USA > Maryland > Studies in the civil, social and ecclesiastical history of early Maryland; lectures delivered to the young men of the Agricultural College of Maryland > Part 9
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had grown by private thrift, intelligence and energy, sought in every way to make them minister to her pros- perity and aggrandisement. And so she pursued the policy indicated. Fortunately for her, she began the policy when the colonies were still comparatively weak and the loss from the navigation act but little felt. Had she waited till the colonial commerce had expanded to large proportions the rebellion against her colonial sys- tem would have been sharp and dangerous. As it was, Massachusetts, that never had any love for the house of Stuart, and always fostered a republican love of having her own way, was forever irritating Charles the Second by her evasions of the law and by her shrewd justifica- tion of her conduct.
The year 1689, however, was big with results for Mary- land. It will be remembered that in 1688 James the Second had been compelled by his fears, which were only too well founded, to flee from England and find his refuge with the king of France. And this he had to do because he had violated the constitution of England, and introduced principles into the executive administration, and practices into religion, that were dreaded and hated by the English people; for he had attempted to nullify the laws of England by his own proclamation founded upon what he supposed his royal prerogative, and by this means he had sought to introduce persons and practices into the Church of England which the people had cast off one hundred and fifty years before.
France had such a royal government at this time as James desired, for when in the early days of Louis XIV. the Council had attempted to consider one of his commu- nications, he quickly informed them that his edicts were
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submitted not for consideration but to be registered. James desired such regal independence as that. Louis succeeded, and the results of his absolute tyranny were found in the French Revolution one hundred and fifty years later. The people, not having courage to resist him then, had to rise in their power and crush out entirely his system and his successors afterwards. The English people, however, did their crushing at once, with the result that James and the abominable principles he attempted to establish, were forever ruled out of England.
Now this agitation in the English world of course extended to the colonies. The strong feelings that were excited at home were excited also here, while the frequency of communication kept the colonies posted as to the progress of events. The ferment of feeling was known and sympathized with, while the hope of relief in the coming over of William the Stadtholder, from Holland, was soon known in the colonies. Maryland was pecu- liarly circumstanced in the matter, for she was the only one of all the colonies whose proprietary or other chief administrator was of the same church with James. This fact had immense influence in exciting the interest of the people of Maryland in the progress of affairs; for though Charles Lord Baltimore was known to be wise and con- siderate, and the people had from time to time declared their appreciation of him and of the method he had pur- sued in the government of the province, yet because he was of the same faith and practice with his royal master he now became the subject of suspicion, and they were ready to believe anything that the wildest imagination could invent. Outrages were reported, tyrannical con- duct was charged, and deadly intentions were said to be
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meditated, if not by Lord Baltimore, at least by those who were of the same faith with him in the colony. Commendations by a people of their rulers, however, are not always to be taken at their face value; heavy dis- counts have often to be allowed. While the people were commending Lord Baltimore they were also approach- ing James with fulsome eulogy, congratulating him upon the birth of his son, wishing long life and peace; yet as soon as might be they rejoiced in the downfall of James, and did their utmost to overthrow their own proprietary.
Unfortunately for Lord Baltimore in this emergency, when William and Mary were established on the throne, and their title had been officially proclaimed, and they stood forth before England and the world as the defenders of the Protestant faith, Lord Baltimore, through no fault of his own, but through the untoward death of his messenger, was very slow in proclaiming them. The result of all these things was The Protestant Revolution.
What was this? The records of the province are at fault here, for there is a gap reaching down to the year 1692. But from what is known we learn that, like as in all such periods of transition, when men are excited by any cause, the citizens of the province bound themselves in an association to break up the government of Lord Baltimore, and to bring about the establishment of Mary- land as a royal colony, with the king occupying the relation to the colony that up to this time the proprietary had held. The object of the association was to agitate, and this they did, preying without doubt upon the people's fears, denouncing to Marylanders the same condition which James had attempted to bring about in England. They did this by reporting among the thinly settled dis-
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tricts of one part of the province outrages as committed by the religious friends of the proprietary in another part; for owing to the difficulty of communication and the small degree of intercourse, it was easy to start an alarm which it would take a long while to allay. Indian out- rages also were reported, and the association of the papists with the Indians in conspiracy. All such fears were the more readily excited by the horrible. atrocities which in 1685 had followed upon the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when four hundred thousand French Protestants, solely for their religion, were driven forth in the name of religion-the Roman-from house and home and country, dragooned to death, or stripped of all property and sent forth penniless.
