Dispute as to the Proprietor's

revenue.

DISPUTES OVER REVENUE.

323

The only attack on Baltimore's private rights came not from the crown, but from the Maryland colonists. The chief sources of the proprietary income were three. Firstly, there were the quit-rents. These, by an Act of the Assembly, passed in 16711 and confirmed in 1674,2 were made payable in tobacco at a fixed rate of twopence per pound. Secondly, by the same Acts, the Proprietor received one-half of the duty on exported tobacco. Over and above this he received a port duty of fourteen pence per ton on the cargo of all vessels trading in the colony.3 No attempt was made to interfere with either the quit-rents or the tobacco duty. The Assembly, however, petitioned that the duty on imports should be appropriated to them on the plea that it had been originally designed, not as a port duty, but as a fort duty, that is, as an impost for purposes of defense. This unscrupulous attempt only brought upon them a reproof from the crown. The policy of the king and his advisers was clear and definite. The rights of sovereignty and the rights of proprietorship were sharply separated. The former were transferred from the Romanist Proprietor to the crown, the latter were left complete and untouched.

The first act by which the crown marked its new authority was the appointment of a Governor, Lionel Copley. The whole Establish- policy of the crown towards the colonies in the years ment of the which followed the Revolution will come before us at royal authority. a later stage. But we shall find a more convenient halting place if we trace the slight and uneventful thread of Maryland history down to the day when the rights of sovereignty were restored to the house of Calvert.

The Revolution brought about the same change in Maryland which we have marked of an earlier date in Virginia. It substituted English officials bound by all their interests and connections to the mother country for the old type of governor who was a colonist, if not by birth, at least by association and feeling. The political history of Maryland falls into the ordinary routine of a colony under the immediate control of the crown. Its monotony is only varied here and there by petty internal dissensions or small constitutional difficulties with the home authorities. One of the most noteworthy of these occurred at the death 1 Bacon, 1671, ch. xi. 2 lb., 1674, ch. i. The financial position of the Proprietor is set forth by Bacon in an appendix to the Act of 1671.

• The petition of the Assembly and the answer are to be found in the Colonial Papers.

arose.

of Copley, and serves to illustrate the incompleteness of the new system. At Copley's death two claimants for the Governorship Blakiston, the President of the Council, a man of some importance in the colony, claimed the post as standing next in official rank, while Sir Thomas Laurence, of whom nothing is known save that he was a member of the Council, put forward the plea that Copley had bequeathed the office to him by will. It is scarcely needful to say that his claim went unheeded, and that Blakiston acted as Governor till a regularly commissioned successor came out.1

as Governor.

Above the train of insignificant officials that pass across the stage during this period of Maryland history, one robust figure Nicholson towers pre-eminent. In Maryland, as in every one of the colonies where a long and varied career led him, Francis Nicholson brought the activity and intelligence of a vigorous temper and a clear brain. There, as in Virginia, we see him grasping at once the true principles on which the commercial prosperity of the colony should rest, stirring up a torpid community into some zeal for education and religion, and at the same time throwing a vigilant and comprehensive glance on the whole body of colonies, and missing no feature which bore either on their own welfare or their utility to the crown. His letters from Maryland, like those from Virginia, give an admirable picture of the aspect in which our colonial empire at that day presented itself to a vigorous, clear-headed official of no specially exalted views or aspirations.

His

In Maryland as in Virginia, Nicholson was the advocate and promoter of education. The college of William and Mary had indeed no rival on the north side of Chesapeake Bay. Still, it was something to persuade the Assembly to establish and endow a free school at St. Mary's, and to make provisions for extending the system throughout the colony.2

reforms.

In another of his schemes for reform Nicholson was less successful. In Maryland as in Virginia, there had been a constant struggle between the natural tendencies engendered by the country and the views of those in power as to the welfare of the settlers. Just as in Virginia, the abundance of navigable rivers forbade the growth of ports or towns. Year after year the lack of them was a subject of complaint with the authorities at

1 The whole of this dispute is told of in a letter from Maryland, September 21, 1693 (Co nial Papers).

Bacon, 1696, ch. xvii.

ATTACKS ON NICHOLSON.

325

home and the officials in the colony. In 1696 an Act was passed constituting Annapolis a city with a municipal government.1 It was easier, however, to constitute a city than to wean the Maryland settlers from their straggling habits, and, as in Virginia, urban life played no part in the development of the colony.

