Maryland Historical Magazine, 1941, Volume 36, Issue No. 2

5c S£g/~ id MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE VOL. XXXVI JUNE, 1941 No. 2 THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE IN MARYLAND By CHARLES A. BARKER Some ten years ago, when the present writer was beginning a study of revolutionary origins in Maryland, he planned a book in terms of the scholarship of the American Revolution. He thought then as he does now that the significance and meaning of the Revolution is to be understood only in detailed and inclusive terms—agriculture and trade as well as taxation, habits of thought as well as political argument. Maryland offered an unstudied case- history. The core of the problem was to investigate the conditions and movements of Maryland history in the eighteenth century, and to establish their dynamic connection with the national movement of separation from Great Britain. Now that the account is rendered,1 and the editor of the Maga- zine has generously invited a general comment on the investigation as a whole, the events of the year 1941 add a new and poignant interest to Anglo-American history. Today the independent Uni- ted States is consciously re-entering the area of world politics as it never has before; the orbit begun by departure from the British Empire a century and two-thirds ago is visibly closing; national policy declares that the fate of Great Britain is inextricably our own. Such a declaration gives a fresh significance to the separation effected by the Revolution: was it a deep clean break, or was it 1 Barker, The Background of the 'Revolution in Maryland (New Haven, 1940). As my invitation is to submit to readers of the Maryland Historical Magazine my reflections on the subject of the book, I feel free to dispense with elaborate documentation below. The book itself will supply documentation and detail for those who want them. 125 126 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE incomplete and superficial ? What does the case of Maryland tell us on the point ? As we search out the origins o£ Maryland's separation from the mother country, we may well consider large things first, those intellectual influences toward liberalism which were not truly local but common to British culture everywhere, at home and overseas alike. Then we may gradually narrow the focus. There were certain emancipating influences, political and commercial, which were markedly American not British, such as the self-conscious aggres- siveness of the assemblies and the economic independence of the merchants. They were important in Maryland. Finally we shall need to narrow our vision to the very particular. Certain distressed features of the tobacco-staple economy and the hopelessly divided structure of provincial politics, unique in Maryland, are necessary to understand the intensity of the revolutionary impulse when it came. The very largest thing in the British Commonwealth of Nations today, as its spokesmen are proud to say, is its common mind and its set of liberal principles. In the long view, much the same thing was true of the old colonial system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Far less was said then than now about a common political mentality or a common civili2ation; British liberalism was not yet mature or democratic in implication and appeal. Yet the prominence of mercantilism in the colonial period, with its accents on trade and central control, should not obscure the fact that there did overarch the British and British-American world a common English-speaking and English-feeling culture which was richer and more enduring than trade regulation. It was a culture which in its more liberal and conscious aspects stemmed largely from England's own revolutionary and early-scientific period of the seventeenth century, and which was destined in due time to contribute emancipating ideas to the revolutionary movements in America and Europe alike. This culture was partly a political thing: it conveyed the natural-rights philosophy in the writings of Coke and Locke and many others; and it conveyed a faith in constitutional government which came close to constitu- tion-worship. It also practiced such a tolerance of religious and political differences as evoked the praise of Voltaire, who was used to Roman Catholic intolerance in France, and that of the young Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who resented the colonial THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE IN MARYLAND 127 anti-Catholicism of the French and Indian War period. It equally expressed recognition of science, summed up in the reputation of Sir Isaac Newton; and it produced a contemporary literature which was inspired, Gibbon said, by '" the spirit of reason and liberty." Maryland had a generous share of this English culture. The libraries of well-to-do provincials testify to tastes which had been cultivated during periods of study in England. Stephen Bordley and various members of the Carroll family, for example, all had a special taste for the classics, particularly Latin letters and literature; their own correspondences include discussions of the merits of ancient statesmen as set forth by historians of the period. Such private libraries as theirs, as well as the circulating libraries which were launched in the dozen or so years before the Revolution, plainly indicate a wide preference for works of history and political thought; they also indicate special enthusiasm for the English poets, essayists, and novelists from the age of Dryden to contemporary publication. The importation of books into late colonial Maryland of course included much that is less marked with the special stamp of the Enlightenment: older works of English literature, handbooks of trade, books of law, and occasional volumes of divinity. But the accent on modern liberal letters is very plain, in no instances more so than in the Catholic Carroll's fondness for Voltaire, and in the occasional purchase of other French writers such as Bayle, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Maryland's own literary product, although it was a minor literature of newspaper essay and other ephemeral writing, exactly caught the modern accent. The gentlemen of the social and literary clubs around Annapolis, of which the well-known Tuesday Club was only one, produced their own mock-heroics after the manner of Butler; and Dr. Hamilton wrote a club history in an ironic and moralistic vein. The Maryland Almanack, like the better-known almanacs of Franklin and Ames, was penetrated with worldly wisdom and rationalistic thought. More particularly the weekly Maryland Gazette, until 1773 the one newspaper in the province, carried critical essays on government, society, history, and religion. The sharpness and the unanimity of this writing is more suggestive than the amount: there was only the one kind of literature in Maryland, and the thinking it expressed had the same critical quality and the same intellectual independence as Frank- lin's and Zenger's famous newspapers in Philadelphia and New York. 128 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE All this refers, of course, particularly to the members of the upper class—to men of education and social standing who had had a classical education, who belonged to clubs, who could express themselves in Addisonian essays. What of the ideas and attitudes of the lower classes? What particularly of the class of freemen who owned sufficient land to vote, but who as small planters had little or no education? Could they share the critical modernism of the well-to-do? About the only direct evidence is that of religion in the established church, and it is such as to suggest that the ideas of the Enlightenment cut deep into the lower levels of society. Such clergymen as Hugh Jones and Thomas Bacon reported widespread deism in the parishes. They and their sort may have been alarmists, but they leave a picture of religious coolness, of scepticism about revelation, and of the decline of family worship; such a picture conforms nicely with the pattern of thought familiar in the upper class. With exceptions for the piety of the German sectarians and the Methodists of northern and western Maryland, and in spite of the opposition of religious individuals of the lower counties, it does seem that the critical secular spirit reached very far in Mary- land. And, as religious rationalism and political Whiggism were intellectual twins in the British world, equal offspring of the natural-law philosophy, it seems farther that the Maryland mind was well prepared to receive the arguments of political liberalism, even of revolution. England had exported to the colony the hardy habit of critical thought, and the habit had taken many roots. As Maryland shared a national culture that was at once British and American, so it also shared with all the other colonies an increasing movement of self-government in America. From the very earliest years of its history, the province had had an assembly; in a remarkably short period that assembly had established itself as a true legislature with powers to introduce and to enact laws of all kinds. A similar degree of autonomy prevailed in the whole British colonial world of the mid-eighteenth century. By that time a normal type of government had emerged; with the excep- tion of Connecticut and Rhode Island, all the colonies were organized as provinces under crown or proprietor. Under this form government had been stabilized as a divided thing: the source and focus of authority was located in the mother country, and administration and legislation were located in America. Cer- THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE IN MARYLAND 129 tain special institutional and political tensions and rivalries, which we shall have to consider later, were to flow from Maryland's peculiar proprietary control, as established by the charter of 1632. But in all the larger aspects Maryland's provincial government was the same as in Virginia and the other royal colonies.

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