Then Province of Maryland had been a British / English colony since 1632, when Sir George Calvert, first Baron of Baltimore and Lord Baltimore (1579–1632), received a charter and grant from King Charles I of England and first created a haven for English Roman Catholics in the New World, with his son, Cecilius Calvert (1605–1675), the second Lord Baltimore equipping and sending over the first colonists to the Chesapeake Bay region in March 1634. The first signs of rebellion against the mother country occurred in 1765, when the tax collector Zachariah Hood was injured while landing at the second provincial capital of Annapolis docks, arguably the first violent resistance to British taxation in the colonies. After a decade of bitter argument and internal discord, Maryland declared itself a sovereign state in 1776. The province was one of the Thirteen Colonies of British America to declare independence from Great Britain and joined the others in signing a collective Declaration of Independence that summer in the Second Continental Congress in nearby Philadelphia. Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed on Maryland's behalf.
Although no major battles of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) occurred in Maryland itself, (although the British Royal Navy fleet passed through and up the Bay to land troops at the "Head of Elk"), to attack the colonies' capital city, this did not prevent the state's soldiers from distinguishing themselves through their service. General George Washington counted the "Maryland Line" regiment who fought in the Continental Army especially the famed "Maryland 400" during the Battle of Brooklyn in August 1776, outside New York Town as among his finest soldiers, and Maryland is still known as "The Old Line State" today.
During the war itself, Baltimore Town served as the temporary capital of the colonies when the Second Continental Congress met there during December 1776 to February 1777, after Philadelphia had been threatened with occupation by the British "Redcoats". Towards the end of the struggle, from November 26, 1783, to June 3, 1784, the state's capital Annapolis, briefly served as the capital of the fledgling confederation government (1781–1789) of the United States of America, and it was in the Old Senate Chamber of the Maryland State House on State Circle in Annapolis that General George Washington famously resigned his commission as commander in chief of the Continental Army on December 23, 1783. It was also there that the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, was ratified by the Confederation Congress on January 14, 1784.
Like other states, Maryland was bitterly divided by the war; many Loyalists refused to join the Revolution, and saw their lands and estates confiscated as a consequence. The Barons Baltimore, who before the war had exercised almost feudal power in Maryland, were among the biggest losers. Almost the entire political elite of the province was overthrown, replaced by an entirely new political class, loyal to a new national political structure.
Background
The State of Maryland began as the Province of Maryland, an English settlement in North America founded in 1632 as a proprietary colony. George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (1580–1632), wished to create a haven for his fellow English Catholics in the New World. After founding a colony in the Newfoundland called "Avalon", he convinced the King to grant him a second territory in more southern temperate climes. When George Calvert died in 1632 the grant was transferred to his eldest son Cecil.
The ship The Ark and The Dove sent by Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore (1605–1675), landed on March 25, 1634, at Blackistone Island, thereafter known as St. Clement's Island. Here at St. Clement's Island, led by Father Andrew White, they raised a large cross, and held a mass. In April 1634, Lord Baltimore's younger brother Leonard Calvert, first colonial governor, made a settlement at what was named "St. Mary's City".
Religious strife Although Maryland was an early pioneer of religious toleration in the British colonies, religious strife among Anglicans, Puritans, Roman Catholics, and Quakers was common in the early years, and in 1654 Puritan rebels briefly seized control of the province.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 saw King James II, of the dynasty of the House of Stuart, replaced with his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. In British North America, John Coode led a rebellion, known as the "Protestant Revolution", that expelled the Catholic Lords Baltimore from power and banned Roman Catholic worship in the Province. In 1692 King William III installed a crown-appointed governor.Events that Changed America Through the seventeenth century by John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, pp. 133–34.
Economy
Despite early competition with the colony of Virginia to its south, the Province of Maryland developed along lines very similar to those of Virginia. Its early settlements and populations centers tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Like Virginia, Maryland's economy quickly became centered around the farming of tobacco for sale in Europe. The need for cheap labor to help with the growth of tobacco, and later with the mixed farming economy that developed when tobacco prices collapsed, led to a rapid expansion of indentured servitude and, later, forcible immigration and enslavement of Africans.
In the later colonial period, the southern and eastern portions of the Province continued in their tobacco economy, heavily dependent on slave labor, but as the revolution approached, northern and central Maryland increasingly became centers of wheat production. This helped drive the expansion of interior farming towns like Frederick and Maryland's major port city of Baltimore.
