The Beginners of a Nation

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The religious aim. "The first and most important design of the Most Illustrious Baron, which ought also to be the aim of the rest, who go in the same ship, is, not to think so much of planting fruits and trees in a land so fertile, as of sowing the seeds of religion and piety." This was Lord Baltimore's authoritative declaration, and because it varies in form from the stock phrases so common at the time, it bears an air of some sincerity, though it is diplomatically ambiguous.

Efforts to obstruct the ships. Baltimore's opponents made great exertions to prevent the departure of the Ark and the Dove, which were to bear faithful Catholics across the flood to a new world. A story was started that these ships were carrying nuns to Spain, and another tale that found believers was that they had soldiers on board going to France to serve against the English. It was told that Calvert's men had abused the customs officers at Gravesend, and sailed without cockets in contempt of all authority, the people on board refusing the oath of allegiance. The Ark was stopped and brought back by order of the Privy Council, and the oath of allegiance was given to a hundred and twenty-eight passengers. Letters of Baltimore to Wentworth in Strafford papers, passim. But the ships came to again at the Isle of Wight, and when they got away at last there were near three hundred passengers on board, including Jesuit priests. Most of the passengers were "laboring men"; how many were Catholic and how many Protestant it is impossible now to tell. That the leaders and the gentry were, most of them, Catholics there is every reason to believe. The passengers called Protestants were rather non-Catholics, precisely the kind of emigrants that would give the Jesuits the converts of which they tell exultantly in their letters. There was no Protestant minister on board, nor was there the slightest provision for Protestant worship, present or future. 82

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Toleration. Toleration was the Baltimore policy from the beginning. It was no doubt in the original plan of George Calvert and his associates, whoever they were. 83 The Provincial of the Society of Jesus privately furnished Baltimore with arguments in defense of this policy before the first colony sailed. The founders of Maryland were men of affairs shaping plan to opportunity, and the situation was inexorable. Toleration and protection was all that English Roman Catholics could hope to find in traveling thus to the ends of the earth.

Toleration a policy. Cecilius gave positive instruction that on shipboard acts of the Roman Catholic religion should be performed with as much privacy as possible, so as not to offend the Protestant passengers "whereby any just complaint may hereafter be made by them in Virginia or in England." There is no pretense of theory here; all is based on the exigency of the situation and sound policy. The policy was George Calvert's, whose school was the court of James, and whose whole career shows that he entertained no advanced views of human liberty. Had he held toleration as a theory of government, his doctrine would have been more liberal than that of Ralegh and Bacon and far in advance of that of contemporary Puritan leaders. They quite misunderstand the man who regard him as a progressive thinker; he was a conservative opportunist. Still less was Cecilius a man likely to act on general principles.

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Religious observance at sea. We have seen how religiously the Puritans passed their time at sea in long daily expositions of Scripture and other devotions, and that sometimes even the watch was set with a psalm. Not less religious were the Catholic pilgrims, and though the form is strikingly different, the believing and zealous age is the same. To make things safe, the Jesuit fathers committed the principal parts of the ship in some detail to the protection of God in the first place, and then to that "of His Most Holy Mother and of St. Ignatius and of all the angels of Maryland." Relatio Itineris, p. 10. These angels to whom the safety of Maryland was committed were kept busy by special spiritual opponents. A dangerous storm was raised on one occasion by all the "malignant spirits of the tempest and all the evil genii of Maryland." 84 But Father White circumvented this combination of ordinary storm spirits with imps of Protestant proclivities by setting forth to Christ and the Blessed Virgin, while the storm was at its worst, "that the purpose of this journey was to glorify the Blood of our Redeemer in the salvation of the Barbarians, and also to build up a kingdom for the Saviour and to consecrate another gift to the Immaculate Virgin his mother." Relatio Itineris, 16, 17. The last clause apparently refers to Maryland, as if it were named in honor of the Virgin. The representation was effective; the good father had scarcely ceased speaking when the storm began to abate.

