Conceived in Liberty (22 page)

Charles II, still in exile, embittered by what he regarded as acts of treachery by Lord Baltimore, deposed him and appointed instead Sir William Davenant as royal governor, for Baltimore “did visibly adhere to the rebels in England, and admit all kinds of sectaries and schismatics and ill-affected persons into the plantation.” Davenant sailed from France to try to seize Maryland but was himself captured by the English.

Walking the tightrope of religious liberty between the demands of Parliament and those of the Crown was a difficult feat, and in 1651 the rulers of Maryland fell off. The Catholic royalist deputy governor, Thomas Greene, foolishly decided to recognize Charles II in the same year as the legitimate ruler of England. This proclamation naturally angered Parliament and precipated severe reaction. The following year Parliament sent to the Chesapeake colonies commissioners, of whom the angry Claiborne was one, to subdue the recalcitrants. After settling matters in Virginia, the commissioners proceeded to Maryland, where they removed the governor and ousted the proprietary. Governor Stone was reinstated, but he, in turn, persisted in trying to reinstate the authority of the proprietor. He compounded his difficulties by insisting on imposing an oath of allegiance on Lord Baltimore. The oath offended Puritans. Stone then denounced the Puritans and the commissioners as fomenters of sedition. The result was the capture of St. Marys by the commissioners in 1654, and their appointment of a Puritan Council and of Capt. William Fuller as governor. Catholics were now excluded from voting and from the Assembly, and the Toleration Act as well as the rule of the proprietor were canceled. A law of 1654 declared that “none who professed and exercised the popish religion could be protected in this province.” The law disfranchised not only Catholics, but also Anglicans. The Puritans made it clear that freedom of worship would now be extended only to Protestants free of either “popery or prelacy.”

Former governor Stone now raised his insurrectionary army loyal to the proprietary, and in 1655 attacked Providence, the principal Puritan settlement in Maryland. The erstwhile governor was crushed by a force of Puritan planters, Stone was imprisoned, and several of his followers executed, even though they had been promised their lives before surrender. Calvert, however, proved extremely agile and managed to convice Cromwell and
Parliament that religious toleration and hence his own rule should be reestablished. Calvert was permitted to appoint a new governor in 1656 and this governor, Josiah Fendall, joined with the Puritans in agreeing to establish religious toleration, including toleration for Catholics.

With the death of Cromwell, Fendall tried to seize the opportunity to liberalize the colony further by casting off proprietary rule and submitting himself to appointment by the Maryland Assembly. The restoration of Charles II, however, ended such hopes for the remainder of the century, and Baltimore moved swiftly to crush this move for independence, appointing Philip Calvert as governor.

After the Restoration, tensions and grievances accumulated in Maryland somewhat as they did in Virginia. Falling tobacco prices, the crippling effect of the English Navigation Acts, the raising of the quitrents—each conduced to this effect. In Maryland, too, suffrage was restricted to freeholders in 1670; furthermore, proprietary rule aggravated the problem of quasi-feudal landholdings. Moreover, anti-Catholic sentiment grew among the Protestant masses and focused both against the proprietor and against religious toleration. Another important grievance: the Calverts had tampered with the election to the burgesses in 1670 and after that, in imitation of Berkeley, suspended elections until 1676. The ambivalence of religious toleration in Maryland may be seen in its treatment of the Quakers. Quakers were people who had no priests, declined to swear oaths, and refused determinedly to fight or bear arms. They were, accordingly, highly unpopular wherever adoration of the state ran high. They proclaimed, indeed, that they were “governed by God’s laws and the light within and not by man’s laws.” In Maryland the Quakers were steadily persecuted; forty were publicly whipped within one year. Finally the Quakers were branded as “rebels and traitors,” and in a law of 1659 Maryland ordered their expulsion from the colony. The law decreed that “any of the vagabonds or idle persons known by the name of Quakers, who should again enter the province, should be whipped from constable to constable out of it.” The proprietary, however, soon ceased to enforce the law, and before long many Quakers were reestablished in the colony. When the founder of the Quakers, George Fox, visited Maryland in 1672, he welcomed the full religious liberty in the province and rejoiced in the number of public officials who had been converts.