Economic tensions
Among the many tensions between Maryland and the mother country were economic problems, focused around the sale of Maryland's principal cash crop, tobacco. A handful of Glasgow tobacco merchants increasingly dominated the tobacco trade between Britain and her colonies, manipulating prices and causing great distress among Maryland and Virginia planters, who by the time of the outbreak of war had accumulated debts of around £1,000,000, a huge sum at the time. These debts, as much as the taxation imposed by Westminster, were among the colonists' most bitter grievances.Oliver, Neil, p. 340
Prior to 1740, Glasgow merchants were responsible for the import of less than 10% of America's tobacco crop, but by the 1750s a handful of Glasgow Tobacco Lords handled more of the trade than the rest of Britain's ports combined. Heavily capitalised, and taking great personal risks, these men made immense fortunes from the "Clockwork Operation" of fast ships coupled with ruthless dealmaking and the manipulation of credit.Oliver, p. 341 Maryland planters were offered easy credit by the Glaswegian merchants, enabling them to buy European consumer goods and other luxuries before harvest time gave them the ready cash to do so. But, when the time came to sell the crop, the indebted growers found themselves forced by the canny traders to accept low prices for their harvest simply in order to stave off bankruptcy.Oliver, p. 342
In neighbouring Virginia, tobacco planters experienced similar problems. At his Mount Vernon plantation, future President of the United States George Washington saw his liabilities swell to nearly £2000 by the late 1760s.Randall, Willard Sterne. George Washington a Life. New York: Henry Holt &, 1998. Print. Thomas Jefferson, on the verge of losing his own farm, accused British merchants of unfairly depressing tobacco prices and forcing Virginia farmers to take on unsustainable debt loads. In 1786, he remarked:
A powerful engine for this [mercantile profiting] was the giving of good prices and credit to the planter till they got him more immersed in debt than he could pay without selling lands or slaves. They then reduced the prices given for his tobacco so that ... they never permitted him to clear off his debt.Breen, T. H. Tobacco Culture: the Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985. Print.
Many Marylanders sought to use the opportunity posed by war to repudiate their debts. One of the "Resolves" later adopted by the citizens of Annapolis on May 25, 1774, would read as follows:
Resolved, that it is the opinion of the meeting, that the gentlemen of the law of this province bring no suit for the recovery of any debt, due from any inhabitant of this province to any inhabitant of Great Britain, until the said act [The Stamp Act] be repealedAndrews, p. 293
After the war, few of the enormous debts owed by the colonists would never be repaid.
There were also serious tensions between the colonists and the British over land, especially after the Crown effectively confirmed Indian land rights in 1763. Washington himself was appalled by this decision to protect native property rights, writing to his future partner William Crawford in 1767 that he:
could never look upon that Proclamation in any other light ... than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians. It must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying their lands.Ferguson, p. 116
Tax protests In 1764 Britain imposed a tax on sugar, the first of many ultimately unsuccessful attempts to make her North American subjects bear a portion of the cost of the recent French and Indian War.Andrews, p. 276 The first stirrings of revolution in Maryland came in the Fall of 1765, when the speaker of the Lower House of the Maryland General Assembly received a number of letters from Massachusetts, one proposing a meeting of delegates from all the colonies, others objecting to British taxation without consent and proposing that Marylanders should be "free of any impositions, but such as they consent to by themselves or their representatives".Andrews, p. 277
Meanwhile, an Annapolis merchant by the name of Zachariah Hood, charged by the British with the task of collecting the new stamp duty, was injured at the dock on his return to Maryland by an angry crowd in what has been called the "first successful, forcible resistance in America to King George's authority".Andrews, p. 279 Shunned by his friends and fearful of his life, Hood, at the invitation of governor Cadwallader Colden of New York, fled Maryland for New York and took refuge at Fort George. Governor Sharpe reported in September 1765 that he was "very apprehensive that if the stamp paper was to arrive here and be landed at this time it would not be in my power to preserve it from being burnt".
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
One of the early voices for independence in Maryland was the wealthy Roman Catholic planter Charles Carroll of Carrollton. In 1772 he engaged in a debate conducted through anonymous newspaper letters and maintained the right of the colonies to control their own taxation. As a Roman Catholic, he was barred from entering politics, from practicing law, and from voting.
In the early 1770s, Carroll appears to have begun to embrace the idea that only violence could break the impasse with Great Britain. According to legend, Carroll and Samuel Chase (who would also later sign the Declaration of Independence on Maryland's behalf) had the following exchange:
Writing in the Maryland Gazette under the pseudonym "First Citizen," Carroll became a prominent spokesman against the governor's proclamation increasing legal fees to state officers and Protestant clergy. Carroll also served on various Committees of Correspondence, promoting independence.aoc.gov Article on Carroll at www.aoc.gov Retrieved May 7, 2010