USA > Maryland > Maryland : the history of a palatinate > Part 9
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Coode could not but know that what he was doing was neither more nor less than high tren- son, so ho detained all vessels bound for Eng- land until he had had time to prepare an address to the King, in the name of the Protestant inhabitants of Maryland, declaring that they had taken up arms in defence of the Protest- ant religion, and to secure the Province to his Majesty. William, who was quick to see his interest, and never over-scrupulous, sent his ap- proval of what they had done, but ordered them to await his further commands. Meanwhile the Associators called an Assembly, or at least part of one, opened correspondence with the other Provinces, and strengthened themselves as they could, but apparently did nothing to settle and establishı the government.
Was this really an uprising of the people, or was it the work of a few factious spirits, the people at large not participating ? It is not easy now to decide. On the one hand, if seven hundred man were in arms under Coode, as some say, and these were all Marylanders, that would intimate a pretty strong following. On the other hand, the Protestants at this time outnumbered the Catholics in the proportion of twelve or fifteen to one; and though it was all very well in their addresses to the King to talk of the oppression under which the Protestants
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groaned, and the terror in which they lived, in the Province it must have been known that this was pure fiction. One thing, however, we must remember, and that was the isolated character of the settlements. It was easy to alarm the people of one place by reports of what was going on at another, and thus get a consider- able force together for defence against purely fictitious dangers. It is on record that Coode's force came near disbanding in the march upon St. Mary's, and were hardly prevailed upon to keep together.
Addresses now went to England from all the counties - except, singularly enough, Ann Arundel, which would have nothing to do with Coode - expressing warm sympathy with the movement, and begging William to take the . government into his own hands. Counter- addresses were also sent, declaring the charges against the Proprietary false, and Coode and his party a set of factious knaves; but the signatures to these are less numerous than to the others.
The fact is, that all these documents, on both sides, have a suspicions look. The anti-Coode addresses are pretty much copies of one an- other; those on Coode's side are not only in his clumsy and tumid style, but ring the changes on a set of pet phrases which occur in his own
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letter. Add to this that a number of the sign- ers (many of whom are marksmen) appear on both addresses. On the whole, it seems highly probable that both sets were drawn up at St. Mary's, and sent in haste to supporters in the counties, who procured such signatures as they conveniently could, and added themselves the names of persons whom they thought likely to be favorable.
For a while the Associators had things all their own way, and carried matters with a pret- ty high hand, commissioning officers, imprison- ing not only Catholics, but Protestants who disapproved their lawless proceedings, plunder- ing cattle and horses, and threatening to put to death all who opposed them. The loss of the records leaves us much in the dark as to the events of this time, but it does not appear that there was any bloodshed. They urged William . -always writing in the name of the Protest- ant inhabitants of Maryland - to declare the charter forfeit; and William, who really can hardly be blamed for taking the people's fran- chises, when they seemed so eager to deliver them, needed no urging. In 1690 the Attor- ney-General was instructed to proceed against the charter, by way of scire facias. But this took time, and William applied to Chief-Jus- tice Holt to know if he could not take the gov.
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ernment into his hands without all this tedious waiting. Holt's reply must have caused that usually upright judge a twinge; it was to the effect that it would be better if an inquisition were held, and some forfeiture found; but as that had not been done, and the ease was a pressing one, he thought the King might take the government, and the investigation, after the fashion of Jeddart justice, might be made after- wards.
So the King rose up and took possession, and in August, 1691, Sir Lionel Copley was made the first royal governor of Maryland. The Commissioners of the Privy Seal doubted the legality of Lord Holt's decision, and refused . to confirm the commission without orders from the Council. In the quo warranto caso the facts alleged could not be proved, and no judg- ment was obtained. But William, none the less, held fast to the Province.
A distinction was drawn between the Pro- prietary's sovereign and his personal riglits. He had no longer any share in the govern- ment ; public officers were appointed by the crown or its delegates, laws received royal con- firmnation, and processes ran in the name of William and Mary. But Baltimore's terri- torial rights were respected ; he retained his quit-rents and his ownership of vacant lands,
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his port-duty of fourteen pence per ton on all foreign vessels trading to the Province, and his one half of the tobacco duty of two shillings por hogshend. These duties were disputed by the Assembly, but the crown confirmed the Proprietary's rights. William coveted Balti- moro's authority, and was jealous of his inde- pendence, but he did not covet his private property.