Maryland’s economy and social structure developed in a way similar to neighboring Virginia’s. After a brief period of growing subsistence crops of maize, pork, and vegetables, the colony turned to specialization in tobacco. A large tobacco plantation society and economy, in short, prevailed in the whole Chesapeake Bay area, Maryland as well as Virginia. The plantations were located in the fertile river plains of the coastal tidewater region, and trade was oriented to London and Bristol. Again, quasi-feudal land allocation led to large plantations, although small up-country farms growing subsistence crops and tobacco were more numerous but not dominant in the colony. Once more, the land was extensively settled and thinly
populated. The labor base for the plantations was indentured service and Negro slavery.

Perhaps the major economic and social difference between Maryland and Virginia was Maryland’s far more feudal structure. The land was kept in a hierarchy of overlordships and tenancies, with the Calverts owning all the land and collecting a quitrent from all the landholders, while the manor lords of the vast estates given to them by the overlords leased the land to smaller planters. The small yeoman farmers of the back country could not therefore gain their land outright, but could only stay as tenants paying quitrents to the proprietary overlord. Large stretches of tidewater land were held by a few large planters.

Although beginning as a rigidly feudal structure, even the Maryland land system could not survive the liberating conditions of America: in particular, the enormous abundance of new land and the need to stimulate settlement upon it. By the late seventeenth century, the land was being increasingly transferred to the settlers; through purchases, the feudal land structure was dissolved into its component parts, and ownership progressively devolved upon the actual users of the land. Feudal landholdings, in short, began to dissolve into the market economy.

One of the most important single manifestations of feudal landholdings, especially in a proprietary colony, was the quitrent, exacted from all landowners as tenants of the proprietary. Originally Cecilius Calvert had fixed a quitrent of ten pounds of wheat for each fifty acres, and then of one shilling per fifty acres, to be paid in kind. In 1648 Calvert attempted a drastic increase in quitrents, ranging now from one shilling per fifty acres up to twenty shillings per fifty acres, or ten pounds per manor of 2,000 acres after a term of years. Pressure of the settlers and the need to encourage settlement forced abandonment of this plan, and the Maryland Assembly felt the need in 1654 to pass a law upholding the rights in the land of the settlers as well as of the proprietary. After the Restoration in England, the cocky Lord Baltimore doubled the quitrent to four shillings per 100 acres, which began to be enforced in 1669. In addition, in an attempt to block the quiet dissolution into the market of feudal tenure, the proprietors imposed in 1660 a fine on any alienation of landed property. Happily the fine was never thoroughly enforced. The proprietors also imposed on the settlers a purchase price (known as “caution money”), which considerably restricted the growth of the colony. First levied in 1683 at 200 pounds of tobacco per 100 acres, the purchase price was increased the next year to 240 pounds, and by 1717 had reached the sum of 40 shillings per 100 acres.

As in Virginia, the chief money was tobacco, and so quitrents were paid in that commodity. As the price of tobacco fell drastically, the Assembly began to fix the exchange rate in order to try to keep the tobacco prices above the market rate. Such minimum price control could only create unsold surpluses of tobacco and aggravate conditions further for many tobacco planters, as well as for tobacco consumers. However, an incidental boon was to
relieve the burden of quitrents on the inhabitants. Thus, in 1662 and again in 1671, the Assembly fixed the tobacco price at twopence per pound while the market price was a penny a pound, thus reducing the quitrent burden by letting it be paid in arbitrarily overvalued tobacco. The quitrents, furthermore, were enforced by forfeit of land for nonpayment, and by making every debt due to Lord Baltimore a prior lien on the land. Where there were no goods to seize, the delinquent tenant was imprisoned.

The relative growth of Maryland may be gauged by comparing its population with Virginia’s: less than 600 as compared with Virginia’s more than 10,000 in 1640, Maryland’s population rose to 4,500 in 1650, 8,400 in 1660, and almost 18,000 in 1680, compared with Virginia’s 44,000. The Negro (almost all-slave) population of Maryland was proportionately greater in 1680 (over 1,200 compared with Virginia’s 2,000), but then fell behind because of an enormous spurt in Virginia’s slave population. By 1700 there were 3,200 slaves in Maryland, while over 16,000 in Virginia. Slave revolts broke out in Maryland in the early 1680s, in 1688, 1705, 1738, and 1739.