All such things were esteemed possible in that day, the times were rife with them, and if they were not done by Lord Baltimore, his abstention from them was, to the minds of the people of the province, an accident of his disposition or of his circumstances. The spirit was believed to be of the essence of his church and liable to show itself in every member. We may see differently now, but there were many circumstances then to justify apprehension. For Lord Baltimore as a man the people might have great respect; but for Lord Baltimore's church, and for him as a member of it, the people not only had no respect, but great fears and anxieties. This probably suggests the leading cause of the Protestant Revolution.
The revolution consisted in getting the government of the colony out of Lord Baltimore's hands into those of the king and queen; and the reason why the . people sought to make the change was that they had
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faith in the one and they had not faith in the other. When the matter was brought before the king he con- sented to the desire of the people, and the government passed over to his hands. All Lord Baltimore's private rights, however, in the property of the province, were fully respected. The soil was his, the quit-rents or ground- rents were his, manors held for himself and vacant lands were his. The port dues were his also, and one-half of the tobacco dues, or duties on tobacco exported. When the revolution took place, the people claimed that these exactions went with the government, and were not to be accorded to the proprietary as a private right. They had been granted by acts of Assembly, and were no part of the proprietary's charter prerogatives. The king, how- ever, after a hearing of the case, decided in favor of Lord Baltimore. Private rights were in this way gen- erously respected, the king acting as Lord Baltimore's friend and restraining the impetuosity of the people.
But all the functions of government passed out of his hands. The governor was appointed by the king, and all the officers of the colony. All laws had to be submitted to the king for his approval. The courts ran in his name; the assemblies were called under his writ. All the functions of government were performed by him. It was a great change, it is true, but whether it was such that the people who lived quietly on their several farms could observe it, is a question. It gave them, however, a sense of greater security, for now they could have faith in the officials of the province, which they seem not to have had before. Beside that we can feel that a province of the English kingdom should be under the king of England. There was a fitness in it. And doubt-
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less they had some such feeling in that day. Certainly by the charter allegiance to the king was saved, and all the residents of the province were declared to be liege subjects of the king. But yet the proprietary was " abso- lute lord," and fealty was pledged to him, and the king in all current administration, was not known.
We of this day have exceedingly little respect for kingly government; but for feudal government and subor- dination, as of hereditary right to a fellow-subject, we have far less respect. It would be an anachronism now, and it was becoming rapidly so at that time. The be- heading of Charles the First and the abolishment of the House of Lords, the voluntary recall of Charles the Second, and the practical expulsion of James the Second, were successively fatal blows to feudalism; and the people of Maryland doubtless felt a relief when the feudal over- lordship was done away with. It is true, it was in some degree restored again after 1715, but it never became what it had been before. Royal and parliamentary inter- vention in the affairs of Maryland, as well as of the other colonies, was far more frequent and direct after the restoration of the proprietary government than it had been before.
The thing most frequently spoken of in connection with the royal government of the colony is the change that took place in church matters, the whole institution as regards religion having been changed at that time. · Before 1689 religion had been neglected. Doubtless many good Christians were found in the colony, but the population was so thinly scattered, and the various denominations so numerous, that the support of a min- istry and the keeping open of places of worship, were
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exceedingly difficult. There were a few churches and chapels of various denominations of Protestants in widely distant places, and the Jesuit fathers had their chapels in different parts of the colony. But religion was neces- sarily neglected, as the ministers, except the Roman Catholic priests, had to depend upon their private estates for their living, lands which they had probably taken up under the conditions of plantation. Lord Bal- timore stated that in his testimony before the Lords of Plantations concerning the Church of England clergy in 1676; nor is there any reason to believe that it was not true of all other Protestant ministers, what few there were within the colony. The Jesuits had their extensive landed property in different parts of the colony, and they had also their lay coadjutors to attend to their affairs of business.
As far as is known, and as was declared at the time, Lord Baltimore did nothing for religion, except for his own church. One of the charges against him in 1690 was that of erecting and founding chapels for the popish superstition, to the encouragement of popery and the subversion of the Protestant religion. And another was that he took advantage of escheats of lands bequeathed and devised to the use of the Protestant ministry. There is no evidence whatever that any sums out of the revenues of the province, were bestowed in that way. As a loyal member of his church, he could not consist- ently help along the heretical faith, and as is evidenced by the long list of names in the "Act Concerning Re- ligion," the denominations were numerous; for that list probably indicates the composition of the population. In 1676 Lord Baltimore testified that the nonconformists
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4
in the colony outnumbered both the Church of England people and the Roman Catholics together by three to one. As he had been resident in the colony for a number of years just previous to this time, his testimony bore the full weight of authority. As is known also, he returned to the colony in 1680, and remained there about four years, so that he was personally responsible for any neglect on the part of the government of the province in matters of religion. And the same is true of the matter of education.
