USA > Maryland > Saint Mary's County > Saint Mary's City > Civil and religious equality : an oration delivered at the fourth commenoration of the landing of the pilgrims at Maryland. > Part 3
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We have an opportunity to judge of the character of the St. Mary colonists by their trade with the Indians, and their legisla- tion with regard to that people whose existence and rights seem to have been a stumbling-block to most of the colonies.
The acquisition of territory, by the various bodies of colonists, was made by different modes ; sometimes by means that suited the peculiar character of the purchaser, sometimes in a manner that denoted the estimate in which the seller was held by the purchaser. Sometimes a distribution of miserable trinkets sent away the uninformed savage to comprehend at his leisure the entire alienation of his fields and hunting grounds, and the utter worthlessness of the finery which, with barbaric taste, he had associated with the display and dignity of his seignorial rights, but which became utterly useless when he found that he had bartered away the realities of power for the worthless insignia of condition.
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Others debased the appetite of the aborigines, and then min- istered to their morbid cravings, till the poor wretches became maddened with the liquid fire, and exposed themselves to the visitations of vengeance that thinned their number and confis- cated their possessions.
Others made treaties which they could scarcely believe-which probably they did not hope-would be observed by the native party to the compact, and swept the tribe with exterminating vengeance, for the violation of agreements that had in them neither reason nor right; a vengeance that stretched the first reached offenders dead upon their lordly paternal possessions, and dragged the fugitives from their fastnesses to be sold into foreign slavery.
Christianity was made terrible to these worshippers of the Great Spirit, by the vindictiveness of its professors, who pun- ished offences with unforgiving rigor, and confounded invincible ignorance with premeditated crime. Nay, that religion was often made abhorrent to the savages by the haughtiness of its teachers, who would not admit of any adaptation of its adminis- tration and influences to the nomadic taste and habits of the. lords of the soil.
One other mode of dealing with the Indians was adopted by a portion of the early white settlers, and has been by practice, transmitted down to the present day, not always with the same amount of actual injury as formerly, but often with an equal liability to abuse. The improved sense of the community, sus- tained by the conduct of one small class of immigrants, and the philanthropic teachings of the Quakers, prevented a portion of the injury which might result to the Indians from a natural, though perhaps not a legal operation of the treaty-making customs.
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The terrible inflictions which preceded some of these treaties, and the utter deprivation which followed, must have made the natives more apprehensive of the pen of the white man than of the sword; and what was called a treaty by European emigrants,
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must have seemed a forceful distress to the natives; and that which was dignified with the name of Peace, had in it certainly more of destruction and solitude. Under these circumstances, the Indians might well exclaim, "Auferre trucidare, rapare, falsis, nominibus, imperium," if they had ever read Tacitus, or heard of Agricola, "atque solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant."
In strong and beautiful contrast with these various modes of transferring the possessions of the nations, and of alienating their affections, is the plan adopted by the Catholic Pilgrims of Maryland, who acknowledged the poor Indian to be the proprietor of the soil, and recognized in him the form of the Creator, and the object of the sacrifice and redemption of the Saviour. They saw and confessed him a man, and as such, Christianity as they understood it-Humanity as they had been taught to practice it-Paganism, indeed, as explained by the polished bondman of Rome,* forbade that the rights, interests, and whatever else related to those members of the human family, should be alien to their own hearts. If they took the land of the savages, it was not to repay them with profitless gewgaws; not to hold by the dead hand of unsatisfied contract, nor the red hand of vio- lence; not, indeed, to pay for the material and valuable posses- sions of the aboriginal planters in the cold lessons of selfish morality, or impracticable and repulsive forms of Christianity.
They purchased the lands, and paid for them. They offered peace, and peaceful associations ; and they presented the most attractive points of the Christian religion for the admiration and confidence of the Indians, viz., peace among themselves, and kindness and justice towards others.
Those who had left England to avoid the unjust penal statutes of the government, and the persecuting spirit of non-conformists, felt how attractive must be the evidences of justice, and how conciliating the procedure that recognizes in man the dignity and the rights of man.
