The general histories of Maryland have been characterized in another place.[631] Of one of them, Chalmers’s, some further mention is made in the present volume.[632] Two works of a general character have been published since that enumeration was made. One of these is the Maryland (Boston, 1884) of William Hand Browne, a well-written summary of the history of the palatinate prior to the Revolutionary period.[633] Mr. Browne’s familiarity with the Maryland archives was greatly helpful in this excellent condensation of Maryland’s history. Mr. John A. Doyle has made special use of the colonial documents in the Public Record Office, in the chapters (x. and xi.) which he gives to the province in his English in America, Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, London, 1882.
There have been some valuable papers of late embraced in the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, edited by Professor Herbert B. Adams, which touch Maryland, particularly its institutional history. Such are Edward Ingle’s Parish Institutions of Maryland (Studies, 1st series, no. vi.); John Johnson’s Old Maryland Manors (no. vii.);[634] Herbert B. Adams’s Maryland’s influence upon land cessions to the United States, with minor papers on George Washington’s interest in Western lands, the Potomac Company and a National University (3d series, no. 1);[635] Lewis W. Wilhelm’s Maryland Local Institutions, the Land System, Hundred, County, Town (nos. v., vi., and vii.).
The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Baltimore, occurring in 1880, has produced several records. The city commemorated the event, and printed the next year a Memorial Volume, 1730-1880, edited by Edward Spencer;[636] and the Proceedings of the Historical Society, October 12, 1880, constitutes no. 16 of their Publication Fund series. Mr. J. Thomas Scharf, who had published his Chronicles of Baltimore in 1874, elaborated the matter into the more extensive History of Baltimore City and County, in 1881, published at Philadelphia. There is a plan of the city showing its original and present bounds in this last book (p. 62), as well as in the same writer’s History of Maryland (i. 416). In 1752 there was printed a List of families and other persons residing in Baltimore, and this has been thought to be the earliest directory of an American town. In the same year there was a view of Baltimore by John Moales, engraved by Borgum, which is the earliest we have.[637]
The coarse, hearty, and somewhat unappetizing life of the colony, as it appeared to a London factor, who about the beginning of the eighteenth century sought the country in quest of a cargo of tobacco, is set forth amusingly, as well as in a warning spirit, in a rough Hudibrastic poem, The Sot-weed Factor, by Eben Cook, Gent.[638] (London, 1708.)
There are modern studies of the life of the last century in Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies, in the seventh chapter of Neill’s Terra Mariæ, and in the last chapter of Doyle’s English Colonies; but the most complete is that in the first chapter of the second volume of Scharf’s History of Maryland, whose foot-notes and those of Lodge will guide the investigator through a wide range of authorities.[639]
Illustrations of the religious communions are given in Perry’s History of the American Protestant Episcopal Church (i. 137), in the Historical Collections of the American Colonial Church (vol. iv.), in Anderson’s American Colonial Church, in Hawks’s Ecclesiastical Contributions (section on “Maryland”), and in Theodore C. Gambrall’s Church Life in Colonial Maryland (Baltimore, 1885).[640] The spread of Presbyterianism is traced in C. A. Briggs’s American Presbyterianism, p. 123.
The literature of the controversy over the bounds of Maryland, so far as it relates to the northern lines, has already been indicated in another volume.[641] The dispute was ably followed by McMahon in his History of Maryland (vol. i. pp. 18-59), among the earlier of the general historians, and the whole question has been surveyed by Johnston in his History of Cecil County (ch. xix.). He traces the course of the Cresap war,[642] the progress of the chancery suit of 1735-1750.[643] The diary of one of the commissioners for running the line in accordance with the decision, being the record of John Watson, is preserved in the library of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Mr. Johnston (p. 307) also describes the line of 1760,[644] and tells the story of the work and methods adopted by Mason and Dixon in 1763, referring to their daily journal, one copy of which is, or was, preserved in the Land Office, the other in the library of the Maryland Historical Society.[645] The scientific aspects of this famous survey are considered in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1769); and a running sketch of the history of the line, by William Darlington, is reprinted in the Historical Magazine (ii. p. 37). Another, by T. Edwards, is in Harper’s Monthly (vol. liii. p. 549), and one by A. T. McGill in the Princeton Review (vol. xxxvii. p. 88). Dunlap’s “Memoir” (see Vol. III. p. 514) is also contained in Olden Time (vol. i. p. 529).