For religion and education were both very little cared for, and the result was a great prevalence of immorality; for though irreligious men, unbelievers or non-believers, sceptics or agnostics, may scorn the claims of the church, yet all men know, who are at all in the tide of life, that the ministrations of the church, and the influence of the Gospel through those ministrations, have a powerful effect upon every community for peace and good order. Nor are we called on merely to suppose that immorality abounded. The evidence is sufficient of its prevalence and of its gross character. It might be inferred from the general experience, for in all new communities, before order has settled down into a definite habit, vice flour- ishes. First adventurers that break away from the restraints of settled society to brave new things in a wil- derness do not, as a rule, represent the religious part of a community. Religion only comes to be considered when the first rush has subsided, and a sense of a fixed establishment has been reached; because religion belongs to the more thoughtful and meditative elements of the human mind and heart, however much it may and must show itself in the active relations of the human life.
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But over and beyond this anticipation, we know Mary- land at this time to have been a very immoral commu- nity. The Rev. Mr. Yeo, who wrote at the time Lord Baltimore went to England in 1676, and whose letter called out the testimony of Lord Baltimore, as given above, reported to the Archbishop of Canterbury that the colony was a Sodom of uncleanness and a pesthouse of iniquity, and he ascribes as the cause, that the ministry were not provided with a support, and so could not live in the colony. An immense deal has been made of his call for an established support for the ministry, as if it were the voice of narrow ecclesiastical bigotry; and even McMahon holds Mr. Yeo up to reprobation, and points out the example of the Master who came down from heaven on His mission of mercy without providing for himself an established support. We need only say that such an argument from such a precedent, hardly proves an abundance either of learning or of logic in Divine matters. That something should have been appropriated out of the increasing revenues of the province, either by the proprietary or by the Assembly, for the support of - religion was surely no unreasonable or extravagant demand; and if not for God's sake and man's eternal good, at any rate as a matter of good policy, and as a police measure for securing the welfare of the colony, it would have been well for Lord Baltimore had he made the provision. As reported by Mr. Yeo, there were about twenty thousand persons living in the colony at that time.
Nor does the testimony of Mr. Yeo stand alone; for in the year preceding the Protestant Revolution we find the president of the Assembly drawing a picture of the vice of the colony in the matter of drunkenness, adultery,
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Sabbath-breaking and swearing, which being independent evidence, and that of a layman speaking in his official character, and following a dozen years after Mr. Yeo's, confirms all that he had said. The state of the province was wretched in the extreme. Further evidence, also, of a confirmatory character, is given in the act of 1692 providing for an established support of the church; for among the functions of the vestry, as then ordered, was one providing for the suppression of adultery within the several parishes, a function that was performed; while the several parishes show on their records how great the evil was. For in one parish, and that in some respects exceptionally well placed for moral living, there were ten separate cases of gross immorality passed upon in one month in the year 1698.
Lord Baltimore's administration had evidently done nothing for the moral welfare of the colony. In this respect his government was a failure. The ministers of his own church ministered to an insignificant minority,- one to thirty, the ratio was reported to be in 1681,-while the great body of the people were deprived of ministerial oversight and care. He may have thought them fools and blind for rejecting the ministrations that satisfied him, but nevertheless they did. And it proved bad policy on his part, though it may have satisfied his con- science, to have consented to this neglect. An estab- lished support, something out of the revenues for the maintenance of religion, would have promoted the welfare of the colony, and, as it proved, his own. His absolute indifference to this matter, with the consequent results, was doubtless one cause why the people were willing to see his government overthrown and the administration pass into the hands of the king.
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For in considering the law of 1692 and its subse- quent amendments till 1702, we must always remember that it was the act of the people and the people only; and not only so, but that what was done was not that which the majority of the people would have desired, but what they felt was the best their circumstances permitted them to do. For the Church of England which they estab- lished, was the church of but a part of one-fourth of the people; the three-fourths being made up of noncon- formists of diverse names and principles, who had during the last forty years done what they could, more than once, to put down, not only popery, but prelacy as well. The act was passed at a time when all the frecholders of the colony had the right of franchise; so that the As- sembly was not a packed one, but represented all the most intelligent classes of the people.