The arrival. The Puritans when using a geographical name that began with the word "saint" scrupulously uncanonized it by leaving off the prefix. But these devout pilgrims of the Roman faith, when once the saints and guardian angels of Maryland had piloted them safe in spite of the malice of storm spirits and evil genii into landlocked waters and the bounds of Lord Baltimore's grant, proceeded to sanctify the whole region by sprinkling it with the names of saints and angels from Michael the archangel downward. The ancient Indian designations were marks of a heathenism they purposed to overthrow, and they began by trying to get rid of the whole "bead roll of unbaptized names." No convenient island, creek, river, bay, or cape escaped Christian baptism. On Annunciation Day, 1634, they landed on Heron Island, in the Potomac, which they named appropriately for St. Clement, who was martyred by being thrown into the sea attached to an anchor, and here the sacrifice of the mass was celebrated, the worshipers reflecting that "never before had this been done in this part of the world." After the mass they took upon their shoulders a great cross hewn out of a tree and advanced in order to the place appointed, where the governor and his assistants took part in its erection. The Catholics of the party, seeing this symbol of the faith erected in a new land, knelt upon the ground and recited the litanies of the cross in a kind of religious ecstasy. Here in another form was that tender attachment to their faith that one finds among the more devout Protestant exiles, and in the nobler natures there was doubtless that element of the heroic and the saintly often evolved in the religious sufferings and activities of that day – a relief to the pettiness of the debates and the irksomeness of the bigotries of the age.

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A Catholic colony. The colony had been named Maryland by King Charles in honor of his wife Henrietta Maria; at least there was assigned to the king responsibility for a name that, like nearly everything else about Maryland, was ambiguous. But the phrase Terra Mariæ in the charter, though represented there to be the equivalent of Maryland, was significant to a devout Catholic of something better than a compliment to a Catholic queen. Compare Clarke's Gladstone and Maryland Toleration. The Indian village which with its gardens and cornfields had been bought for the germinal settlement and capital, took the name of St. Mary's, and the whole infant colony is called the Colony of St. Maries, by its own Legislative Assembly in 1638, as though by Maryland were intended the land of Mary. Maryland Archives, i, 23. Notwithstanding the manifest care of the second Lord Baltimore to hold the missionaries within the limits of worldly prudence, the zealous fathers lived and labored in a spirit of other-worldliness. They set themselves first of all to convert those sheep without a shepherd, the Protestants of Maryland. Some of these appear to have been men of reckless and immoral lives, who were greatly bettered by an acceptance of religious restraint. Those non-Catholics who were ill, and those who found themselves languishing and dying in the wilderness without the consolations of their own religion, were zealously visited and converted in extremis by the Jesuits. The servants and mechanics employed by or apprenticed to the missionaries were brought under their constant influence and were readily won. Nearly all the Protestants who arrived in 1638 were swiftly brought over to the faith of the missionaries, and twelve converts were joyously reckoned as fruits of the Jesuit labors in 1639. There was more than one instance of the miraculous, or at least of the marvelous, to help on this work. One man of noble birth, who had by dissipation brought himself to desperate straits, and then sunk until he became at length a bond servant in Maryland, embraced Catholicism. After the death of this convert a very bright light was sometimes seen burning about his place of burial, and even those who were not Catholics were permitted to see this wonder. Excerpta de Diversis Literis, etc., 56-60. The horrible punishments that resulted from the Divine wrath against those who scoffingly rejected the Catholic faith in Maryland remind one of the equal calamities that befell those who were unfaithful to Puritanism in New England. Seventeenth-century Englishmen with sky-wide differences in opinion were one in the traits that belonged to their age. Father White was sure that the destruction of Indians in Maryland was specially ordered by God to provide an opening "for His own everlasting law and light"; but not more sure than were the Puritans that the cruel plague which exterminated whole villages on the Massachusetts coast was sent to open a way for the planting of Calvinistic churches. Each division of Christians in turn reduced the Almighty Creator to the level of a special tutelary divinity, sometimes to that of a rather vindictive genius of the place.