Thus Maryland, from a free Palatinato, was reduced to the condition of a crown colony ; and the Proprietary, from being a prince little less than sovereign, sank to a mere absentee landlord.
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CHAPTER X.
MARYLAND SOCIETY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
DOWN to this time the history of Maryland has been little more than the history of the Proprietaries and the charter, and of the at- tacks upon both, by foes external and internal. In fact, it could not be otherwise. The charter of the Province was the bulwark of the people's rights and liberties ; all attacks upon them had first to be nimed at the charter, and whether the Proprietary in resisting these was acting from selfish or from magnanimons motives, he was equally fighting the battle of his colonists. Now they had, with their own hands, made a breach in their fortress, and henceforth they had to defend themselves against the crown of England, whose little finger was thicker than the loins of the Proprietary.
Maryland history, then, in the seventeenth century, 18 the history of attacks upon the rights of the Proprietary ; in the eighteenth it is the history of invasions of the liberties_of the people. Let us see who these people were, and how they lived.
In the first place they were a people of farm-
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ers - planters, as they called themselves, the colonies being generally known in England as the Plantations. But great plantations and manors of over a thousand acres were compara- tively few, and the law prevented the accumu- lation of vast neglected tracts in single hands. Plantations of from one hundred to a thousand acres were the rule. The colonist who brought over only his pair of stout arms, took up fifty or one hundred acres, and craftsmen twice or thrice as much. The prosperous settler might increase his holding for every servant,1 male or female, he brought over, and when at the end of three or five years the servant became a free- man, his former master, by the custom of the country, gave him two suits of clothing, a gun, necessary tools, and a hog or two, and he might claim a farm of fifty acres by the conditions of plantation. Services were often paid in land ; and we find a great planter on the Patuxent engaging a man to make the brick for his new mansion, and giving him a farm as part of his pay.
Everybody, high and low, thus living on his farm, towns could not grow. St. Mary's, the
1 It has already been shown that though technically ser- vants, those were by no means necessarily of a servile, or even a humble class, but that many of them were " porsons of good rank and quality."
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capital, and ouly town till near the close of the century, on its beautiful platean in the arms of St. George's River, with a fine harbor in front, and land behind gradually rising almost to hills, seemed marked out by nature for the site of a prosperous commercial city ; yet as late as 1678 it was hardly a town at all, but a settlement straggling along the shore for five miles, with not above thirty houses, and those " very mean and little, and generally after the manner of the meanest farm-houses in Eng- land." In most of the settled parts, there were "not fifty houses in the space of thirty miles." 1
The reason of this was the Chesapeake Bay, which shaped the whole life of tidewater Mary- land, and gave a special character to the peo- ple. That magnificent sheet of water, indent- ing the shores with innumerable river-mouths, coves, creeks, and inlets, gave the Marylanders boundless facilities for intercommunication, and mado the town, or village, as a common rally- ing-point, unnecessary. The planter needed no port when ships from London or Bristol, Bos- ton or Jamaica, brought wine, sugar, salt-fish,
1 "St. Mary's novos had more than sixty houses," writes one in 1835, " but the mutlom call town any place where as many houses are as individuals required to make a riot ; that is twenty." Rec. Eng. Pror. series VII.
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English and Dutch wares to his very door, and loaded tobacco and maize at his own wharf. The town. St. Mary's, or later, Ann Arundel, was the place where the courts were held and public business transacted, but it was nothing more. The town, as a centre of political and social life, was not known in Maryland.
This state of things was further favored by the friendly relations with the Indians. The occasional attacks from the northern tribes were small affairs at the worst, only disturb- ing the outlying settlements. We hear of hog- stealing, and now and then of a murder by southern Indians, but the offenders were seized and handed over to justice by the "emperor" of the tribes, who was not merely in alliance with, but under the protection of, the colony, and the friendly relations remained undis- turbed. There was no necessity for the set- tlers to huddle together for protection.
