CHAP. XI.

TOLERATION ACTS.

437

Captain Ingle and were lost. A wise clemency extended a general pardon to the rebels, excepting Ingle, and tranquillity was speedily restored.

Lord Baltimore displaced Green, a Roman Catholic, who had been actinggovernor since the decease of Leonard Calvert, and commissioned William Stone of Virginia, a Protestant and warm friend of Parliament. Through his influence the Virginia Puritans came to the waters of the Chesapeake, insisting upon liberty of conscience. Soon after that the Maryland Assembly of 1649 met, says John Hammond (a friend of Lord Baltimore, in a pamphlet published in London in 1656), composed of Puritans, Church of England men, and a few Roman Catholics. It was this body of a majority of Protestants that passed the Toleration Act of which so much has been written. That act seems to have been an outgrowth of statutes passed by the British Parliament in 1645 and 1647, and adopted by the Maryland Legislature under the pressure of the strong Puritan influence then existing there. By that act, every believer in Jesus Christ and the Trinity, was allowed the free exercise of his or her religious opinions, but from this "toleration" Jews and Unitarians were alike excluded, and it was far from being a full "Toleration Act." No man was allowed to reproach another on account of his peculiar religious doctrines, excepting under the penalty of a fine to be paid to the person so insulted; and to Maryland the persecuted in other colonies now flocked to enjoy this broader freedom-Churchmen from New England, Puritans from Virginia, and Roman Catholics from all. That act is the pride and glory of Maryland's early legislation, yet it was not the first act of the kind (as has been often alleged) passed by a colonial assembly in America. In May, 1647-two years before-the General Assembly of Rhode Island adopted a code of laws which closed with the declaration that "all men may walk as their consciences persuaded them, without molestationevery one in the name of his God." This would include Jew or Mohammedan, Parsee or Pagan. It was absolute toleration.

For more than ten years republicanism prevailed in England. Lord Baltimore, whose politics and theology were easy-fitting garments, professed to be a republican when the king lost his head, but he had too lately been a decided royalist to secure the confidence of Parliament. They appointed a commission, of which Clayborne was a member, to govern Maryland. These commissioners entered upon their duties there with a high hand. They demanded a sight of Governor Stone's commission, and when he produced it, they snatched it from his hands, removed him and his subordinates from office, took possession of the records and abolished the authority of the proprietor of the province. A few months afterward they reinstated Governor Stone, put Kent and Polmer's islands into the possession of Clayborne,

and so enabled the vigorous Baltimore.

"outlaw" to trample over his enemy, Lord

When the Long Parliament was dissolved in 1653, Cromwell restored full power to Baltimore as proprietor. Stone proclaimed the movements of the commissioners to have been rebellious. He displaced all officers appointed by them, and in other ways acted very unwisely. The incensed commissioners returned to Maryland and compelled the governor to surrender his authority. Then they vested the government of the province in a board of ten commissioners.

Now the passions of the opposing political and religious parties were aroused into vehement action. The Protestants, who were still the majority in the General Assembly which convened in the fall of 1654, were imbued with the narrow bigotry of the early Puritans of Massachusetts, and, unmindful of the better principles of the Toleration Act of 1649, they wantonly disfranchised the Roman Catholics and members of the Church of England, by passing a law which declared that Papists and Churchmen were not entitled to the protection of the laws of Maryland. These zealots flogged and imprisoned Quakers; and their unworthy triumph was celebrated in a book published in London entitled "Babylon's Fall in Maryland."

When intelligence of these unrighteous proceedings reached London, Lord Baltimore obtained an audience with Cromwell, then Lord High Protector and real monarch of England. These eminent men met in the Council Chamber at Whitehall, in friendly conference. Cromwell in power was not like Cromwell fighting for power. He was tolerant. His Latin Secretary, the eminent John Milton (who was present at the interview), had assisted in making him so. When Baltimore courteously protested against the injustice of Puritan legislation in Maryland, the Protector said: "I would that all the sects, like the cedar and the myrtle and the oil-tree, should be planted in the wilderness together," and assured Lord Baltimore that he disapproved of the ungrateful decree. That assurance was followed by an order which Cromwell sent to the commissioners "not to busy themselves about religion, but to settle the civil government."

So encouraged, Lord Baltimore determined to vindicate the rights of his people. He upbraided Stone for his want of firmness, and ordered him to raise an army for the restoration of the authority of the proprietor. Stone, smarting under rebuke, acted vigorously. He raised a force, chiefly of Roman Catholics, seized the colonial records, resumed the office of governor, and inaugurated civil war. Skirmishes followed. Finally, a sharp battle was fought, early in April, 1655, near the site of Annapolis, in which Stone was defeated and made prisoner, and about fifty of his party were killed or

CHAP. XI.

GEORGE FOX IN MARYLAND.

439

wounded. The governor and others were tried for treason. spared, but four of his colleagues were hanged.