* Terrence.
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The Christian religion is never more exalted in the eyes of the pagan or skeptic than when its possessors manifest their high sense of its character and importance, by making its re- quirements the most distinguished of all the difference between men, and it never is more attractive than when all other distinc- tions are merged in that difference ; all differences buried in the effort to make it respected by the virtues of its professors, and to have it adopted because of the gentleness and charity with which it is presented.
The Pilgrims who came to this spot with Calvert, were of the same country and of the same age as those who settled Virginia and New England. They had grown up amid the same contests, and had had their minds moulded, their opinions formed, in the same circumstances as were those of the other contemporary colonies. If, then, we succeed in showing that in purity of life they excelled, in righteousness towards others they exceeded, and in the presentation of the elements of our present form of na- tional government they stood, if not alone, at least pre-eminent, we may well inquire-it is our duty as Americans to inquire- it is our privilege as religionists diligently to inquire, what were the extent and influence of their superiority, and to what princi- ple it is to be referred.
For myself I have, by reading and reflection, formed an opinion on that subject ; and it is a part of the duty I assumed for this day to express and to support that opinion.
I do not think that the colonists who came with Calvert were men of education (in the ordinary sense of that word) much superior to many of the settlers of Virginia. They were cer- tainly not of more acute intellects than the first colonists of Plymouth or Massachusetts. They stood in the same relation to the savages as did the other colonists, with regard to the danger from violence or the advantages of peace. They had the means of vitiating the physical appetites of the Indians as abundant as others; and could have used cunning (I say not fraud) to become owners of the soil, and could have appealed to
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the love of finery or the thirst of revenge, to limit the posses- sions of the natives or diminish their number. But they did not resort to these modes, which distinguished the conduct of some other colonists ; and their forbearance was not the consequence of impaired appetite for possession, or a deficiency of means to enforce a wrong. In all these circumstances, in all their ante- cedents, these settlers stood on the same ground of power, the same strength of desire, the same means of appreciation, as did the English immigrants to other colonies of this country. The difference in conduct was great; it was eminently distinguishing. Whence did it come ?
The only difference in the circumstances of the colonists of Maryland, and those of Virginia and New England, the only operative difference was in their religious creed, and the educa- tional influences immediately and necessarily resulting therefrom, combined with the painful experience to which that creed had ex- posed them, and the lofty motives of purity and justice which the Christian religion supplies to all its followers, at all times, but which it suggests with great cogency when it also exposes them to the persecution of a tyrant king, or a thoughtless infuriate populace.
There is scarcely a more beautiful page in history, sacred or profane, than that which records the dealings of Leonard Calvert and his followers with the aborigines, who tilled the soil on which we stand. He landed not as a proprietor, but as a visitor. He addressed the native chief, not as one who comes to conquer, but as one who came to purchase. His manners were not those which offended first, and then irritated to hostilities. They awakened caution, but they conciliated esteem and secured confidence.
When the intrigue of an enemy in disguise provoked a portion of the savages to a war, the followers of Calvert made it a duty of the colonists to restore lands acquired by conquest, and made it a penal offence to kidnap or sell a friendly Indian, and a high misdemeanor to supply them with intoxicating liquor. Surely in
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these arrangements, not only is there manifested the true spirit of Christianity, with the fruits of charity and justice, but we must find in them something which appeals to our approval more than does the conduct of some of the other colonists; and I may as well add, that the difference in the conduct of Calvert and that of the Governors of the other colonies, was noticed at the time ; and an old contemporary writer says, "Justice Pop- ham and Sir George Calvert agreed not more unanimously in the public design of planting, than they differed in the private way of it. The first was for extirpating heathens; the second for converting them. He sent away the lewdest ; this the sober- est people. The one was for present profit; the other for rea- sonable expectation. The first set up a common stock, out of which the people should be provided by proportions. The second left every one to provide for himself."
