Maryland Colonies Quotes

The haphazard unfolding of religious toleration described above occurred chiefly by default (and in New York, to enhance a commercial environment), not to promote religious freedom. However, three colonies present arguable claims to the narrative of America being a haven for religious liberty: Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania.

With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world's premier long-range shippers. Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the worlds of Daniel Defoe, "more properly called slaves." First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618, the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hence the children's sobriquet "Duty boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.

Boyer, Paul S., and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cross, Tom Peete. Witchcraft in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1919. Davies, Owen. Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft Myths in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Goss, K. David. Daily Life During the Salem Witch Trials. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989. Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: G. Braziller, 1969. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow, England, New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991. Matossian, Mary K. “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair.” American Scientist 70 (1970): 355–57. Mixon Jr., Franklin G. “Weather and the Salem Witch Trials.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (2005): 241–42. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Parke, Francis Neal. Witchcraft in Maryland. Baltimore: 1937.

The form of slavery in the English plantation system was unlike any other in history. Because it supplied low- cost workers for labor- intensive industries such as tobacco, forestry, land clearance, sugarcane, rice, cotton, iron ore, and milling, slavery was essential to the colonies. In the beginning the Tidewater was the center of colonial slavery, but, “by the mid- eighteenth century, slaves accounted for nearly half of Virginia’s population. Virginia had changed from a ‘society with slaves’ in which slavery was one system of labor among others to a ‘slave society where the institution stood at the center of the economic process. Slavery formed the basis of the economy, and the foundation of a powerful local ruling class, in the entire region from Maryland south to Georgia.

More than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants. They were mostly English in the seventeenth century, Irish and German in the eighteenth century. More and more, slaves replaced them, as they ran away to freedom or finished their time, but as late as 1755, white servants made up 10 percent of the population of Maryland.

In the Catholic colony of Maryland, the Glorious Revolution was a catastrophe. The colony had flourished, despite antagonism and sometimes armed invasion from Virginia. Indians were protected and many were converted by Jesuit missionaries; there was intermarriage between Indians and settlers. In 1641 the first black man in the colony, a former indentured servant, was elected to the Maryland General Assembly. Following the Revolution, however, the Church of England became the established church in Maryland. Catholics were denied civil rights, the Mass was illegal, and execution was the punishment for making converts. One measure, which sounds more like Stalinist law than anything else, provided that a Catholic child who apostatized had a right to all his parents’ possessions.

THE colonial history of Maryland offers two points of especial interest. Maryland was the first proprietary government in America, and she lays claim to the distinction of having been the first state where religious toleration not only prevailed in practice, but was established by law.

Limited government meant, in part, not establishing religious monopolies, even in colonies, like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, at first dominated by members of a single denomination.

skeletons were found scattered around the site of the Catoctin Furnace, an iron forge in Frederick County, Maryland. Little is told of the enslaved labor on the iron plantations central to colonial economic development, smelting, smithing, and mining ore.

Because North Carolina lacked a deepwater port and because plantation-based agriculture increasingly predominated in its eastern counties, white people who migrated into the colony's western, or backcountry, region came overwhelmingly from the north—chiefly Pennsylvania and the western parts of Maryland and Virginia – rather than directly from Europe, as was more often the case in other British provinces. ... These people came to North Carolina to pursue upward mobility by securing fertile land on easy terms, acreage they would clear, cultivate, and then pass on to future generations.

Through a diversity of Bible-based beliefs, Colonial America firmly founded its culture, laws, and government on the Judeo-Christian worldview. That common faith was clearly expressed in the founding documents of all thirteen American colonies: The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter recorded an intent to spread the “knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith,” much as the Mayflower Compact cited a commitment to “the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian faith.” Connecticut’s Fundamental Orders officially called for “an orderly and decent Government established according to God” that would “maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.” In New Hampshire, the Agreement of the Settlers at Exeter vowed to establish a government “in the name of Christ” that “shall be to our best discerning agreeable to the Will of God.” Rhode Island’s colonial charter invoked the “blessing of God” for “a sure foundation of happiness to all America.” The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England stated, “Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel …” New York’s Duke’s Laws prohibited denial of “the true God and his Attributes.” New Jersey’s founding charter vowed, “Forasmuch as it has pleased God, to bring us into this Province…we may be a people to the praise and honor of his name.” Delaware’s original charter officially acknowledged “One almighty God, the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the World.” Pennsylvania’s charter officially cited a “Love of Civil Society and Christian Religion” as motivation for the colony’s founding. Maryland’s charter declared an official goal of “extending the Christian Religion.” Virginia’s first charter commissioned colonization as “so noble a work, which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the…propagating of Christian Religion.” The charter for the Colony of Carolina proclaimed “a laudable and pious zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith.” Georgia’s charter officially cited a commitment to the “propagating of Christian religion.”27