Another step in the same direction was taken in 1706, when an Act of Assembly was passed appointing wharves and ports throughout the colony, and limiting their number to three at least in any one county. This Act, however, and another passed in the next year, changing some of its details, were vetoed by the crown,2

Attacks on

In one respect Nicholson was less fortunate in Maryland than in Virginia. In Virginia it is clear that his activity and public spirit won the esteem and love of the settlers. In Maryland, on the other hand, whether from a laxity of moral character which offended the dominant Puritans, or from his friendship Nicholson. for the Church of England, he incurred the bitter hostility of one party. The attacks upon him are preserved in memorials which assuredly discredit no one but their authors. Nicholson may have been a man of vicious life and at times high-handed in his exercise of power. Indeed the school in which he had been trained was one which hardly left a possibility of rigid private or public virtue. But the charges brought against Nicholson by his opponents in Maryland confute themselves by their very violence. They depict him wallowing in the foulest sensualities, outdoing the shamelessness of a Sedley or a Wharton, and treating his subordinates and even his favorites with all the brutal caprice of an Eastern despot. Such, we may be sure, was not the man who won the friendship and esteem of Blair, and who in every colony where he held office stood out as the model of an able and well-advised administrator.3

Disaffection towards their governor seems to have been the leading note of the Maryland Puritans during the interval between Rumors the Revolution and the restoration of the Proprietor. of Jacobitism. In addition to the accusations brought against Nicholson's private character, we find him charged with open and avowed manifestation of Jacobite sympathies. That a public of

1 Bacon, 1696, ch. xxiv.

2 lb., 170f, ch. xiv.

3 Both the private and political attacks on Nicholson are preserved in the Colonial Papers. One of the charges is so grossly indecent that it has been omitted in one draft, and erased, though imperfectly, in another.

ficial should have celebrated the birthday of the Pretender with public rejoicings, with a salvo of cannon, and with treasonable. toasts drunk at his own table, is a story not to be accepted on the evidence of a few fanatical Puritans. Yet such were the charges sent home to England, not only against Nicholson, but against one of his successors, Harte, who held office from 1714 to 1720.

lished.1

The Protestant feeling of the colony showed itself more definitely and practically than in these old wives' tales. From the Anglican Revolution onward the whole course of legislation ism estab- showed how completely the once dominant Papists had sunk into the position of an insignificant and oppressed minority. As we have already seen, Anglicanism was only one of a variety of creeds which coexisted in Maryland in a state of mutual toleration. If Baltimore's report may be believed, the Church of England was surpassed in wealth, numbers, and influence by nearly all the chief sects of Nonconformists. In 1677 there were only three Anglican clergymen in the whole colony. There were but few churches and no endowments. Burial in unconsecrated ground was the prevailing practice.

In Maryland as in Virginia, the reproach which rested on the Church of England was in a great measure overcome by the pious energy of one man. Bray, like Blair, was one of those honest and sagacious divines who in the latter part of the seventeenth century united the zeal and ecclesiastical loyalty of the Nonjuror with the practical good sense of the Latitudinarian. His earnest representations as to the neglected condition of the colonial churches led to the incorporation and establishment of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Another fruit of his labors was the collection in England of books to form parish libraries for the use of the colonists. We, however, are chiefly concerned with his conduct in Maryland as Commissary for the Bishop of London. He was appointed to that office in 1698, and arrived in the colony in 1700. The Anglican party in the colony just then stood in special need of assistance and advice. In 1692 an Act had been passed by the Assembly declaring the worship of the Church of England to be the established form for

1 I have taken this account of the establishment of Protestantism, and the disputes that accompanied it, from the Journals of the Assembly, which are among the Colonial Papers; from The History of the Protestant Church in the United States, by F. L. Hawks; and from a book entitled Public Spirit Illustrated in the Life and Designs of T. Bray, by Samuel Smith, LL.D., Rector of All-Hallows, London, published in 1746.

RESTORATION OF THE PROPRIETOR.

327 the colony. But it does not appear that any definite measures were then taken towards providing a maintenance for the clergy. To remedy this an Act was passed in the lower chamber in 1698 for raising a church rate by a duty on tobacco. The measure does not seem to have met with any effectual opposition either from the Roman Catholics or the Dissenters. It was nearly lost, however, through the perverse and injudicious conduct of the Burgesses. They thought it a good opportunity for exacting from the English government a formal declaration of the rights and liberties of the colony. Relying on the anxiety of the crown to see Protestantism legally established in a once Papist colony, the Burgesses tacked to this Act a clause wholly alien from the matter of the bill, declaring that the colony should henceforth be governed according to the fundamental laws of England. Nicholson remonstrated, and at last arranged a compromise by which the words "laws and statutes" were substituted for "fundamental laws." At the same time he warned the colonists that the English government would never assent to a law which contained in itself two distinct substantive enactments totally different from one another in kind. As Nicholson foresaw, the bill was vetoed. For the next three years repeated attempts were made to carry a like measure, but the crown, influenced, it is said, by the representatives of the Maryland Quakers, remained firm, and the veto was continued. At length, in 1700, the Assembly, acting under the persuasion of Bray, withdrew the obnoxious clause, and the measure passed.

tion of the

In 1715 the conversion of the fourth Lord Baltimore to Protestantism brought about the revival of his proprietary rights. Restora- The view taken by the crown and its advisers was that Proprietor. these were only in abeyance, and that as soon as the inabilities imposed by the Proprietor's religion came to an end, his rights revived. But though the Proprietor was formally restored, his position was changed. The interval of twenty years had broken the spell of personal influence, nor was any sentiment of loyalty likely to revive when its object was an obscure youth who had never set foot in the colony. His power was no longer supported by the influence of the Jesuits, nor his dignity upheld by any memories of the founder, and hereafter Maryland shows but faint traces of the peculiar conditions of its origin.