This is not the time nor the place to pursue at length a com- parison between the different modes of colonizing, adopted by men of different objects. .
Where entire dominancy and sudden profits are expected, the utter destruction of the conquered race is the policy of the victor. Wherever Christianizing and humanizing our fellow- being are the leading motives, there patient endurance, and the delay of the fruition of hopes and the reward of labors, are the duties and the compensation of the conquering or dominant race.
Favor to the original inhabitants, works a diminution of spoils ; and the exercise of Christian graces and the presentation of Christian example, ensure the postponement, if not the destruc- tion, of the largest expectation of the conquerors.
Strike down the pagan Indian by tribes and nations, and do . you not open the way for the Christian white man ? Spare the miserable idolater because he may have a soul, and, like the good Las Casas, you hinder if not defeat the end of conquest. Civilization seeks the extension of her arts by the destruction of her opponents, and the distribution of her professed followers. Christianity seeks extent, not so much by the cultivation of the
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example of republican simplicity in its form and action of gov- ernment ; that it afforded the loftiest example of religious toler- ance and equality that was ever presented, and the first that was presented in this country ; and that in the treatment of the Indians its conduct was that of surpassing righteousness. And as these were constantly and heartily practised in that period, it is fairly deducible that the founders of the government of this nation were largely and effectively influenced by these examples, and hence to these examples in their effect on the minds of others do we owe in part the recognition and the security by constitu- tional provisions of some the rights dearest to us as men, as pa- triots, as christians, and some of the practices of those national virtues which concern us as philanthropists.
To the early colony of Maryland is our government indebted for the development of some of the best principles that distin- guish our institutions and do honor to their operation, and that colony owed these principles and her determination and ability to give them practice, to that pure and undefiled religion which the the colonists brought with them from the persecutions and the more dangerous favors in Europe, to establish its altars here, and to proclaim "life and immortality" to its professors, and unbounded love and unrestrained equality to all who should profess a belief in its divine founder. Honor and fame to the self-sacrificing Pil- grims who thus came to the new world to give full operation to the pure principles of Christianity ! Honor and reverence to the venerable and reverend "Fathers" who led the Pilgrims, who erected an altar, lighted its incense and offered its victim ; who poured back the light of truth upon their faithful followers, and sent forward its rays to the eye of the astonished pagan ; who made the work of conquest honorable to the conqueror and ac- ceptable to the conquered; who showed their confidence in their own creed by recommending full indulgence to the creed of others ! Honor to the venerable Fathers who recommended their religion by active benevolence, and invited the red man to the adoption of the Christian faith by the beauty of the white man's practice.
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Our orators and our poets have lauded the motives and cele- brated the perseverance of the Pilgrim Fathers of St. Mary's. They have noted the perils of the sea which they incurred in the little vessels when they left their homes in England to cross the Atlantic in the months of winter, and the historians have care- fully portrayed the terrors of the storms encountered, and the dangers from the merciless foes that infested the seas at that time. All of us have heard of the sufferings of those fathers, of the sympathy manifested by those of the tempest-tossed Ark- for those on board the defenceless Dove. All of us have read of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers on a neighboring island, and how, true to their faith, they celebrated its holy mysteries of the altar, and erected as a memorial of that faith and as a token of their hopes, a simple cross in imitation of the "world's redeem- ing wood." Beside this, we follow these Pilgrim Fathers up- ward on the Potomac and backward again to the sanctified spot on which we now celebrate their landing, and commemorate the virtues which they imparted and cherished.
Graham, a writer of great purity of motive, says, mistaking here and there some of the minor facts, "the first band of emi- grants consisting of about two hundred gentlemen of considerable rank and fortune, with a number of inferior adherents, in a ves- sel called the Dove and Ark sailed from England under the com- mand of Leonard Calvert, and reached the coast of Maryland in the beginning of the following year."
Hawkes speaks of the arrival of these "two hundred gentle- men of rank and fortune," of their faithful and Christian-like commencement of the province which they came to found.