From this state of things it resulted that while the sense of individual freedom was strong, as it always is with those who live on and from their own lands, the political spirit that knits men together for a common purpose was weak. The disturbances in Maryland were never popular movements in the sense of being the acts of considerable bodies of men with a common grievance and a definite purpose; they
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wero the work of a few active spirits, who took advantage of the credulity which was born of this isolation. In one place they used a pre- tended Indian invasion, in another a projected tax, in another a popish plot, to awaken alarm, and for the same reason these inconsistent re- volts met with but slight resistance. In fact there was no general grievance on which all could unite. The one exception, the over-pro- duction of tobacco, was serious indeed ; but it was forced on them partly by circumstance, and partly by the avarice of the crown, nor was it a grievance peculiar to Maryland, nor one that any revolution was likely to redress until the upland country was settled.
The planter, living under a simple code of his own framing, unmolested in his religion, scarcely knowing the Proprietary, save as one to whose agents he paid light quit-rents and tobacco-duties, lived in freedom as he lived in the open air, unconsciously. Hence, violent po- litical changes, as when the Parliamentary com- missioners, and later the King, overthrew the people's franchises, were felt rather as invasions of the Proprietary's rights than of their own. The sense of political liberty was lost in that of personal freedom. It took the experience of the eighteenth century to show that the one grew from the other as the plant from its soil.
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The same causes that hindered the growth of towns promoted local sociability and hospital- ity. Almost every plantation had water com- munication with its neighbors, and canoes, pinnaces, and light " pungies," the special bay- craft, were incessantly darting about. For land conveyance they had small wiry horses, many of which ran wild in the swamps and woods, and multiplied exceedingly. Carriages there were none; everybody rode, and if highways were scarce, bridle- paths run everywhere. Planters who had no water-front brought down their tobacco by "rolling roads," where the cask, with an axle through it, and an ox or horse in a pair of hoop-pole shafts, was at once the load and the vehicle.
Nor need the planter think ruefully of the . state of his larder if he saw a cavalcade com- ing through the woods, or a flotilla steering up to his landing. The forest swarmed with deer, turkeys, and pigeons; the creeks were alive with swans, geese, and ducks ; fish of the most delicate kinds, with oysters and crabs, could be drawn in cartloads from the water at his door. Sheep there were few, on account of the wolves, but the herds of swine, fed with plenteous mast, and guarded by the valiant boars,1 ran wild in
1 We find in 1653 a double price set on "a great boar which defended the herd from the wolves."
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the woods, each bearing its owner's registered mark. Cattle also were numerous, and ran partly wild. These were of a scrubby kind, probably, and no great milkers, if we may judge by the recorded name of " Five Pints " borne by a cow apparently as a title of honor. Wheat brend was not abundant, but there was plenty of hominy, pone, and the crisp hoe-cake. As there were but few mills, the corn had to ho beaten in large wooden mortars, a laborious process. We find as part of the sentence of n prisoner that he shall " beat his own bread," and a dying man, leaving his children to the care of n kinsman, stipulates that they are not to be put to the heavy drudgery of pounding corn.
The want of mills was severely felt all through the seventeenth century, and was one cause why lands suitable for wheat and corn were given up to pasturage. To remedy this a law was passed empowering any one willing to erect a mill on a water-power, where the owner of the land would not or could not build one himself, to obtain a writ ad quod damnum, and take up twenty acres as a mill-site, a jury deter- mining the amount of indemnity to the owner.
It is worthy of note that the five peculiar Inxuries of the Chesapeake Bay, which now inake its shores a kind of gastronomic Mecca,
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seem not to have impressed our ancestors as they impress their descendants. Wild ducks are mentioned, but without discrimination, and nothing about them was considered remarkable except their numbers. We should have only inferential proof that they were eaten at all, but for a rather notable record of 1678, from which it appears that the Governor and both Houses of Assembly, having indulged freely in " Duck Py," conceived, from the serious con- sequences that followed, that they had been poisoned. Touching crubs and terrapin the rec- ords are silent; while the solitary reference to the oyster - affection for which mollusk lins since developed into a specific cultus in the Bay region, caeteris ostreosior oris - is distinctively a note of depreciation. It occurs in the dep- ositions in the Claiborne suit, where the isl- anders particularise as one of their hardships, that when their supply of corn was cut off they had perforce to eat oysters to keep from starv- ing.
