•\5 Historical Magazine Published Quarterly by The Museum and Library of Maryland History The Maryland Historical Society Summer 1979 MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY BOARD OF TRUSTEES J. Fife Symington, Jr., Chairman* Leonard C. Crewe, Jr., President* Robert G. Merrick, Sr., Honorary Chairman* H. Furlong Baldwin Mrs. Thomas F. Johnson Mrs. Emory J. Barber H. Irvine Keyser, II James R. Herbert Boone Richard R. Kline Philip Carroll Mrs. Frederick W. Lafferty* Mrs. James F. Colwill Charles D. Lyon James W. Constable Calvert C. McCabe, Jr.* Owen Daly, II* Joseph H. McLain Emory Dobson Robert G. Merrick, Jr. Mrs. Gerson G. Eisenberg John E. Motz John G. Evans* Thomas S. Nichols Charles O. Fisher George M. Radcliffe* Mrs. Jacob France (Honorary) Adrian P. Reed Louis L. Goldstein Richard C. Riggs, Sr. Louise Gore Richard C. Riggs, Jr.* Kingdon Gould, Jr. David Rogers William Grant John D. Schapiro Benjamin H. Griswold, III Jacques T. Schlenger* Louis G. Hecht Truman T. Semans T. Hughlett Henry, Jr. A. Russell Slagle C. A. Porter Hopkins T. Rowland Slingluff, Jr. Samuel Hopkins* John T. Stinson E. Ralph Hostetter Mrs. W. Wallace Symington, Jr. Elmer M. Jackson, Jr. T. Hammond Welsh, Jr. Mrs. Harold Duane Jacobs William C. Whitridge Louis P. Jenkins William L. Wilson *Executive Committee James T. Wollon, Jr. MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY COUNCIL Helen Delich Bentley Mrs. Frederick W. Lafferty* Mrs. Calhoun Bond Calvert C. McCabe, Jr.* James W. Constable Robert G. Merrick, Sr.* Leonard C. Crewe, Jr., President* Morgan H. Pritchett Owen Daly, II* George M. Radcliffe* Mrs. Raymond P. Delano, Jr. Richard C. Riggs, Jr.* John G. Evans* Jacques T. Schlenger* Louis G. Hecht Truman T. Semans Edgar G. Heyl J. Fife Symington, Jr.* Allen C. Hopkins Charles L. Wagandt, II Samuel Hopkins* John Walton Bryden B. Hyde G. Luther Washington Mrs. William G. Kouwenhoven *Executive Committee Romaine Stec Somerville, Director Larry E. Sullivan, Head Librarian P. William Filby, Consultant The Maryland Historical Magazine is published quarterly by the Maryland Historical Society. 201 W. Monument Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201. Contributions and correspondence relating to articles, book reviews, and any other editorial matters should be addressed to the Editor in care ol the Society. All contributions should be submitted in duplicate, double-spaced, and consistent with the form outlined in A Manual uf Style (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 19691. The Maryland Historical Society disclaims responsibility for statements made by contributors. HALL OF RECORDS LIBRARY ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND ARYLAND Vol. 74, ISTORICAL No. 2 June, 1979 11} ISSN-0025-4258 CONTENTS Joseph W. Cox The Origins of the Maryland Historical Society: A Case Study in Cultural Philanthropy 103 James P. P. Horn The Letters of William Roberts of All Hallows Parish, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, 1756-1769 117 Charlotte Fletcher 1784: The Year St. John's College Was Named 133 Thomas More Page Lloyd Tilghman and Sherwood Manor 152 Frank W. Porter, III A Century of Accommodation: The Nanticoke Indians in Colonial Maryland 175 Book Reviews: Shomette, London Town: A Brief History, by Richard J. Cox • Magdol, A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedmen's Community, by W. A. Low • Wytrawal, Behold! The Polish Americans, by Jean Scarpaci • Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, by Gary L. Browne • Burgess, Coasting Schooner: The Four-Masted Albert F. Paul, by Ferdinand E. Chatard • Kammen.^i Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination, by Robert Fallaw 193 NEWS AND NOTICES 201 L 109 [PIMLICO RACE COURSE, BALTIMORE] (trimmed). Signed on the stone, co. LUD- LOFF. ** Lithograph, printed in colors. 45.3x62.6 cm. MdBE, MdBPM, CCr, Merrick, VBHo. This view, lithographed about 1875, was taken from a drawing by Conrad Ludloff. It shows the start of a race at Pimlico (the name of the site leased to the Maryland Jockey Club). The colors worn by the jockeys are those of the owners, including Oden Bowie, John F. Chamberlin, Joseph Donohue, G. L. LoriUard, and Pierre Lorillard. The first race, held October 25, 1870, was won by a bay colt named Preakness. Within two years, the club had built the judges' stand (at the right in front of the grandstand), the grand- stand (in center), and the clubhouse (at left). The clubhouse burned in 1966. The horse- topped weathervane, seen at the top of the clubhouse, was painted each year with the colors of the winner of the Preakness. The Preakness, a top-flight race named for the very first winner at Pimlico, was established in May 1873 and is run each year in the spring. Conrad Ludloff worked as an artist, engraver, and lithographer in Baltimore from 1875 to 1905. The Origins of the Maryland Historical Society: A Case Study in Cultural Philanthropy JOSEPH W. COX ii'r- H,ISTORICALf SOCIETY" OFTEN CONJURES