Chalmers, another historian, speaks of the immigration of the fathers of this State, and lauds their character and their conduct.
Wherever we find a record of the settlement of Maryland, we meet with accounts of proceedings which do honor to the "few hundred gentlemen of the first character," who came in the Ark and Dove, or who succeeded, in places and duties, those distin- guished men, but no one has paused to tell of the PILGRIM
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MOTHERS. Great dangers were encountered by those gentlemen in crossing the Atlantic in a small vessel, but was there exemp- tion from danger and from suffering for the women ? Was there nothing in the crowded state of those small vessels to make almost unavoidable great physical sufferings to "well-born and well-educated ladies ?" and to shock female delicacy even more than deprivation could injure and tempest and pirates affright ? In the organization of the domestic circle when they had arrived, and in its extension, was nothing due to woman ? When the altar was reared in its fragile temple,* was there no female there to give to it the beauty of holiness ? none to gather around the simple sanctuary as woman once clung around the cross on Cal- vary, to make more impressive the august sacrifice ?
When Tayac, the King, bowed his head to baptism, he, of course, owed his conviction to the instruction of the reverend teachers ; but when his queen came to the sacred font, had she not been invited by the gentle precepts and attractive examples of the female pilgrims ? Or, if the argument of the priest or the example of the husband was alone operative upon the wife, who taught their princess daughter to profess the creed, receive the sacraments and illustrate the doctrines of Christianity ? That was alone, the office of woman ; nameless, fameless, perhaps, but ever the missionary of benevolence, piety and purity.
The holy religion of those pilgrims, which in its first proclama- tion had released woman from the degradation of pagan condition, made her the co-worker in the great mission of domestic and social piety ; endowed her with all the dignity of recognized co- operation in the office of Christianity ; and, though sparing her the burthen of sacramental labors, yet honoring her with the passive distinction of the baptism of sorrow in herself, and the commission to lead up others to all the blessings that follow vir- tue, and all the dignity that is conferred by religion.
Why, then, have we no record of the sufferings endured in
" The Indian Wigwam.
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themselves, and lessened in others by the women who commenced the work of regenerating the colony ? They were there, else whence the gentle sentiments that pervaded all the public acts and social business intercourse of the Fathers. They were there, and though we knew them not by their names nor by the special mention of their usefulness, yet, we discover their influence in the growth, the picty and the constant peace of the early colony. We find woman there in all her sex's fullest dignity, by the per- petuation of the names of those who first landed. She was there in all her sex's gentleness, to mould the manners and direct the conduct of those whose courage has given fame to Maryland, and whose genius has augmented her scientific and literary character. She was there in all her sex's holiest influences, to prepare the messengers and ministers of love and philanthropy for the duties of the convent cell, and the sacrifices and devotion of the pesti- lential hospital. She was there in all her sex's loftiest office, to fill the sanctuary with the dispensers of the august mysteries of our faith, and to prepare them to wear the mitre and the crozier with dignity and grace, and to deserve the Tiary by their learn- ing, their piety, and their devotion.
Why, then, is woman in such a commemoration unrecognised ? While leaders and teachers, warriors and philanthropists of the other sex are celebrated, why are women, their companions in dangers and triumphs, unnoticed ? I cannot tell, unless their modesty forbade them to chronicle their own worth, and an un- worthy motive lead the historians to make prominent only the names and deeds of the fathers. Special and extraordinary acts we know are those which strike the public mind, and obtain a place in general history ; while continual usefulness so connects itself with the daily experience of man as to become unnoticed by its benefits. Woman is always in the discharge of that mis- sion. Man, at best, is only "instant in season." Man's office is like the offering of the laity of Israel, which was yearly, only, but generous ; woman's is like the sacrifice of the Christian. Church, daily, small indeed, but precious, clear and pure.
