FREDERICK, LORD BALTIMORE.
From an engraving in the London Magazine, June, 1768, after an original painting of the sixth baron. He was born Feb. 6, 1731; succeeded to the title on the death of the fifth baron, April 24, 1751. Some accounts make him erroneously the seventh baron.
The beginning of the French war found Horatio Sharpe[600] fresh in office (1753) as the representative of the man to whom the people paid this money. There was need of resources to push the conflict, in which Maryland had common interests with Virginia and Pennsylvania. The delegates were willing to vote grants, provided the revenue of the Proprietary would share in the burden. This the governor refused to consider; but as the war went on, and the western settlements were abandoned before the Indian forays, Sharpe conceded the point, and £40,000 were raised, partly out of a double tax upon Catholics, who were in the main of the upper classes of the people. The question of supplying the army lasted longer than the £40,000, and each renewal of the controversy broadened the gulf between the governor and the lower house. It soon grew to be observed that the delegates planned their manœuvres with a view to overthrowing, under the stress of the times, the government of the Proprietary. Occasionally a fit of generosity would possess the delegates, as when they voted £50 a scalp to some Cherokee rangers, and £1,500 to the Maryland contingent in Forbes’s expedition against Du Quesne. It was never difficult, meantime, for them to lapse into their policy of obstruction. So Maryland did little to assist in the great conflict which drove the French from North America.
When the war was practically closed, in 1760, the long dispute over the boundary with Pennsylvania was brought to an end, substantially, upon the agreement of 1732, by which the Proprietary of that day had been over-reached. This fixed the limits of the present State of Delaware, and marked the parallel which is now known as Mason and Dixon’s line. The most powerful colony south of that line was Virginia, with whom Maryland was also destined to have a protracted boundary dispute, that has extended to our own time, and has been in part relegated to the consideration of the new State, which the exigencies of the civil war caused to be detached from the Old Dominion. What was and is the most westerly of the head fountains of the Potomac (so the charter described the point from which the meridian of Maryland’s western line should run) depended on seeking that spot at the source of the northern or southern fork of the river. The decision gave or lost to Maryland thirty or forty square miles of rich territory. A temporary concession on Maryland’s part, which entailed such a loss, became a precedent which she has found it difficult to dislodge. Again, as the line followed down the Potomac, whether it gave the bed of that river to Virginia or to Maryland, has produced further dispute, complicated by diversities in the maps and by assumptions of rights, but in 1877 arbitration confirmed the bed to Maryland. Changing names and shifting and disappearing soil along the banks of the Chesapeake have also made an uncertainty of direction in the line, as it crosses the bay to the eastern shore. A decision upon this point has in our day gained new interest from the values which attach to the modern oyster-beds.
The history of Virginia was left in an earlier chapter[601] with the suppression of Bacon’s Rebellion. The royal governors who succeeded Berkeley held office under Lord Culpepper, who himself assumed the government in 1679,[602] bringing with him a general amnesty for the actors in the late rebellion.[603] But pardon did not stop tobacco falling in price, nor was his lordship chary of the state, to maintain which involved grinding taxes. Towns would not grow where the people did not wish them, and even when the assembly endeavored to compel such settlements to thrive at fixed landing places, by what was called a Cohabitation Act (1680), they were not to be evoked, and existed only as ghosts in what were called “paper towns.” Tobacco, however, would grow if only planted, and when producers continued to plant it beyond what the mob thought proper to maintain fit prices, the wayward populace cut off the young plants, going about from plantation to plantation.[604] Culpepper kept up another sort of destruction in hanging the leaders of the mob, and in telling the people that a five-shilling piece, if it went for six, would make money plentier. When the people insisted that his salary should be paid in the same ratio, he revoked his somewhat frantic monetary scheme.
When Culpepper ceased to be the Proprietary, in 1684, Virginia became a royal province, and Charles II. sent out Lord Howard of Effingham to continue the despotic rule. The new governor had instructions not to allow a printing-press.[605] He kept the hangman at his trade, for plant-cutting still continued. The assembly managed to despatch Ludwell to England to show how cruelly matters were going, and he got there just after William and Mary were proclaimed. The representations against Effingham sufficed to prevent the continuance of his personal rule, but not to put an end to his commission, and he continued to draw his salary as governor, despite his adherence to James, and after Francis Nicholson had been sent over as his deputy (1690). The new ruler was not unskilled in governing; but he had a temper that impelled him sometimes in wrong ways, and an ambition that made the people distrust him. He could cajole and domineer equally well, but he did not always choose the fit occasion. He was perhaps wiser now than he was when he nearly precipitated New York into a revolution; and he showed himself to the people as if to win their affections. He encouraged manufactures. He moved the capital from Jamestown, and created a small conspicuousness for Williamsburg[606] as he did for Annapolis, in Maryland. He followed up the pirates if they appeared in the bay. He tried to induce the burgesses to vote money to join the other colonies in the French war; but they did not care so much for maintaining frontier posts in order to protect the northern colonies as one might who had hopes to be one day the general governor of the English colonies. They intrigued in such a way that he lost popularity, when he had none too much of it. He seemed generous, if we do not narrowly inspect his motives, when he said he would pay the Virginia share of the war money, if the assembly did not care to, and when he gave half of a gratuity which the assembly had given him, to help found the college of William and Mary. This last act had a look of magnanimity, for James Blair, who had been chiefly instrumental in getting the college charter, and who also in a measure, as the commissary of the Bishop of London, disputed Nicholson’s executive supremacy, had laughed at his Excellency for his truculent ways. The governor had opposed the “Cohabitation” policy as respects towns, and a certain Burwell affair, in which as a lover he was not very complacent in being worsted, had also made him enemies powerful enough to prefer charges in England against him, and he was recalled,—later to be met in New England and Acadia, and as Sir Francis Nicholson to govern in Carolina.
His service in Virginia was interrupted by his career in Maryland, ending in 1698, during which Sir Edmund Andros ruled in the larger colony. This knight’s New England experience had told on him for the better; but it had not wholly weaned him from some of his pettish ways. He brought with him the charter of the College of William and Mary, and had the infelicity to find in Blair, its first president, the adversary who was to throw him. This Scotchman was combative and stubborn enough for his race, and equally its representative in good sense and uprightness. Blair insisted upon his prerogatives as the representative of the bishop, and taking the grounds of quarrel with the governor to England he carried his point, and Nicholson was recalled from Maryland to supply the place of Andros.
The new college graduated its first class in 1700, and at about the same time Claude Philippe de Richebourg and his Huguenots introduced a new strain into the blood of Virginia.