Their act, therefore, must have been contrary to their preferences, and could they have avoided it they would. They did not love the Church of England, nor did that Church love them. They had been subjected for many years in England, and especially since the Restoration, to many and grievous penalties. But something had to be done, and established maintenance had to be pro- vided that they might have ministerial supervision at all. They were broken up themselves into many names. Maryland was now a royal colony, and the establishment of any one of their different denominations, was an entire impossibility; and yet the need was crying and imperative. They met their difficulty, therefore, in the only possible way; they provided a maintenance for the clergy of the Church of England.
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For that was all that was done. It was not a state church they set up. No church functionary, clerical or lay, had any part in the administration of the colony, saving in the matter of suppressing immorality. No right to a seat in the Assembly was granted, no possession of influence or direction in testamentary matters, no voice in the matter of marriages, no independent courts in which to try their own causes, not even the power of disciplining the clergy themselves. No spiritual court of any kind whatever, nothing analogous to the efforts of the Roman Church fifty years before, nothing com- mensurate with the influence and power exercised by the nonconformist churches in the northern colonies. It was in no degrec a state church. The state provided main- tenance, and in return exercised jurisdiction so far as to say who should be settled in the parishes, and to super- vise accounts, so as to know whether the money appro- priated was properly spent. It even attempted at one time, in violation of the fundamental principles of the ministry, to exercise the power of spiritual discipline; but this the clergy resisted, and all discipline was held in abeyance. All attempts also to set a Bishop over the church, were steadily resisted and defeated. The state exacted a heavy compensation for the maintenance it bestowed. Every man, also, in the province, from the Governor down, enjoyed the privilege of indulging in charges and complaints against the clergy, a luxury of which very many constantly availed themselves.
Doubtless the men of that day knew what they were doing, and they exercised the good judgment that their knowledge of affairs and the exigencies of the times called for; and it is absurd for us at this day to question
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or fault them in the light of our present surroundings. For what might be wisdom now, in the midst of our dense and well-ordered society, would have been fool- ishness then. The establishment of the church was a police measure, and a very good police measure it was; for it did what could not otherwise be done. It planted in thirty-one different centers in the colony a house wherein high moral truths were taught-had to be taught -- both from the pulpit and from the reading-desk, and in this way it created a standard of good living. It also selected a council for morality in all these places, and bound the members to see to the morals of the people; and while the minister, or chief vestryman, as he was called, was to reprove, rebuke, exhort, the members of this council, or vestry, were to have the ability to enforce the colonial laws of right living. Observe, I do not speak of the high and holy functions of the church, but only of its establishment in the colony and what it wrought in the minds of the people.
The system certainly had its defects, as all systems have; and society also afterwards outgrew it, so that it became an anachronism and was removed; but in its earlier day, and through very much of the colonial period, it was an unspeakable blessing and accomplished high purposes. It is notable, too, that though at any time, down to the Revolution, it could have been abrogated, or could have been rendered inoperative by the rescinding of the provision for the annual tax, yet it was not only continued to the Revolution, but was shown very marked favor when the necessity arose for its repeal.
Let us now consider the features of the law itself. And first of the assessment laid upon the whole body
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of the people for the support of the church. This was a poll-tax of forty pounds of tobacco, which was the cur- rency of the colony, laid upon the whole labor-producing part of the population, white male citizens, slaves, both male and female, except those too old or too young to work, and a man's sons of age to endure labor. This was the taxable portion of the community. Ministers holding benefices were. exempted, and also paupers. This forty pounds tax has excited a great deal of com- ment, and was through all the colonial period looked upon by certain classes, especially the Roman Catholics and the Quakers, as a grievance. It was, however, the main feature of the law, the very essence of the enact- ment, and if the law was at all necessary this tax was necessary. It appeared to bear heavily, and was one of those evident things that anybody could see. The value of the church, however, upon the welfare of the colony was not so palpable, and as a consequence people did not see the advisability of this demand. Only the two classes named above, however, made any very stren- uous opposition; the first of which believed that no min- istry was entitled to the name but their own, all the rest being heretics, while the second did not believe in a paid ministry at all. Forty pounds was the amount in the beginning while the population was small. After- wards, when it had increased very greatly, the amount was reduced to thirty pounds. It may be of some com- fort to some persons to know that, with scarcely an exception, no one could live in luxury on the income of his parislı.
Churches, also, were built by a tax laid, but in this case by a special levy. Though this was not under the
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law, but by act of the Assembly in each particular case. Current expenses, also, were in this way provided for. The voluntary system was hardly known. Gifts were sometimes made by individuals, and sometimes very handsome ones. Most of the glebes came by gift, and many ornaments for the church building. But the great reliance was upon the state and the revenue that caine by the tax; a good system as far as it went, but not adapted to lift the people to any degree of fervor in the cause of religion.
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