In this work of propagandism the missionaries did not forget the red men. Their labors among the aborigines were fairly successful at first, then interrupted by relapse and by war. Such is the history of Indian missions. Much was made of the solemn profession and baptism of an Indian "king," at which the governor and other distinguished men "honored by their presence the Christian sacraments," the governor marching behind the neophyte in the procession. Maryland was in fact openly a Catholic colony until after 1640. Note 17.

Failure to make a Catholic state. But as a Catholic colony it was a failure. In fear of the rising Puritan tempest in England, or the violent opposition on several grounds of its stronger neighbor Virginia, and of the mutinous bigotry of its own Puritan settlers, who regarded Baltimore's government as a "Babylon" to be overthrown, it was never able to afford to Catholics perfect security, much less was it able to promise them domination. But the Catholics included most of the rich and influential families, and it was a Jesuit boast that they were superior to other American settlers in breeding and urbanity. As they had choice of the best land in the province, the Catholic families remained during the whole colonial period among the most prominent people of Maryland. 85 There is also evidence that the Catholics were numerically considerable in proportion to the population, though the reports on the subject are vague and conflicting. In 1641 they were about one fourth of the whole. The ranks of the early Catholic settlers, both of the rich and poor, seem to have been recruited from Ireland as well as from England, but the Maryland government in Queen Anne's Protestant time passed acts levying an import tax of twenty pounds on each Irish Catholic servant, in order that the bond servants and even the transported convicts in Maryland should be orthodox Protestants. 86

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Opposition to Maryland. George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, molded the Maryland enterprise until the drafting of the charter, and his spirit was felt in it after his death. Cecilius, his son, was a man of a somewhat different sort, and his traits became more apparent as time went on. He was strongly supported at court by Strafford, his father's most devoted and obliged friend, and no doubt also by the queen, who was godmother to Maryland. The opposition to Maryland was probably embittered by the hatred to Strafford and the jealousy of a Catholic queen.

The second Lord Baltimore and Virginia. On his enemies in Virginia the younger Baltimore took ample vengeance. He got one of the queen's household appointed treasurer of the colony, and the Virginians found themselves obliged to pay the quitrents, which had been neglected and apparently forgotten. 87 Other officers of the colony were nominated by Baltimore. Harvey, the governor, hoping to collect money due him from the royal treasury by Baltimore's assistance, was his obsequious tool, to the bitter indignation of the Virginians, who hated Baltimore not only because he was a Romanist, but also because he had divided the first colony and cut off the northern Indian trade from Virginia. In consequence of the quarrel between Harvey and the Virginians over Maryland there ensued a revolution in Virginia; Harvey was shipped to England by the same bold men who had sent the first Lord Baltimore packing. But Harvey was sent back again by the king, and by this counter revolution the colonial constitution of Virginia was modified for the worse. It was altogether an exquisite revenge.

Baltimore seeks to control Virginia. Cecilius meditated even a bolder stroke. He schemed through Windebank to have himself made governor of Virginia, promising to wring out of it eight thousand pounds more of revenue for the king from some neglected sources. To achieve this, he proposed a scheme by which Windebank was to impose on the king's credulity. Secretary Windebank may have recoiled from the part he was to play; it is certain that Charles was not persuaded to hand over Virginia bound hand and foot into the power of the proprietary of the rival colony. 88

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Cautious policy of Baltimore. Intolerance on the part of the authorities of Maryland directed toward Protestants might have brought a swift overthrow of the whole project. The instructions given for the first voyage already cited show throughout the need for extreme caution in the face of extreme peril. It is required of the governor and commissioners that "they be very careful to preserve the peace amongst all the passengers on shipboard, and that they suffer no scandal nor offense to be given to any of the Protestants." Baltimore's instructions, 15 Nov., 1633, Calvert Papers. The rulers are to instruct the Catholics to be silent "upon all occasions of discourse concerning matter of religion," and those in authority are to "treat the Protestants with as much mildness and favor as justice will permit." These instructions were to hold good after landing, and in one notable case of religious dissension after the arrival in Maryland, justice was meted out against the Catholic offender in a way that showed a disposition to observe this policy of conciliation toward Protestants at the expense of some unfairness toward Catholics. Very early a proclamation was issued for the suppression of all religious disputes, and Copley, the business administrator of the Jesuits, thought they ought to be put down for fear the writings should be sent to the governor of Virginia.

