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The Province of Maryland-also known as the Maryland Colony-was founded in 1632 as a safe haven for English Catholics fleeing anti-Catholic persecution in Europe. The colony was established by Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore (also known as Lord Baltimore), who also governed the Colony of Newfoundland and the Province of Avalon. The Maryland Colony's first settlement was St. Mary's City, which was built along the Chesapeake Bay. It was the first settlement in the New World to guarantee religious freedom for all Trinitarian Christians.

Fast Facts: Maryland Colony

Who Founded Maryland?

The idea for an English colony along the Chesapeake Bay where Catholics could live and worship in peace came from George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore. In 1632, he received a charter from King Charles I to found a colony east of the Potomac River. That same year, Lord Baltimore died, and the charter was given to his son, Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. The first settlers of the Maryland Colony included a mix of about 200 Catholics and Protestants who had been promised land grants; they arrived on the ships the Ark and the Dove.

Why Was Maryland Founded?

Following the Protestant Reformation, Europe experienced a series of religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries. In England, Catholics faced widespread discrimination; for example, they were not allowed to hold public office, and in 1666 they were blamed for the Great Fire of London. The first Lord Baltimore, a proud Catholic, envisioned the Maryland Colony as a place where English people would have religious freedom. He also wished to found the colony for economic gain.

The new colony was named Maryland in honor of Henrietta Maria, the queen consort of Charles I. George Calvert had previously been involved in a settlement in Newfoundland but, finding the land inhospitable, hoped this new colony would be a financial success. Charles I, for his part, was to be given a share of the income that the new colony created. The first governor of the colony was Cecil Calvert's brother, Leonard.

Interestingly, although the Maryland Colony was ostensibly founded as a refuge for Catholics, only 17 of the original settlers were Catholic. The rest were Protestant indentured servants. The settlers arrived at St. Clement's Island on March 25, 1634, and founded St. Mary's City. They became heavily involved in the cultivation of tobacco, which was their primary cash crop along with wheat and corn.

Over the next 15 years, the number of Protestant settlers steadily increased, and there was fear that religious liberty would be taken away from the Catholic population. The Act of Toleration was passed in 1649 by Governor William Stone to protect those who believed in Jesus Christ. However, this act was repealed in 1654 when outright conflict occurred and the Puritans took control of the colony. Lord Baltimore actually lost his proprietary rights and it was some time before his family was able to regain control of Maryland. Anti-Catholic actions occurred in the colony all the way up until the 18th century. However, with an influx of Catholics into Baltimore, laws were once again created to help protect against religious persecution.

June 20, 1632: King Charles I grants a charter for the Maryland Colony.

March 25, 1634: The first group of settlers, led by Leonard Calvert, reach St. Clement's Island in the Potomac River. They established St. Mary's City, the first Maryland settlement.

1642: The people of the Maryland Colony go to war against the Susquehannocks; fighting will continue until the two groups sign a peace treaty in 1652.

1649: Maryland passes the Maryland Toleration Act, which guarantees religious freedom to all Trinitarian Christians within the colony.

1767: A border dispute between Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware results in the drawing of the Mason-Dixon line, which marks Maryland's northern and eastern borders.

1776: Maryland joins the rest of the 13 American colonies in a revolution against England.

September 3, 1783: The American Revolution officially comes to a close with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

April 28, 1788: Maryland becomes the seventh state to be admitted to the United States.

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The Province of Maryland-also known as the Maryland Colony-was founded in 1632 as a safe haven for English Catholics fleeing anti-Catholic persecution in Europe. The colony was established by Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore (also known as Lord Baltimore), who also governed the Colony of Newfoundland and the Province of Avalon.

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In 1608 the English explorer Capt. John Smith sailed into Chesapeake Bay and stayed for several weeks to map the shoreline. With reference to the countryside around the bay, Smith exclaimed, "Heaven and earth seemed never to have agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation."

In 1632 Cecilius Calvert was granted a charter for the land as a haven in which his fellow Roman Catholics might escape the restrictions placed on them in England. The first governor of the proprietary colony, Leonard Calvert, the younger brother of Cecilius, landed the founding expedition on St. Clements Island in the lower Potomac in March 1634. The first settlement and capital was St. Marys City. Aware of the mistakes made by Virginia's first colonists, Maryland's settlers, rather than hunt for gold, made peace with the local Native Americans and established farms and trading posts, at first on the shores and islands of the lower Chesapeake. The field hands included indentured labourers working off the terms of their passage and, after about 1639, African slaves. The most important crop was tobacco. Roads and towns were few, and contact with the English-model manor houses was largely by water.

