THE CAVALIER COLONIES OF THE SOUTH
VIRGINIA has often been called the Cavalier colony. Do any of you know why, or who the Cavaliers were? Perhaps I had better tell you. They were the lords and the proud people of England. Many of them had no money, but they would do no work, and cared for nothing but pleasure and fighting. There were plenty of working people in that country, but there were many who were too proud to work, and expected others to work for them, while they hoped to live at ease.
Some of this kind of men came out with John Smith, and that is why he had so much trouble with them. The Puritans and the Quakers came from the working people of England, and nobody had to starve them to make them work, or to pour cold water down their sleeves to stop them from swearing.
While religious people settled in the North, many of the proud Cavalier class, who cared very little about religion, came to the South. So we may call the southern settlements the Cavalier colonies, though many of the common people came there too, and it was not long before there was plenty of work.
The first to come after John Smith and the Jamestown people were some shiploads of Catholics. You should know that the Catholics were treated in England even worse than the Puritans and the Quakers. The law said they must go to the English Church instead of to their own. If they did not they would have to pay a large sum of money or go to prison. Was not this very harsh and unjust?
The Catholics were not all poor people. There were rich men and nobles among them. One of these nobles, named Lord Baltimore, asked the King for some land in America where he and his friends might dwell in peace and have churches of their own. This was many years before William Penn asked for the same thing. The King was a friend of Lord Baltimore and told him he might have as much land as he could make use of. So he chose a large tract just north of Virginia, which the King named Maryland, after his wife, Queen Mary, who was a Catholic. All Lord Baltimore had to pay for this was two Indian arrows every year, and a part of the gold and silver, if any were found. This was done to show that the King still kept some claim to Maryland, and did not give away all his rights.
And now comes a story much the same as I have told you several times already. A shipload of Catholics and other people came across the ocean to the new continent which Columbus had discovered many years before. These sailed up the broad Chesapeake Bay. You may easily find this bay on your maps. They landed at a place they called St. Mary's, where there was a small Indian town. As it happened, the Indians at this town had been so much troubled by fighting tribes farther north that they were just going to move somewhere else. So they were very glad to sell their town to the white strangers.
All they wanted for their houses and their corn fields were some hatchets, knives and beads, and other things they could use. Gold and silver would have been of no value to them, for they had never seen these metals. The only money the Indians used was round pieces of seashell, with holes bored through them. Before these people left their town they showed the white men how to hunt in the woods and how to plant corn. And their wives taught the white women how to make hominy out of corn and how to bake johnny-cakes. So the people of Maryland did not suffer from hunger like those of Virginia and New England, and they had plenty to eat and lived very well from the start.
This was in the year 1634, just about the time Roger Williams went to Rhode Island. Lord Baltimore did the same thing that Roger Williams did; he gave the people religious liberty. Every Christian who came to Maryland had the right to worship God in his own way. Roger Williams went farther than this, for he gave the same right to Jews and all other people, whether they were Christians or pagans.
It was not long before other people came to Maryland, and they began to plant tobacco, as the people were doing in Virginia. Tobacco was a good crop to raise, for it could be sold for a high price in England, so that the Maryland planters did very well, and many of them grew rich. But religious liberty did not last there very long, and the Catholics were not much better off than they had been in England. All the poor people who came with Lord Baltimore were Protestants. Only the rich ones were Catholics. Many other Protestants soon came, some of them being Puritans from New England, who did not know what religious liberty meant.