Marynia

“ While the northern settlements were torn and blood-drenched and fire-blasted by intolerance, when the flames of burning witches lighted New England, and the air echoed with the lash of whipped Baptists, no man was ever molested for his opinions in Maryland—while Marylanders controlled the palatinate. Several times during that stormy epoch, which cost a king his crown in England and the people their liberties, there had been struggles between the Cavalier and Roundhead parties in Maryland, in which the latter were successful as their friends and relatives in England had been. ”

“ The Catholics were not all poor people. There were rich men and nobles among them. One of these nobles, named Lord Baltimore, asked the King for some land in America where he and his friends might dwell in peace and have churches of their own. This was many years before William Penn asked for the same thing. The King was a friend of Lord Baltimore and told him he might have as much land as he could make use of. So he chose a large tract just north of Virginia, which the King named Maryland, after his wife, Queen Mary, who was a Catholic. ”

“ Not long after King Charles made the grant of land to his friend, Lord Baltimore, a woman of queenly daring and republican courage found her way to the new colony and into the councils of its leading men, and her name, Margaret Brent, stands for the most vigorous force in the early history of Maryland. She was born in England, about 1600, and died at Saint Mary's, Maryland, about 1661. A writer of this time has said about her, "Had she been born a queen she would have been as brilliant and daring as Elizabeth; had she been born a man she would have been a Cromwell in her courage and audacity." ”

“ Settlement of Maryland.--Maryland included the most valuable portion of Virginia north of the Potomac. Beside being the owner of all this land, Lord Baltimore was also the ruler of the colony. He invited people to go over and settle in Maryland and offered to give them large tracts of land on the payment of a small sum every year forever. Each man's payment was small. But all the payments taken together, made quite a large amount which went on growing larger and larger as Maryland was settled. The Baltimores were broad-minded men. ”

“ There’s Life in the Old Land Yet.
[From the New Orleans Delta.]
“Graves are better hid by flowers than by snow.” Jean Paul.
If the grave of unhappy Maryland were really dug and its mound heaped by the minions of despotism, there would not be wanting lovely forms and tender hearts to robe its sod with flowers. ”

“ Therefore Maryland grew and prospered without those bitter memories which in New England and in Virginia separated class from class and divided neighbor from neighbor. And whenever their neighbors on the south side of the Potomac were harassed by the savages on their borders, the Marylanders were prompt and generous in spending life, blood, and treasure in their defense. There never was an Indian war in Maryland. ”

“ Maryland.—One of the most charming domestic scenes is reported to us from the “Bird’s Nest,” in Maryland, where there are several members of the Circle. A good woman, who is the light of the house, writes: There have been days when I could not study at all, but the shells that I was able to gather as I stood on the shore, helped me to listen to the waves as they came in from the other side of the great sea of knowledge, from away back before the coming of Christ. And I have learned that there is no god like our God, for he knoweth that we have need of this mind-furnishing. ”

“ To Baltimore and the Assembly of Maryland belongs, not the glory of inaugurating an era of wide toleration for men and women of all beliefs or disbeliefs, whether Christian or not, but the real though lesser glory of establishing entire toleration among the divisions within the Christian circle itself. ”

“ The purpose of the colony was not all religious. Trading and business were also the objects of those brave settlers, and some of the most successful merchant princes have sprung from that old Maryland stock—“the best out of Old England.” The women of Maryland have been far-famed for their beauty. There is good reason for naming the loveliest of climbing roses, “Baltimore Belles.”
The best thing grown in old Maryland was its patriotism. When the Fathers were signing the Declaration of Independence,{185} the chief man from Maryland was Charles Carroll. ”

“ Lord Baltimore did not himself go to America, but sent his brother, Leonard Calvert, as Governor. Maryland was not founded like the Puritan colonies for religious purposes, but like New Hampshire, merely for trade and profit. But in those days religion and religious strife entered into everything. So it did into the founding of Maryland.
For Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and in England Roman Catholics in their turn, as well as dissenters, were persecuted, and Lord Baltimore hoped to found a refuge for them in his new possessions in America. ”

“ THE FUGITIVE BLACKSMITH. CHAPTER I. MY BIRTH AND PARENTAGE.—THE TREATMENT OF SLAVES GENERALLY IN MARYLAND.
I was born in the state of Maryland, which is one of the smallest and most northern of the slave-holding states; the products of this state are wheat, rye, Indian corn, tobacco, with some hemp, flax, &c. By looking at the map, it will be seen that Maryland, like Virginia her neighbour, is divided by the Chesapeake Bay into eastern and western shores. My birthplace was on the eastern shore, where there are seven or eight small counties; the farms are small, and tobacco is mostly raised. ”

“ The coastal plain embraces that part of Maryland lying to the east of a line passing from Washington to Baltimore, Havre de Grace, and Wilmington. It includes more than half the land area of the State, and is divided by Chesapeake Bay into what is commonly called the ‘eastern shore’ and the ‘western shore’ or Southern Maryland. The ‘eastern shore’ is low and level; only in the north does it reach 100 feet, and most of it is less than 25 feet above the sea. The ‘western shore’ is higher, and rises to 300 feet near the District of Columbia and again near Baltimore. ”

“ Maryland, under the Baltimores, was the sole colony that not only admitted convicts, but welcomed them. The labor of the branded hand of the malefactor, the education and accomplishments of the social outcast, the acquirements and skill of the intemperate or over-competed tradesman, all were welcome to the Maryland tobacco-planters; and the possibilities of rehabilitation of fortune, health, reputation, or reëstablishment of rectitude, made the custom not unwelcome to the convict or to the redemptioner. ”

“ Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia call to mind a civilization on which the mind of America lovingly dwells, a group of early settlers whose memory is a matter of pride to their descendants scattered throughout the land, whose sacrifice, high thinking, and achievement is deep patterned in the upbuilding of the republic. ”

“ The second, like the first, Lord Baltimore, was a believer in kings and aristocracies, in a natural division of human society into masters and men. His effort was to plant intact in Maryland a feudal order. He would be Palatine, the King his suzerain. In Maryland the great planters, in effect his barons, should live upon estates, manorial in size and with manorial rights. The laboring men—the impecunious adventurers whom these greater adventurers brought out—would form a tenantry, the Lord Proprietary's men's men. It is true that, according to charter, provision was made for an Assembly. ”

“ By old Potomac's rushing tide,
Our bayonets are gleaming;
And o'er the bounding waters wide
We gaze, while tears are streaming.
The distant hills of Maryland
Rise sadly up before us--
And tyrant bands have chained our laud,
Our mother proud that bore us.
Our proud old mother's queenly head
Is bowed in subjugation;
With her children's blood her soil is red,
And fiends in exultation
Taunt her with shame as they bind her chains,
While her heart is torn with anguish;
Old mother, on famed Manassas' plains
Our vengeance did not languish. ”

“ From the time that Lord Baltimore landed on her shores to the present day no public man has disgraced the fair record or blurred a page of the history of Maryland. And, indeed, the beginning of her civilized days was an eminently fit prelude to her whole subsequent career. From out of the first colony established on the banks of the Chesapeake flowed the doctrines of religious toleration and equal religious rights to all men irrespective of clime and color, at a moment when witch-burning fires lighted up the settlements of Massachusetts. ”

“ We here again so clearly perceived the providence of the Lord over us, that our hearts were constrained to ascend to Him, and praise him for what He is and does, especially towards His children. As we have confined ourselves quite strictly to the account of our journey, we deem it serviceable to make some observations upon some general matters concerning Maryland, in addition to what we have before remarked. ”

“ I can't think of a more desolate place than they had in Maryland, by their own account;—a great, dismal house, without chick or child in it for years and years;—full of rooms and furniture and black people, and nowhere the shout and cry of a baby. ”

“ Cattle and swine were obtained from Virginia, and soon the neighbourhood of St. Mary's was covered with thrifty and smiling farms. New colonists came quite steadily, and presently from St. Mary's the plantations spread about the shores of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. The first assembly was convened and the first laws were enacted in 1635, and when Cecilius, Lord Baltimore, died, just forty years afterward, his Maryland had grown to be a prosperous community of 20,000 souls. ”

“ I begin with Maryland, because, in proportion to her area, she has greater natural advantages than any one of the thirty-four States, and, if the comparison with the free States is most unfavorable to her, it will be more so as to any other Southern State, as the census shows that, from 1790 to 1860, and from 1850 to 1860, Maryland increased in population per square mile more rapidly than any other slaveholding State. ”

“ After a year of crosses and difficulties in the way of our discovering a suitable and convenient place for our establishment, we found ourselves in Maryland, an excellent province, producing all the necessaries of life in abundance. ”

“ What the volume contains relative to the internal affairs of the Province is not always accurate. Mr. Neill has published several pamphlets and articles on the early history of Maryland, in which he endeavors to show that Maryland never was a Roman Catholic colony, that a majority of the colonists were from the beginning Protestants, and that the Church of England was established by the charter. ”

“ Maryland's chief city, Baltimore, was founded about 1729. It was named in honor of the Catholic founder of the colony, and it still contains thousands of faithful Roman Catholics.
Owing to mistakes made in drawing up the different grants, the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland became a cause for disputes which lasted about fifty years. Several times surveyors were sent out from England to settle the quarrel, and the line they finally drew is generally known as the Mason and Dixon line. ”

“ In point of religious toleration Rhode Island unquestionably holds the foremost place among the colonies, while next after it come Quaker Pennsylvania, with New Netherland, which for its brief season maintained the wholesome Dutch traditions. There are some respects in which Maryland's record may vie with the brightest, but her success was not attained without struggles. We shall presently have occasion to see how curiously her beginnings were complicated with the affairs of her elder sister Virginia and with some phases of the Puritan revolution. ”

“ But there is one more ancient and more homely for us Englishmen. It is found at a date when the old traditions of the Catholic Church were still vigorous in the minds of men.... If the modern spirit had any share in producing the constitution of Belgium, it certainly had no share in producing the constitution of Maryland. Lord Baltimore, who had been Secretary of State under James I., in 1633 emigrated to the American plantations, where, through Lord Stafford’s influence, he had obtained a grant of land.... They named their new country Maryland, and there they settled. ”

“ After the Revolution of 1688 it is not strange that a like movement was set on foot in Maryland. The "beneficent despotism" of the Calverts, notwithstanding every concession on their part, was ended for the time by the efforts of an "Association for the Defense of the Protestant Religion," and Maryland became a royal colony. Under the new régime it was easier to inflict annoyances and disabilities on the petty minority of the Roman Catholics than to confer the privileges of an established church on the hardly more considerable minority of Episcopalians. ”

“ The Confederate army began fording the Potomac at a point nearly opposite the Monocacy, and by the 5th of September all of it was on Maryland soil. The bands struck up the popular air, "Maryland, my Maryland," the exultant thousands joining in the tremendous chorus, as they swung off, all in high spirits at the belief that they were entering a land "flowing with milk and honey," where they would find abundant food and be received with outspread arms. ”