With all these good things of forest, field, and flood, what more could man desire ?
The Marylander desired more, he desired abundant drink. This he made for himself, in the form of cider and perry, - persimmon- beer seems of later introduction, - but he also imported rum, " Dutch drams" (anise, rosa so
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lis, and other cordials), brandy, metheglin, clar- et, "Fyal," or canary, and sack. The namo Back was given to both madeira and sherry, and it was a favorite beverage with our ancestors two hundred years ago, on whose modest dress- ers the silver sack-cup was often the sole piece of plate. In 1658 we find T. Wilford, in con- sideration of twenty thousand pounds of to- bacco, covenanting to support Paul Sympson, for the rest of his life, "like a gentleman." Looking further to discover what were the needs of a Maryland bachelor gentleman, we find that he needed "a house fifteen feet square, with a Welsh chimney, and lined with riven boards ; a handsome joined bedstead, bedding, and curtains ; one small table, six stools, and three wainscot chairs; a servant to wait on him ; meat, apparel, and washing; and every year one anker of drams, one tierce of sack, and a case of English spirits, for his own drink- ing." 1
Mr. Sympson's modest cabin was of logs, and 80 were most of the houses. The wealthier planters, however, built of brick. The large,
1 In 1669 ordinary.keepers charged ten pounds of tobacco for a meal, and sixteen pounds for n night's lodging. French brandy rought forly pounds per gallon, claret the same ; Engl' Sspirits, Dutch drams, madeira, and port one hundred pounds, and refined white sugar sixteen pounds. - tobacco being then worth twoponce the pound.
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highly-glazed, russet or chocolate-colored bricks, found in very old houses, were not, as is com- monly supposed, imported from England, but made on the spot. It is doubtful whether a single house was built of imported brick. The brickmaker went to the intended site, hunted for suitable clay, and then and there made and burned his brick till enough were provided. Even now, in parts of the Eastern Shore, wher- ever we find an old brick house, or the site of one, we are pretty sure to find one or more cir- cular shallow pits near at hand, from which the clay was taken,1 and often traces of the ancient kiln.
Aristocracy proper there was none, and yet the society was aristocratic, that is, it was dis- tinctly a society of families. The wealthier planters lived in greater style, had a larger honse, more land, more servants, more of every- thing, except money, - nobody had any of that, - than his poorer neighbor; but this was pretty much all the difference in the seven- teenth century. It is true that the lord of a manor lind, in some cases, certain seigniorial rights ; but these magnates were few and scat-
1 The writer's attention was called to these pits by a gentle- man who has made the early history of the Eastern Shore his special study. We find a contract for making brick as early as 1653, and still earlier mention of brickmakers.
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tered. At first there was some disposition to make these a privileged class, and, as before said, in 1638-39 a bill was introduced providing that they should be tried before a jury of their peers, and that sentence of death upon a lord of a manor should be executed by beheading ; but it never reached a third reading. The existence of African slavery, dividing the com- munity into free and servile races, and the tem- porary servitude of convicts and redemptioners tended further to place all freemen on a level.
The farinstead of the small farmer was, on a small scale, what the plantation of his wealthy neighbor was on a larger. Both were, ns nearly as might be, self-contained, and cach was a little community. The family was the centre of all interest and devotion. As children grow up they helped to extend the area of cultiva- tion, or married and settled on the land. Poor relations were prized and valuable members of the family, which prospered the more the more it increased. The young, penniless fellow who came over in 1634, by 1660 was a prosperous country gentleman, with broad acres around him, his sons' farms girdling his own, and his family connected by intermarriages with his neighbors for miles around. Nowhere was the marriage bond held in higher reverence than in tide-water Maryland; and, even now, Mary-
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Kand is the only State in which no marriage is legally valid without some religious sanction.