The guns on both sides were silent until they returned. Suddenly, a fierce cannonade from the British ships exploded onto the beach at Turtle Gut Inlet, but only one American was hit, “Shott through the arm and body.” It was Richard Wickes. A cannonball took his arm and half his chest away. Fresh from the Reprisal, Lambert Wickes arrived on the beach at the head of his reinforcements just as his younger brother died: “I arrived just at the Close of the Action Time enough to see him expire . . . Captn Barry . . . says a braver Man never existed.”123 Taking Richard Wickes's body, the American sailors left the spit of sand they fought over that morning. The powder was stowed in the Wasp's hold and sent up the Delaware. “At 2 weighed and made Sail,” Hudson briefly noted in his journal.124 The British returned to Cape Henlopen. As before, Barry had taken long odds, assessed the best plan that could succeed, and beaten the British. The Nancy was destroyed, but the Wasp would reach Philadelphia safely with the desperately needed gunpowder. Despite superior firepower, the “butcher's bill” was far heavier for the British. But the victory brought no cheers or satisfaction among the Americans, and Barry was particularly saddened by the death of the gallant young Wickes.125 The next morning—Sunday, June 30—the men of the Lexington and Reprisal gathered to mourn their shipmate at the log meetinghouse in the small village of Cold Spring, just north of Cape May. Under the same light breezes of the day before, the American sailors, with “bowed and uncovered heads,” filed inside and sat on the long, rough-cut wooden pews. After “The Clergyman preached a very deacent Sermon,” Lambert Wickes and the Reprisal's officers silently hoisted the coffin. Shuffling under its weight, they carried it outside to the little cemetery, and laid their comrade to rest.126 Lambert Wickes now faced the task of informing his family in Maryland of Richard's death. On July 2, in a sad but disjointed letter to his brother Samuel, he mentioned Richard's death among a list of the items—including the sugar and “one Bagg Coffee” that accompanied the letter. “You'll disclose this Secret with as much Caution as possible to our Sisters,” he pleaded. He quoted Barry's report that Richard “fought like a brave Man & was fore most in every transaction of that day,” dying for the cause of the “united Colonies.”127 By the time Lambert's package reached his family in Maryland, the “united Colonies” ceased to exist as well. The same day Wickes posted his letter, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. Barry, Wickes, and the rest of the Continental Navy were now fighting for the survival of a new country: the United States of America.

The negro population grew by leaps and bounds, until on the eve of the Revolution it amounted to more than half a million. In five states—Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia—the slaves nearly equalled or actually exceeded the whites in number. In South Carolina they formed almost two-thirds of the population. Even in the Middle colonies of Delaware and Pennsylvania about one-fifth of the inhabitants were from Africa.

The Christianity of Paine's day is not the Christianity of our time. There has been a great improvement since then. One hundred and fifty years ago the foremost preachers of our time would have perished at the stake. A Universalist would have been torn in pieces in England, Scotland, and America. Unitarians would have found themselves in the stocks, pelted by the rabble with dead cats, after which their ears would have been cut off, their tongues bored, and their foreheads branded. Less than one hundred and fifty years ago the following law was in force in Maryland: "Be it enacted by the Right Honorable, the Lord Proprietor, by and with the advice and consent of his Lordship's governor, and the upper and lower houses of the Assembly, and the authority of the same: "That if any person shall hereafter, within this province, wittingly, maliciously, and advisedly, by writing or speaking, blaspheme or curse God, or deny our Saviour, Jesus Christ, to be the Son of God, or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or the Godhead of any of the three persons, or the unity of the Godhead, or shall utter any profane words concerning the Holy Trinity, or any of the persons thereof, and shall thereof be convict by verdict, shall, for the first offense, be bored through the tongue, and fined twenty pounds to be levied of his body. And for the second offense, the offender shall be stigmatized by burning in the forehead with the letter B, and fined forty pounds. And that for the third offense, the offender shall suffer death without the benefit of clergy." The strange thing about this law is, that it has never been repealed, and is still in force in the District of Columbia Laws like this were in force in most of the colonies, and in all countries where the Church had power.

AUSTRALIA, LIKE THE UNITED STATES, experienced a different path to inclusive institutions than the one taken by England. The same revolutions that shook England during the Civil War and then the Glorious Revolution were not needed in the United States or Australia because of the very different circumstances in which those countries were founded—though this of course does not mean that inclusive institutions were established without any conflict, and, in the process, the United States had to throw off British colonialism. In England there was a long history of absolutist rule that was deeply entrenched and required a revolution to remove it. In the United States and Australia, there was no such thing. Though Lord Baltimore in Maryland and John Macarthur in New South Wales might have aspired to such a role, they could not establish a strong enough grip on society for their plans to bear fruit. The inclusive institutions established in the United States and Australia meant that the Industrial Revolution spread quickly to these lands and they began to get rich. The path these countries took was followed by colonies such as Canada and New Zealand. There

Shortly after incorporating, the settlement of Whitesylvania seceded from the country’s government with little to no opposition. The populace knew secession was a terrible idea and that it would leave the racist dickheads vulnerable and desperate, but allowed it all the same, because, as per the official ballot, “Fuck Whitesylvania.” Sadly, though, the colony of prejudiced douchebags thrived – although, in this case, “thrived” meant “thanks to the inbreeding and diseases they still carried from Old Maryland, degenerated into a shambling collective of drooling, subhuman shitheads that literally shared one mind.