by the overlords leased the land to smaller planters. The small yeoman farmers of the back country could not therefore gain their land outright, but could only stay as tenants paying quitrents to the proprietary overlord. Large stretches of tidewater land were held by a few large planters.

Although beginning as a rigidly feudal structure, even the Maryland land system could not survive the liberating conditions of America: in particular, the enormous abundance of new land and the need to stimulate settlement upon it. By the late seventeenth century, the land was being increasingly transferred to the settlers; through purchases, the feudal land structure was dissolved into its component parts, and ownership progressively devolved upon the actual users of the land. Feudal landholdings, in short, began to dissolve into the market economy.

One of the most important single manifestations of feudal landholdings, especially in a proprietary colony, was the quitrent, exacted from all landowners as tenants of the proprietary. Originally Cecilius Calvert had fixed a quitrent of ten pounds of wheat for each fifty acres, and then of one shilling per fifty acres, to be paid in kind. In 1648 Calvert attempted a drastic increase in quitrents, ranging now from one shilling per fifty acres up to twenty shillings per fifty acres, or ten pounds per manor of 2,000 acres after a term of years. Pressure of the settlers and the need to encourage settlement forced abandonment of this plan, and the Maryland Assembly felt the need in 1654 to pass a law upholding the rights in the land of the settlers as well as of the proprietary. After the Restoration in England, the cocky Lord Baltimore doubled the quitrent to four shillings per 100 acres, which began to be enforced in 1669. In addition, in an attempt to block the quiet dissolution into the market of feudal tenure, the proprietors imposed in 1660 a fine on any alienation of landed property. Happily the fine was never thoroughly enforced. The proprietors also imposed on the settlers a purchase price (known as “caution money”), which considerably restricted the growth of the colony. First levied in 1683 at 200 pounds of tobacco per 100 acres, the purchase price was increased the next year to 240 pounds, and by 1717 had reached the sum of 40 shillings per 100 acres.

As in Virginia, the chief money was tobacco, and so quitrents were paid in that commodity. As the price of tobacco fell drastically, the Assembly began to fix the exchange rate in order to try to keep the tobacco prices above the market rate. Such minimum price control could only create unsold surpluses of tobacco and aggravate conditions further for many tobacco planters, as well as for tobacco consumers. However, an incidental boon was to relieve the burden of quitrents on the inhabitants. Thus, in 1662 and again in 1671, the Assembly fixed the tobacco price at twopence per pound while the market price was a penny a pound, thus reducing the quitrent burden by letting it be paid in arbitrarily overvalued tobacco. The quitrents, furthermore, were enforced by forfeit of land for nonpayment, and by making every debt due to Lord Baltimore a prior lien on the land. Where there were no goods to seize, the delinquent tenant was imprisoned.

The relative growth of Maryland may be gauged by comparing its population with Virginia’s: less than 600 as compared with Virginia’s more than 10,000 in 1640, Maryland’s population rose to 4,500 in 1650, 8,400 in 1660, and almost 18,000 in 1680, compared with Virginia’s 44,000. The Negro (almost all-slave) population of Maryland was proportionately greater in 1680 (over 1,200 compared with Virginia’s 2,000), but then fell behind because of an enormous spurt in Virginia’s slave population. By 1700 there were 3,200 slaves in Maryland, while over 16,000 in Virginia. Slave revolts broke out in Maryland in the early 1680s, in 1688, 1705, 1738, and 1739.

A Negro slave in Maryland had the distinction of staging perhaps the first demonstration of nonviolent resistance in America. In 1656 Tony, a slave of one Symon Overzee, ran away and was captured with the aid of bloodhounds. When he ran away and was captured a second time, Tony sat down and refused to rise and work as a slave. Mr. Overzee bound and beat him repeatedly, but Tony still refused to act as a slave. Enraged because “his property” was refusing to function as property, Overzee poured hot lard over Tony and killed him. A court acquitted Overzee of the murder because, after all, Tony had proved to be “incorrigible.”

*In a few years, however, Calvert became dissatisfied with the Jesuit missionaries in Maryland and “their very extravagant” demands for privileges, and took measures to prevent any increased supply of Jesuits to the colony.