UP IMAGES OF RATHER DARK, older buildings, usually suffering a state of genteel decay, in which elderly ladies, their hair drawn back in prim buns, and older gentlemen, in conserva- tive old-school attire, meticulously labor to discover their ancestral roots in the storied past of colony and state, or, better still, to locate a forebearer on the passenger list of some seventeenth-century crossing, or on the tax or church rolls of Elizabethan or Stuart England. One might wonder whether a serious scholar ought to commit half a decade, or whatever, to a study of such periph- eral institutions when more "important" fields invite his or her attention. Actually, this stereotype of the "historical society" is wrong and was even more incorrect and inappropriate in antebellum America. Before 1860 histori- cal societies were organized in every state east of Texas except Delaware. There were societies in the District of Columbia and in the New Mexico Ter- ritory. Over half of these societies are still active.1 Any historian has to take seriously a cultural institution which appeared so frequently, which was usu- ally found in either the largest city or capital of a state, and which was invar- iably created by members of the upper middle class to "elite" segments of American society. Not even the most cynical would suggest that such a move- ment which did not even exist before 1794, but which spawned some sixty-five institutions before the Civil War, could be viewed as anything other than a ma- jor development in the evolving urban-industrial culture of nineteenth-century America. It was obviously much more than a coincidental effusion of dilettant- ish energy with no serious objectives in mind. One must remember, as George Callcott has so eloquently stated, that history was the premier intellectual avocation of literate Americans in the nineteenth century. Never before or since have so many citizens expended so much energy on the study, writing, reading, collecting, and preservation of history and historical objects. Americans have always been strangely preoccupied with the future and fasci- nated with the past. Especially from about 1800 to around 1860, as the future glowed especially bright, a surge of interest in the past swept the young na- tion ... The country's first generation with leisure for sustained cultural ac- tivity was finding personal fulfillment in history.2 Dr. Cox is Acting President of Towson State University. 103 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE VOL. 74, No. 2, JUNE 1979 104 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to focus on the origins of an in- stitution, the Maryland Historical Society, that is of major significance be- cause it both reflected and effected the cultural development of an important American city, and second, to place in perspective the founding of the Mary- land Historical Society as part of a national institutional phenomenon of con- siderable moment. If we can gain insight into why history was so compelling a subject for study at that time, and why this generation was so "past con- scious" and preservationist, so committed to the voluntary association as a means to achieving goals, and so supportive of programs of private cultural philanthropy — we will have, in fact, come to understand better nineteenth- century urban America. The Maryland Historical Society is also an important window on the past, in that its membership included the very men who were making Baltimore the most innovative and progressive city in the antebellum South. These same individuals had the largest stake in social and economic stability, a concern not all unrelated to their activities in the historical society. Nineteenth-century Americans were convinced first that Providence had intended that the United States have a special mission, and second that they were embarked on an errand the likes of which the world had not seen and which was to be of momentous consequence to mankind. What had happened on the Alleghenies' eastern slopes and coastal tidal plains in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and during the heroic era of the Revolution, offered not only evidence of unique accomplishment against frequently staggering ob- stacles, but also a golden opportunity to understand and appreciate America's past as it shed light on the present and showed the way toward the future. Americans of the period 1800-1860 were absolutely convinced of the social utility of history — they believed, with no coaxing from a then nonexistent historical professoriate, that history would both help them to know the truth and make them free. Many nineteenth-century Americans were also impelled to study history, perhaps subconsciously, by feelings of ambivalence toward the times in which they lived. Recent generations of Americans have, in the ahistorical way com- mon to our day, believed that change of "future shock" proportions is solely the curse of the twentieth century — a view which is both myopic and inaccu- rate.