Necessary ambiguity. The ambiguous charter of Maryland was a necessary hypocrisy. The plan of toleration was also inevitable, and it was carried no further than necessity required, for in that age, when toleration was odious, a liberal policy had also its perils. The Act for Church Liberties of 1639 was a fine example of the studied ambidexterity of the Maryland government. It was enacted "that Holy Church within this province shall have all her rights, liberties, and immunities, safe, whole, and inviolate in all things." Holy Church here is a deliberate substitution for "the Church of England" in a similar phrase of Magna Charta. Such an act was worthy of Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways. Interpreted by judges holding office at the will of a Catholic proprietary, it could have but one meaning. For the outside world it might bear another sense. It did all that could be done in the circumstances for the Roman Catholic religion and for Catholic ecclesiastics. 89

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Puritan settlers invited. In 1643, Parliament, dominated by Puritans, could not let the distant Maryland province rest in peace. It passed an ordinance making the Earl of Warwick Governor in Chief and Lord High Admiral of all the plantations in America. This act contained covert allusions to papists, Spaniards, and governors recently appointed by the king. 90 Baltimore met the rising tempest in a way characteristic of him. If he could settle a portion of his province with Puritans they might serve to shield him from the storm. Besides, the Catholic emigration had not proved large, and his province needed inhabitants. He wrote to a Captain Gibbons, of Boston, sending him a commission under the Maryland government, and offering "free liberty of religion and all other privileges" to such of the New England people as were willing to remove to Maryland. Winthrop's Journal, ii, 148, 149. There were those in New England in that day who longed for a more genial climate, but to settle under the authority of a papist was to them much like pitching a tent on the confines of perdition.

Puritans from Virginia. Though Puritans could not be induced to move from New England, it happened that the Puritans living in Virginia were persecuted in this same year by that stanch cavalier and retrograde churchman, Sir William Berkeley, who wanted his parsons to read prayers, but did not like preaching ministers of any sort. 1643. He was new to his government, and had brought over with him plenty of hostility to the party that had affronted his royal master in England. Virginia Puritans had no choice but to suffer or depart, and Maryland was convenient. They began soon after this to seek a refuge under the protection of a proprietary who was a papist and who practiced toleration – two things almost equally hateful to the Puritans. Mr. James, a Puritan minister, tarried in Maryland a short time, as early as 1643; he was probably the only Protestant minister that set foot on Maryland soil before 1650. But the Puritan was never easy unless he was uneasy, and he was sure to be uneasy within when there was none to molest from without. To take an oath of fidelity to a papist was to him swearing fealty to antichrist; but so desirous was Baltimore of Puritan settlers that even the Maryland oath of fidelity was modified, and a saving clause was inserted for the ease of the Puritan conscience. The coming of Puritans who were in sympathy with the Parliament in England and who abhorred a tolerant papist, contributed something to the multifarious turmoils of the following years.

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Maryland turmoils. What we know of the petty civil wars of Maryland is tedious and perplexing. The broils before 1649 sprang from diverse sources, some of which we know, others we may easily conjecture. There was the old claim of Claiborne to jurisdiction over Kent Island; there was a disposition on the part of some of the Marylanders to relieve the tedium of existence by taking a hand in the great struggle against royal authority which was rending England; there was the tendency common in frontier communities to carry debates to a violent issue; there was perhaps a natural proneness to insurrection on the part of bond servants and men lately out of service; and there was an innate hunger for spoil of any sort in the seamen of that age and in the rougher class on shore. 91 But by 1648 the tempest had passed for the time; order had been reestablished; the Catholic and the Puritan were living in peace like the lion and the lamb of Hebrew prophecy; and the Catholic proprietary, always promptly bending before the storm, had delegated his authority to a Protestant governor who took the Parliament side.