The Calvert family provided for religious freedom in the colony, and this was formalized by the General Assembly in 1649 in an Act Concerning Religion, later famous as the Act of Religious Toleration. It granted freedom of worship, though only within the bounds of Trinitarian Christianity. One of the earliest laws of religious liberty, it was limited to Christians and repealed in 1692. Commercial disputes with Anglican Virginia and boundary quarrels with Quaker Pennsylvania and Delaware did not affect this tolerance. Puritan ascendancy in England (1648-60) caused only brief turmoil. A 1689 rebellion by Protestants overthrew the proprietary officers, leading to an interval of crown rule in the royal colony of Maryland (1692-1715). During that period the Church of England was formally established. In 1715 Maryland once again became a proprietary colony of the Calverts, who had converted to Protestantism. Maryland nonetheless remained a haven for dissidents from sectarian rigidity in other colonies.

By the 1660s the Protestant majority in Maryland came to resent the colony's Roman Catholic leadership in St. Marys City. As the population centre shifted to the north and west, the capital was moved to Protestant-dominated Anne Arundel Town (now Annapolis) in 1694. In 1729 Baltimore was founded. Maryland's dominant "country party" early resisted British efforts to make the colonies bear more of the costs of government. Frederick county repudiated the Stamp Act in 1765, and in 1774, the year after the Boston Tea Party, a ship loaded with tea was burned at an Annapolis dock.

The long-standing dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania over their common border was settled in 1767 when Great Britain recognized latitude 39°43′ N as the legal boundary. The boundary was named the Mason and Dixon Line for its surveyors. Thereafter, this line came to be regarded as the traditional division between the North and the South.

Marylanders took an active part in the American Revolution. Maryland is sometimes called the "Old Line State" in honour of the Maryland troops who served with Gen. George Washington. Among the most-reliable troops in the Continental Army, they were often given difficult tasks; Washington called them "The Maryland Line." The Continental Congress, often on the move to avoid British troops, spent a winter in Baltimore. At the close of the war, it convened in Annapolis, where it accepted Washington's resignation from the army and ratified the Treaty of Paris (1783), which acknowledged the independence of the colonies.

Postwar problems included the disposition of confiscated loyalist property, the struggle for paper money, and debtor relief. Maryland's controversy with Virginia over the use of the Potomac and lower Chesapeake Bay, resulting in the Compact of 1785, led toward the Constitutional Convention (1787), as did the Annapolis Convention of 1786, at which Maryland was not represented. Luther Martin distinguished himself as a representative of Maryland at the Constitutional Convention. Maryland ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, the seventh state to do so. It also ceded territory and advanced money for public buildings to help form the District of Columbia (1791).

The state

When harassment on the high seas and other factors brought on the War of 1812, Baltimore clippers, sailing as privateers, dealt more than equal punishment to British ships. In 1814 the British troops who had burned the principal government buildings in Washington, D.C., were repulsed in their attempts to inflict similar punishment on Baltimore. Francis Scott Key, a Georgetown lawyer and an eyewitness to the futile bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British in Baltimore's harbour, wrote the four eight-line stanzas that, set to existing music, became the national anthem, " The Star-Spangled Banner," in 1931.

With peace, Maryland and the rest of the country concentrated on making improvements in transport and communication. The Cumberland Road, or National Road, the first road to cross the Appalachians, was completed to Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia), in 1818. In 1828 workers began construction on the first U.S. passenger railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, and on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, from Washington to Cumberland. The following year, the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, long under construction across the northern part of the Delmarva Peninsula, was completed. It connected the Delaware River to Chesapeake Bay. The country's first intercity telegraph line was constructed between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore in 1843-44. In 1845 the U.S. Naval Academy was founded on the Severn River in Annapolis.

The Civil War, however, arrested Maryland's progress. Landed gentry and residents of the Eastern Shore supported the secessionist South, while workingmen and western Marylanders stood up for the Union; a third faction favoured neutrality. In 1861 federal troops occupied Baltimore and Annapolis, and martial law was imposed in this border state. Confederate armies mounted three major invasions of Maryland territory in successive summers; they were checked at Antietam, they met full defeat at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and their threat to Washington, D.C., was dissipated in 1864. The constitution of 1864 abolished slavery and removed power from the rural aristocracy. The more-cautious constitution of 1867 remains in force.

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In 1608 the English explorer Capt. John Smith sailed into Chesapeake Bay and stayed for several weeks to map the shoreline. With reference to the countryside around the bay, Smith exclaimed, "Heaven and earth seemed never to have agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation."

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Thirteen Colonies

A Southern Colony
The Province of Maryland was an English colony in North America that was founded in 1632. It began as a proprietary colony of Lord Baltimore, who wanted to create a haven for English Catholics in the New World, and to demonstrate that Catholics and Protestants could live together harmoniously. Although Maryland was an early pioneer of religious tolerance in the British colonies, religious strife between Anglicans, Puritans, Catholics, and Quakers was common in the early years.

A Royal Charter
Charles I of England granted a charter for about twelve million acres to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore on June 20, 1632. The charter had originally been granted to Calvert's father, George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, but he died before it could be executed, so it was granted to his son. Cecil had converted to Catholicism, which was a severe stigma for a nobleman in 17th century England. Catholics were considered enemies of the crown and traitors to their country.