A Negro slave in Maryland had the distinction of staging perhaps the first demonstration of nonviolent resistance in America. In 1656 Tony, a slave of one Symon Overzee, ran away and was captured with the aid of bloodhounds. When he ran away and was captured a second time, Tony sat down and refused to rise and work as a slave. Mr. Overzee bound and beat him repeatedly, but Tony still refused to act as a slave. Enraged because “his property” was refusing to function as property, Overzee poured hot lard over Tony and killed him. A court acquitted Overzee of the murder because, after all, Tony had proved to be “incorrigible.”

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In a few years, however, Calvert became dissatisfied with the Jesuit missionaries in Maryland and “their very extravagant” demands for privileges, and took measures to prevent any increased supply of Jesuits to the colony.

In the mid-seventeenth century, many settlers from Virginia, disgruntled by the domination of society by the planter aristocracy or by the Anglican church, moved down to the southern part of the Virginia grant, on the north of Albemarle Sound (in what is now North Carolina). The leader of the first settlement was the Presbyterian Roger Green. Many of these settlers were Quakers. At first part of Virginia, this settlement, which was also largely devoted to raising tobacco, was relatively independent. Soon, however, it was to feel the heavy hand of a feudal proprietary grant. For the large territory south of Virginia and down to the border of Spanish Florida was still up for seizure. In 1663 the newly installed Charles II granted a feudal proprietary gift of the territory between the thirty-first and thirty-sixth parallels—from what is now slightly north of the Florida-Georgia border to the northern boundary of North Carolina—to a proprietorship comprising eight of his favorite courtiers and supporters. This grant whittled away the southern portion of the Virginia grant, which had been bounded by the thirty-fourth parallel. The eight proprietors were Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, the chancellor of the Exchequer (later first Earl of Shaftesbury); the governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley; his brother John Lord Berkeley, a high-ranking naval officer; the Earl of Clarendon, chief minister to the king; Gen. George Mack, the new Duke of Albemarle; Sir George Carteret; the wealthy Earl of Craven; and Sir John Colleton, a wealthy Barbadian planter and slave trader. As in the Virginia grant, the territory grandiosely extended west to the “south seas.” The idea of the grant originated with those proprietors already interested in the Americas: Colleton, William Berkeley, Ashley Cooper (also a Barbadian landholder), and Clarendon, a land-owner
in Jamaica. John Berkeley acted as agent of the others to persuade the king to make the grant. The grant was known as “Carolina,” after a previous land grant to the area.
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Two years later, the eight Carolina proprietors received a new charter extending their grant to 36° 30’ in the north and down to 29° in the south—the latter, however, being academic, as it covered the Spanish settlements of Florida.

A party of settlers under the new grant established a settlement at Charles Town (now Charleston), at the mouth of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, in 1670. From the beginning, the proprietors had to govern two distinct and separate settlements, unruly Albemarle in the north, and Charles Town in the south, far more under its control. Moreover, the two settlements were, from the beginning, administered by different governors, though under the same proprietary. Albemarle was under the general aegis of Virginia’s Governor Berkeley, one of the proprietors who appointed the governor of the district. From 1691 on, Albemarle settlement was known as North Carolina, and the Charleston area as South Carolina, separately administered though for some years under a single proprietary rule.

The proprietors were given a grant with feudal powers virtually as sweeping as the Maryland gift of privilege—a veritable palatinate. The proprietors were empowered to work their will, with the very important exception that an Assembly of the freemen of the colony, or their representatives, had to approve of the laws. Thus, as in the other colonies, the popularly elected Assembly originated less as a sovereign branch of government than as a check on the despotic rule of the executive. Even before Charleston was settled, the proprietors in 1665 drew up for the government of the chartered area, the “Concessions and Agreements,” a relatively liberal document granting freedom of conscience, liberal land distribution subject to the inevitable but small quitrent, as well as an Assembly elected by the freemen of the colony. But in 1669 the proprietors, spurred by the ambitious Ashley Cooper, decided to embark on the fantastic project of fastening a feudal rule on the colony that could not be supplanted or dissolved by market processes. For not only were there to be proprietors as feudal lords, but there was to be a fully ordered feudal hierarchy of various degrees of subinfeudation. This scheme, to be imposed on the entire Carolinas, was drawn up for the supposedly “liberal” Shaftesbury by his hired theoretician,
John Locke, and promulgated as the
Fundamental Constitutions
of the Carolines.
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