Boundless hospitality was a matter of course.1 Any guest was more than welcome, for at least he brought novelty, and news of the world out- side ; and perhaps if he had been at St. Mary's, and had talked with the captain of a Bristol ship, he could tell of the Dutch and French wars. Or perhaps he was an arrival from Eng- land, and at night, when all gathered around the hearth of blazing logs, and the candles of fragrant myrtle-berry wax were lighted, and the sack-posset or rum punch was handed round, he could give the 'Indies some scraps of the gossip of Whitehall or Hampton Court, or de- scribe the fashions which yet live on the can- vases of Lely and Kneller.
Two slight glimpses, by eye-witnesses, of life and society in Maryland, in the seventeenth century, are afforded by two writers, about a generation apart, who wrote from precisely op- posito motives, with precisely opposite impres- sions, and in precisely opposite styles. One lauds Maryland to the skies as an earthly para- dise, the other anathematises it as a purgatory, or worse. One writes in prose, which he tries
1 " Planters' tables, you must know, Are free to all that come and go " Sol- Weed Factor.
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in vain to make poctical ; the other in verse, which he has signally succeeded in making prosaic. A glance at each may help a little to fill up an outline which is but dim at the best.
George Alsop came out to the Province as a redemptioner, in 1658, spent four years on an estate in Baltimore County, and then, returning to England, published his "Character of the Province of Mary-Land," as an inducement to others to emigrate. The book is dedicated to Lord Baltimore, and may possibly have been published at liis expense. The style alone is a curiosity. George evidently felt that he had . undertaken a high task, demanding language of an altogether superfine sort ; and his style may be characterised as Euphuism in a state of de- composition. " I think," he says, in his open- ing paragraph, "there is not any place under the Heavenly altitude, or that has footing or room .upon the circular Globe of this world, that can parallel this fertile and pleasant piece of ground in its multiplicity, or rather Nature's extravagancy of a superabounding plenty. . .. So that those parts of the Creation that have borne the Bell uway (for many ages) for a vegetable plentiousness, must now in silence strike and vayle all, and whisper softly in the auditual parts of Mary-Land. that None but she in this dwells singular."
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But, coming down to simple prose, we find that Maryland, or so much as he saw of it, was a land most plenteous in victual. Venison was 80 common a meat as to be in disfavor; and his master, Mr. Stockett, had at one time in his house, beside abundance of other provisions, " fourscore venisons," - a pretty liberal supply for a family of seven persons. Cows and horses are numerous, and wild hogs roam the woods in numbers that baffle conjecture. The for- ests teem with feathered game, and as for the waterfowl, they frequent the creeks and inlets in " millionous multitudes."
The toleration of , the Province, and its ef- fects, he paints in colors perhaps too flatter- ing. "Here the Roman Catholick and the Protestant Episcopal concur in an unanimous parallel of friendship and inseparable love in- tayled into one another." There are no prisons, and hardly any offenders. " All villanous Out- rages that are committed in other States, are not so much as known here: a man may walk in the open Woods as secure from being openly dissected as in his own house or dwelling. So hateful is a Robber, that if but once imagin'd to be so, he's kept at a distance and shunned as the Pestilential noysomness." There are no beggars, nor ale-houses, nor idlers, and, " from an antient Custom in the primitive seating of
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the place, the Son works as well as the Servant; so that before they eat their bread, they are commonly taught how to earn it."
The position of a servant in Maryland he paints in the brightest colors, as far superior to that of an apprentice or young craftsman in London ; and as for women, they no sooner arrive than they are besieged with offers of matrimony, husbands being ready even for those whom nature had apparently marked ont and predestined for lives of single blessed- ness. In one point he is at one with our other witnesses, and that 'is the astuteness of the planters in bargaining. Whether it be the operation of the salt water they have crossed, or the heat of the sun they live under, he will not undertake to determine, but they are "a more acute people in general, in matters of Trade and Commerce, than in any other place of the World, and by their crafty and sure bar- gaining do often over-reach the raw and unex- perienced Merchant ; " and he warns a corre- spondent that the factor he is about to send out must be "a man of a Brain, otherwise the Planter will go near to make a Skimming-dish of his Skull," - which seems to have been precisely the operation performed on our next witness.
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