MARYLAND began its career as a crown province with conditions similar to those which had regulated its growth under the Proprietary. There was nothing within its limits worthy the name of a town, though there were certain places where the courts met. The people were planters, large and small. They, with their servants, were settled, each with land enough about him, along the extensive tide-water front of the Chesapeake and its estuaries. Each plantation had a wharf or landing of its own, and no commercial centre was necessary to ship or receive merchandise. The Indians were friendly, and no sense of mutual protection, such as prevailed farther north, compelled the settlers to form communities. They raised tobacco,—too much of it,—and saw hardly enough of one another to foster a stable, political union. Local disturbances were accordingly not very promptly suppressed. Because one was independent in his living, he came to have too little sympathy with the independence of the mass.
Life was easy. Land and water yielded abundantly of wild game, while swine and cattle strayed about the woods, with ear-marks and brands to designate their owners. The people, however, had mainly to pound their corn and do without schools, for it needs villages to institute the convenient mill-wheel and build the school-house. The condition of the people had hardly changed from what it was during the seventeenth century. When the eighteenth came in, a political change had already been wrought by the revolution which placed William and Mary on the throne,[595] for in 1692 the Marylanders had welcomed Sir Lionel Copley as the first royal governor. In his train came a new spirit, or rather his coming engendered one, or gave activity to one which had been latent. The assembly soon ordained the Protestant Episcopal church to be the established order of a colony which before had had a Catholic master. In time the exclusiveness relaxed a little, enough in some fashion to exempt from restraint those who were Protestant, but dissenters; but the Romanists soon found to their cost that there was no relief for them. The fear of a Jacobite ascendency in the mother country easily kept the assembly alert to discern the evils supposed to harbinger its advent.
Down to 1715 there was a succession of royal governors, but only one among them made any impress upon the time. This was Francis Nicholson, a man of vigor, who was felt during a long career in America in more than one colony. He was by commission the lieutenant-governor under Copley; but when that governor died, Nicholson was in England. On returning he followed his predecessor’s way in studying the Protestants’ interests. In pursuance of this he made the Puritan settlement at Anne Arundel, later to be known as Annapolis, the capital,[596] and left the old Catholic St. Mary’s thereby to become a name and a ruin.
There grew up presently an unseemly quarrel between Nicholson and Coode, a reprobate ecclesiastic, who had earlier been a conspicuous character in Maryland history.[597] The breach scandalized everybody; and charge and counter-charge touching their respective morals contaminated the atmosphere. Indeed, the indictment of Nicholson by his enemies failed of effect by its excess of foulness. In face of all this the governor had the merit, and even the courage, to found schools. He also acquired with some a certain odor of sanctity, when he sent Bibles to the sick during an epidemic, and appointed readers of them to attend upon a sanitarium which had been established at a mineral spring in St. Mary’s county. There was not a little need of piety somewhere, for the church in Maryland as a rule had little of it. When Nicholson was in turn transferred to Virginia, Nathaniel Blakiston (1699) and John Seymour (1703) succeeded in the government. Under them there is little of moment to note, beyond occasional inroads of the French by land and of the pirates along the Chesapeake. Events, however, were shaping themselves to put an end to the proprietary sway.
Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, died February 20, 1714-15, and his title and rights descended to Benedict, his son, who had already in anticipation renounced Catholicism. In becoming Protestant he had secured from the Crown and its supporters an increased income in place of the allowance that his Catholic father now denied him, out of the revenues of the province, which were still preserved to the family. Benedict had scarce been recognized when he also died (April 5, 1715), and his minor son, Charles, the fifth lord, succeeded. The young baron’s guardian, Lord Guilford, took the government, and finding to his liking John Hart, who was then ruling the province for the king, he recommissioned him as the representative of the Proprietary, who was now one in religious profession with the vast majority of his people. The return of the old master was to appearances a confirmation of the old charter; but an inevitable change was impending.
Meanwhile the laws were revised and codified (1715), and a few years later (1722), by solemn resolution, the lower house of the assembly declared that the people of Maryland were entitled to all the rights and immunities of free Englishmen, and were of necessity inheritors of the common law of England, except so far as the laws of the province limited the application of that fundamental right.[598] This manifesto was the signal of a conflict between the ways that were and those that were to be. The Proprietary and the upper house made a show of dissenting to its views; but the old conditions were doomed. The methods of progress, however, for a while were gentle, and on the whole the rule of succeeding governors, Charles Calvert (1720), Benedict Leonard Calvert (1726), and Samuel Ogle (1731), was quiet.
The press meanwhile was beginning to live, and the Maryland Gazette was first published at Annapolis in 1727. A real town was founded, though it seemed at the start to promise no more than St. Mary’s, Annapolis, or Joppa.[599] This was Baltimore, laid out in 1730, which grew so leisurely that in twenty years it had scarce a hundred people in it. From 1732 to 1734 the Proprietary himself was in the province and governed in his own person.
The almost interminable controversy with the Penns over the northern bounds of Maryland still went on, the latter province getting the worst of it. Even blood was shed when the Pennsylvania Germans, crossing the line which Maryland claimed, refused to pay the Maryland taxes. During this border turmoil, Thomas Cresap, a Maryland partisan, made head against the Pennsylvanians, but was finally caught and carried to Philadelphia. A truce came in the end, when, pending a decision in England, a provisional line was run to separate settlers in actual possession.
Maryland had other troubles beside in a depreciated paper currency, and was not singular in it. She sought in 1733 to find a remedy by making tobacco a legal tender.
In 1751 the rights of the Proprietary again passed, this time to an unworthy voluptuary, destined to be the last Baron Baltimore, Frederick, the sixth in succession, who was not known to his people and did nothing to establish a spirit of loyalty among them. They had now grown to be not far from a hundred and thirty thousand in number, including multitudes of redemptioners, as immigrants who had mortgaged their labor for their ocean passage were called, and many thousands of transported convicts. This population paid the Proprietary in quit-rents and dues not far from seventy-five hundred pounds annually.