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Yes ! woman was here in all her sex's sweetest offices to per- petuate her own virtues in her own sex, to insure innocency, purity and loveliness to the virgin, dignity and grace to the ma- tron, and benignity and charity in the aged, to mould them to all the perfection of the female character, and make this portion of the colony, dedicated in its name to the Mother of God, redolent with all the odors that exhale from her purity, her picty, and her grace.
If not by special act, if not by the record of extraordinary en- durance, if not by commemorated courage or embalmed affection, are the names of these Pilgrim Mothers of St. Mary's to find a place in the history and commemoration of the foundation of Maryland, yet we cannot fail to recognise in all the graces that enrich the State, and all the virtues that have gone forth hence to bless other portions of our Union, the emanations from wo- man's peculiar excellence, and the exercise of her peculiar virtues. Virtues, such as these, demand from the philanthropist, the pa- triot, and the Christian, the most grateful recognition ; especially do they appeal to us who celebrate them here where they were so beneficially developed ; but their best celebration and their perfect reward, are alone in Heaven.
GENTLEMEN OF THE PHILODEMIC SOCIETY :- Though the task which I assumed may not have been accomplished, yet the time for its completion has passed, and it will be permitted to me only to close my address with that special reference to the occasion which the festivity would seem to demand, and to your society, which, holding the commemoration of events, keeps alive their remembrance, and thus commends to practice these Christian virtues which are the glory of the Pilgrim Fathers of Maryland. Your association is the architriclanos of this commemorative mar- riage feast of truth and piety. Let our zeal for religion, and our love for truth, and our affections for our fellow men show that the great author of truth has been invited, and that the im- maculate mother of purity is here in our remembrance.
The ground on which we stand is holy ; the foot prints of the
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good are on its sands, and its soil is enriched with the ashes from the sanctified thurible. The line which sweeps round this limited horizon, includes a space whence history draws her most attrac- tive record, and presents scenes where indeed the purity of the motive and the beneficence of the act seem to invest the genius of history with the spirit of inspiration, and enable us to find be- neath the simplicity of secular narrative the means of spiritual instruction.
Grateful to the heart of every visitor here, must be the hospi- tality that makes our celebration a double festivity. This is the land of bountiful hospitality. The characteristics of the earliest settlers were domestic, social, and municipal hospitality ; and whatever change may have come over the creed or character of the country, the direct inheritance of hospitality is unbroken. Fields are here as of old, improved by culture, and streams made ministrant to trade. Faith and freedom, the boast of the Pilgrim fathers, are yet the attributes of the sons; and piety and beauty, which made lustrous the cabin-chambers of the Pilgrim mothers, now give charms to the stately mansions of their lovely descen- dants ; and all that was the special and peculiar attribute of the Pilgrims of St. Mary's city, has become the general possession, the principle and practice of the people of the Commonwealth.
Nor are we unmindful of the distinction conferred on this day's celebration, by the participation therein of the Ex-chief Magistrate and a portion of the judicial and other officers of the Commonwealth. The successor of the Calvert honors him- self and his co-celebrants when he does honor to his great prede- cessor. The representatives of the popular sentiment thus express sympathy with the dogma of no communion, the rules of no association, the politics of no individual; but they who hold place by the voice of the people, appropriately commemorate the sacrifices and the virtues that gave value and potency to the people's voice. Nor can the functionaries of this or any State more magnify their office, more satisfactorily pledge themselves to an equal administration of the laws, than by presenting them-
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selves among those who honor the declaration and establishment of those great Republican principles, civil and political equality, the right to the pursuit of happiness, and, without diminishing or jeoparding thereby any other right, the glorious right indispensa- ble to our form of government, "freedom to worship God."
Beautifully appropriate to the circumstances of the objects celebrated, are the character and condition of those who main- tain the celebration. Men of condition, of learning and character directed and formed the civilization of Maryland. Most meet is it then that the halls of classical learning should supply the guardians of the annual festival, and since the "Fathers" of a learned and laboring religious order, were the companions and guides of the great exodus, meet is it that the influence of that order should be felt, and the presence of its members enjoyed in the solemnities that commemorate the entry into the promised land.
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