A government of laws.
One cause of this splendid development of legal talent was doubtless the necessarily close connection between legal and political activity. The Virginia planter meant that his government should be one of laws. With his extensive estates to superintend and country interests to look after, his position was in many respects like that of the country squire in England. In his House of Burgesses the planter had a parliament; and in the royal governor, who was liable to subordinate local to imperial interests, there was an abiding source of antagonism and distrust, requiring him to keep his faculties perpetually alert to remember all the legal maxims by which the liberties of England had been guarded since the days of Glanvil and Bracton. On the whole, it was a noble type of rural gentry that the Old Dominion had to show. Manly simplicity, love of home and family, breezy activity, disinterested public spirit, thorough wholesomeness and integrity,—such were the features of the society whose consummate flower was George Washington.
Some characteristics of Maryland.
This chapter must not close without a brief mention of the social features of Maryland, but a brief mention is all that is needed for my purpose, since the portraiture just given of Leah will answer in most respects for her younger sister Rachel. The English colonists in Maryland were of the same excellent class as the Cavaliers who were the strength of Virginia. Though tidewater Virginia at the beginning of the eighteenth century contained but few people who did not belong to the Church of England, on the other hand, in Maryland, not more than one sixth of the white population belonged to that church, while one twelfth were Roman Catholics, and three fourths were Puritans. But these differences in religion did not run parallel with differences in birth, refinement, or wealth. Naturally, from the circumstances under which the colony was founded, some of the best human material was always to be found among the Catholics; and they wielded an influence disproportionately greater than their numbers.
For the first three generations tobacco played as important a part in Maryland as in Virginia. Nearly all the people became planters. Cheap labour was supplied at first by indented white servants and afterwards by negro slaves, who never came, however, to number more than from one fourth to one third of the whole population. There was the same isolation, the same absence of towns, the same rudeness of roads and preference for water-ways, as in Virginia. The facilities for education were somewhat poorer; there was no university or college, no public schools until 1728, no newspaper until 1745.
But early in the eighteenth century there came about an important modification of industries, which was in large part due to the rapid growth of Maryland’s neighbour, Pennsylvania. In the latter colony a great deal of wheat was raised, and the export of flour became very profitable. This wheat culture extended into Maryland, where wheat soon became a vigorous rival of tobacco. In 1729 the town of Baltimore was founded, and at once rose to importance as a point for exporting flour. Moreover, as Pennsylvania exported various kinds of farm produce, besides large quantities of valuable furs, and as she had no seacoast and no convenient maritime outlet save Philadelphia, her export trade soon came to exceed the capacities of that outlet, and a considerable part of it went through Baltimore, which thus had a large and active rural district dependent upon it, and grew so fast that by 1770 it had become the fourth city in English America, with a population of nearly 20,000. The growth of Annapolis was further stimulated by these circumstances; and this development of town life, with the introduction of a wealthy class of merchants and the continual intercommunication with Pennsylvania, went far toward assimilating Maryland with the middle colonies while it diminished to some extent her points of resemblance to the Old Dominion.
CHAPTER XV.
THE CAROLINA FRONTIER.
The Spanish frontier.