Other original authorities for the history of the Province, second in importance only to its own records, are the documents preserved in the state-paper office in London. The peculiar nature of the palatinate proprietorship of Maryland, and the fact that the Proprietary generally resided in England, have caused the Maryland papers to be more abundant than those of any other colony. It was customary to send to the Proprietary documents concerning all the public affairs of the Province. A large number of these, as well as of the papers directly transmitted to the Privy Council or the Board of Trade, are in the state-paper office.[888] In 1852 Mr. George Peabody gave to the Maryland Historical Society a manuscript index, prepared by Henry Stevens, to the Maryland papers, then accessible in that office. This index contains abstracts of 1,729 documents relating to Maryland affairs between the years 1626 and 1780; and the abstracts are somewhat more full than those in Sainsbury’s Calendars of State Papers.[889]
Additional papers have been placed in the state-paper office since the Peabody Index was made, and it is therefore necessary to consult both calendars. There are other manuscripts relating to Maryland in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and elsewhere in England, of which no calendars have been published.[890]
A letter of Captain Thomas Yong to Sir Tobie Matthew, written from Virginia in July, 1634, describes his interviews with Clayborne and Captain Cornwallis, and passes an unfavorable judgment upon the former. Yong gives an account of various plots of Clayborne and other Virginians against the colony at St. Mary’s, and of Clayborne’s refusal to attend a conference which had been arranged for the adjustment of the controversy. The letter is printed in Documents connected with the history of South Carolina, edited by P. C. J. Weston, London, 1856, p. 29, and in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll. ix. p. 81 (Aspinwall Papers), and in the Appendix to Streeter’s Papers Relating to the Early History of Maryland.
There are scarcely any remains of the buildings erected in the Province before 1688. Lord Baltimore wrote to the Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations in 1678 that “the principal place or town is called St. Mary’s where the General Assembly and provincial court are kept, and whither all ships trading there do in the first place resort; but it can hardly be called a town, it being in length by the water about five miles, and in breadth upwards towards the land not above one mile,—in all which space, excepting only my own house and buildings wherein the said courts and offices are kept, there are not above thirty houses, and those at considerable distance from each other, and the buildings (as in all other parts of the Province), very mean and little, and generally after the manner of the meanest farm-houses in England. Other places we have none that are called or can be called towns, the people there not affecting to build near each other, but so as to have their houses near the water for convenience of trade, and their lands on each side of and behind their houses, by which it happens that in most places there are not above fifty houses in the space of thirty miles.”[891]
The principal building at St. Mary’s was the State House, erected in 1674, at a cost of 330,000 pounds of tobacco. In 1720 it was given to the parish of William and Mary to be used as a church; and in 1830, being very much decayed, it was pulled down, and a new edifice built in the neighborhood. Lord Baltimore’s house—called the Castle—stood on the plain of St. Mary’s, at the head of St. John’s Creek. The spot is marked by a few mouldering bricks and broken tiles, and a square pit overgrown with bushes.[892] At St. Inigoe’s manor, near St. Mary’s, there is preserved the original round table at which the first council sat, besides a few other relics.[893]
The earliest historian of Maryland was George Chalmers, whose Political Annals of the present United Colonies was published in London in 1780. Chalmers was a Maryland lawyer, who returned to England at the outbreak of the Revolution. He had access to the English state papers in writing his work, and his account of Maryland is fair and, for the most part, accurate.[894]
The ablest man who has written upon the history of the Province was John V. L. McMahon. He was born in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1800, and, after graduating at Princeton, began the practice of the law in Maryland, where he soon became one of the leaders of a very able bar. The first volume of his Historical view of the Government of Maryland from its Colonization to the Present Day was published in 1831. Though the author did not die till 1871, this volume was never followed by its promised successor. The manuscript of the second volume is in the possession of McMahon’s heirs. The volume published brings the history of the Province down to the Revolution, but its strictly historical part is less than one half of the whole, and treats the subject only in outline. The remainder of the book is devoted to an examination of the legal aspects of the charter, the sources of Maryland law, and the distribution of legislative power under the State government. The work is founded on an original study of the records, so far as was thought necessary for its limited historical scope.[895]