His life was

For several months, anarchy reigned supreme in Maryland, when Lord Baltimore appointed Josias Fendall, a former insurgent, to be governor of the province. Suspected of favoring the Roman Catholics, the Protestant Assembly ordered his arrest as a disturber of the peace, and for two years longer there was bitter strife between the people and the agents of the proprietor. The latter finally made important popular concessions, and Fendall was permitted to act as the 'governor. By prudent conduct he secured the confidence of the people, and Lord Baltimore anticipated a lasting relief from trouble on account of his American possessions, when Cromwell died and there were disquieting presages of a change in the government of England. The people of Maryland did not wait upon movements at home, but boldly asserting their supreme authority, dissolved the proprietary portion of the General Assembly in the spring of 1660, and assumed the whole legislative power of the State. The popular representatives then gave Fendall a commission as governor.

Three months after this political revolution in Maryland, monarchy was restored in England, and the son of the beheaded sovereign ascended the throne as Charles the Second. This event was soon followed by the restoration of his proprietary authority to Lord Baltimore. Fendall was tried for and found guilty of treason, because he had accepted office from the "rebellious assembly." But Baltimore wisely proclaimed a general pardon for all political offenders, and for about thirty years afterward Maryland enjoyed comparative repose, while her neighbor, Virginia, was torn by civil war. Under the mild proprietary rule, the province prospered and the people were happy. Commerce flourished. The soil yielded rich rewards for labor. Industry was fostered by well-paid labor, and feminine hands found ample and profitable employment, as in peaceful Pennsylvania at the same time. A quaint writer of the period, discoursing on Pennsylvania, says in relation to the "price of women's labor:" "One reason why women's wages are so exorbitant is that they are not very numerous, which makes them stand upon high terms for their several services, and moreover, they are usually married before they are twenty years of age, and when once in that noose, are for the most part a little uneasie, and make their husbands so too, till they procure them a maid-servant to bear the burden of the work, as also, in some measure, to wait on them, too."

Emigrants came to Maryland from almost every part of Europe to enjoy the tolerant rule there; and the pleasant spectacle was seen of George Fox, the founder of the sect called "Friends," or Quakers," preaching in the

evening twilight on the shores of the Chesapeake to a multitude of people, comprising members of the Legislature and other distinguished men of the province, and a large group of Indian kings and chieftains, with their wives and children, led by their emperor. But the refusal of the Friends to perform military duty or take an oath, subjected them to fines and harsh imprisonments. This was a civil matter, and had nothing to do with their religious

tenets.

When monarchy was restored, the people of Maryland were in full possession of the liberty founded upon popular sovereignty, and never parted with the precious treasure. The population of the province consisted of about ten thousand white people living together in comparative harmony, the fierceness of religious bigotry having been subdued by mutual concessions.

Lord Baltimore died in 1675, after a rule in Maryland, with several interruptions, for forty-three years. He was crowned in his old age with the blessings and honors of a colony which he had planted in his youth. He had never trodden the soil of Maryland, but a grateful people cherished his memory as they would that of a beloved father known to them in person. The commercial capital of that State bears the name of his title. His son and successor, Charles, followed in the footsteps of his liberal father in fostering toleration and humanity; and he and his successors continued, with a few interruptions, to administer the government of the province until the storm of the revolution, which burst forth in 1775, swept away every

CHAP. XI.

CRITICAL STATE OF AFFAIRS IN MARYLAND.

441

vestige of proprietary and royal government in the English-American colonies. The title of Lord Baltimore became extinct in 1771, and the last of the family in England, of whom anything is known, was a prisoner for debt in the Queen's Bench prison in London, in 1860. In that, and the Fleet prison, he had then been confined, by the fiat of the barbarous law, twenty years.

Maryland, like the other colonies, was shaken by the revolution in England in 1688, and experienced deep sorrows for awhile. For several years before, the democratic ideas then rapidly spreading over the provinces, could not reconcile the rule of a lord proprietor with the principles of republicanism. Even so early as when Charles Calvert went to England after the death of his father, signs of political discontent were conspicuous in Maryland. In 1678, the General Assembly, influenced by the popular feeling, established the right of suffrage-casting of a vote for rulers-on a broad basis. When Charles returned in 1681, he annulled this act, and by an arbitrary ordinance restricted the right to freemen owning fifty acres of land or personal property of the value of forty pounds sterling. This produced great disquietude, and Ex-Governor Fendall planned an insurrection for the purpose of abolishing the proprietorship and establishing an independent Republican government. The king was induced to issue orders that all offices of government in Maryland should be filled by Protestants alone; and so, again, the Roman Catholics were deprived of their political rights.

In 1684, Lord Baltimore again went to England, leaving the government of his province in charge of several deputies under the nominal governorship of his infant son. There he found his rights in great peril; but before the matter was brought to a direct issue by the operation of a writ of quo warranto, King James was driven from the throne and Protestant William and Mary ascended it. Lord Baltimore immediately acquiesced in the political change. Because his instructions to his deputies to proclaim the new monarchs were delayed in their transmission, he was charged with hesitancy; and a restless spirit named Coode, an associate of Fendall in his insurrectionary movements-a man of loose morals and blasphemous speech -excited the people by the cry of "a Popish plot!" He circulated the false story that the local magistrates in Maryland, and the Roman Catholics there, had engaged with the Indians in a plot for the destruction of the Protestants in the province. An actual league at that time between the French and the Jesuit missionaries with the savages on the New England frontiers for the destruction of the English colonies in the East gave the coloring of truth to the story, which created great excitement. The old feud burned intensely. The Protestants formed an armed association. Led