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The Act of 1649. Before this epoch Maryland toleration had been merely a practical fact. It had not been theoretically stated; it had not been a matter of legislation at all; its extent and limitations were unknown. But now that this colonial home of Catholics was to be a land of Protestants, and particularly of Puritans, it was necessary to formulate the principle of toleration, the more, that Baltimore's own co-religionists were to be put under a Protestant governor. Governor and high officers of state were required to swear that they would molest on account of religion no person professing to believe in Jesus Christ, "and in particular no Roman Catholic." By the mere march of events it had come to pass that in the state founded by Catholics as a cradle for the Roman Catholic religion, the Catholic was now compelled to secure as best he could the toleration of his religion at the hands of the heretic. Part of Baltimore's plan for this new settlement of affairs involved the sending over of a code of perpetual laws to be adopted by the Assembly. The proprietary gave orders that the governor should not assent to any of these laws if all were not passed; but the Assembly of Maryland farmers was too cunning to be entrapped into passing laws which it thought inconvenient and unjust. A humble letter was sent from the members to the lord proprietary complaining that they were "illeterate" and "void of that Understanding and Comprehension" necessary to the discussion of such a code, and that in April they were too busy with their "necessary employment in a Crop" to give attention to it. They selected certain acts out of the code which they passed, among which was the famous Act of Toleration of 1649. That this was part of the code sent from England there can be no doubt; the "illeterate" colonists were not capable of framing it, and it bears the character-mark of the Baltimore policy throughout. Here is no philosophic theory of toleration, no far-reaching conclusion like that of Roger Williams, that the magistrate may not take cognizance of merely religious offences. Williams was a thinker, a doctrinary, too far in advance of his age to be the successful organizer of a new state. Baltimore, on the other hand, accepted a practical toleration as an expedient – he may even have come to believe in it as a theory by force of his own situation. But he was not primarily a thinker at all. Even here, where Baltimorean toleration reaches high tide, no philosophic congruity is sought. The Jew and the Unitarian who deny the divinity of Christ are to be put to death. Only so much toleration is granted as is needful to the occasion. And even this toleration is not put upon any other ground than public policy; the forcing of conscience in religion "hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous consequence"; therefore this law is made "to preserve mutual love and amity amongst the inhabitants." The provisions against such offences as blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking and religious disputes precede those for toleration. Very politic is the arrangement by which reviling of God is made a capital offence, while reviling the Virgin Mary is adroitly associated with speeches against the "holy apostles or evangelists" as a sort of second-class blasphemy, a finable offence. 92

Vicissitudes of toleration. And yet it was toleration, and the law was all the more influential as an example, perhaps, because it was only practical and quite incongruous. It was eminently prudent and statesmanlike. That it was not perpetually effective was the fault not of Baltimore but of the times. Puritan ideas were rampant. The government of the proprietary was overthrown; the Jesuits fled to the inhospitable Virginia, where they lived concealed in a low hut like a cistern or a tomb, not lamenting their physical privations so much as the lack of wine which deprived them of the consolation of the sacrament. The new government of Maryland, five years after Baltimore's famous "act concerning Religion," passed a new act with the same title – an act brusque and curt, a law with its boots and spurs on. "That none profess and exercise the papist religion" is its rude forbidding. The tables are turned; it is no longer the nonresident Jew and the hypothetical Unitarian who are excepted. But the wheels rolled swiftly once more, and in three years Cecilius, absolute lord and proprietary, was again master of Maryland, and the beneficent act of 1649 resumed its sway. It protected the Catholic element, which, though always rich and influential, came to be in latter colonial times but about a twelfth of the population. Toleration also served to make Maryland an early dwelling place for abounding Quakers and others holding religious views not relished in colonies less liberal.