The Lords Baltimore were the only Catholics in the history of the British Empire to have or obtain a proprietary colony-a type of settlement in which favorites of the British Crown were awarded huge tracts of land in the New World to supervise and develop. Most of the American Colonies were financed and settled by joint stock companies, in which investors owned shares.

The charter created a state ruled by Lord Baltimore, who owned all of the land granted in the charter, and had absolute authority over it. Settlers were required to swear allegiance to him rather than to the King of England. The charter also created an aristocracy-Lords of the Manor, as they were called-who bought 6,000 acres from Baltimore and held greater legal and social privileges than the common settlers.

Early settlement
The Calvert family recruited Catholic aristocrats and Protestant settlers for Maryland, luring them with generous land grants and a policy of religious toleration. Of the 200 initial settlers who traveled to Maryland, the majority were Protestant. In fact, Protestants remained in the majority throughout the history of colonial Maryland.

The ships Ark and the Dove landed at St. Clement's Island on March 25, 1634. The new settlers were led by Lord Baltimore's younger brother Leonard Calvert, whom Baltimore had delegated to serve as governor of the new colony. The 150 or so surviving immigrants purchased land from the local Native Americans.

One of the highlights of the early days of Maryland was the Act Concerning Religion, which guaranteed people in Maryland the freedom to practice whatever religion they wanted. This law attracted members of many different faiths, including Quakers, Presbyterians, Puritans, and Episcopalians

Maryland was a southern colony. Despite early competition with the colony of Virginia, the Province of Maryland developed along very similar lines as Virginia. Its early settlements clustered around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay.

Native Americans
The Yaocomico were a Native American tribe who lived along the north bank of the Potomac River near its confluence with the Chesapeake Bay. The first settlers of the Maryland Colony purchased the land for their settlement at St. Mary's City from the Yaocomico, who had a settlement there. European settler accounts claim that the Yaocomico were content to sell the land to the Maryland colonists because they were being threatened by tribes to the north.

The Maryland settlers continued to maintain good relations with the Yaocomico, going so far as to write language protecting them into treaties with other neighboring tribes. However, the Yaocomico disappeared by the 1670s or 1680s, possibly as a result of the European diseases that had begun wreaking havoc on native populations.

Maryland and the English Civil War
In 1654, after the Third English Civil War, Protestant Parliament forces assumed control of Maryland, and Governor William Stone went into exile in Virginia. Stone returned the following spring at the head of a Catholic force and marched on Annapolis. In what is known as the Battle of the Severn, on March 25, 1655, Stone was defeated, taken prisoner, and replaced him as Governor.

Puritan rebels briefly seized control of the Province by the Protestant King of England in 1688, but it was restored to the family when Charles Calvert, the 5th Baron Baltimore, swore publicly that he was a Protestant.

The Plantation Economy
Like its larger neighbor, the Colony of Virginia, Maryland developed into a plantation colony. In the 17th century, most Marylanders lived in poor conditions on small family farms. They raised a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and livestock, but the cash crop was tobacco, and it soon dominated the economy. Tobacco was sometimes used as money. The colonial legislature passed a law requiring tobacco planters to raise a certain amount of corn as well, in order to ensure that the colonists had enough to eat.

Slavery in Maryland
Maryland's economy quickly became centered around the cultivation of tobacco for sale in Europe. The need for cheap labor led to the rapid expansion of indentured servitude and, later, forcible immigration and enslavement of Africans. Barbados was the first British possession to enact restrictive legislation governing slaves in 1644, and other colonial settlements quickly adopted similar rules modeled on it.

With the success of tobacco planting, African Slavery was legalized in Maryland in 1664, becoming the foundation of the Southern farming economy. In the 1690's, slave prices dropped, and the owning of slaves became more common.

By 1755, about 40% of Maryland's population was African. Maryland planters also made extensive use of indentured servants and convict labor. An extensive system of rivers facilitated the movement of produce from inland plantations to the Atlantic coast for export. Baltimore was the second-most important port in the eighteenth-century South, after Charleston, South Carolina.

King Charles II and his brother James disregarded the grant their father had made to Lord Baltimore, and conveyed to William Penn a large portion of his territory, which became Delaware. James, after he became king, was about to deprive Baltimore of his charter altogether when he was driven from the British throne.

In 1691, Maryland became a royal province, but Lord Baltimore was still permitted to receive revenues in from the colony. In 1692, the first royal governor arrived. But in 1716, the heir of Lord Baltimore was reestablished in his rights, and the proprietary form of government was restored;

Colonial Maryland was larger than the present-day state of Maryland. The Province lost some of its original territory to Pennsylvania in the 1760s, when the Mason-Dixon Line was drawn to resolve a boundary dispute between the two colonies. Maryland also ceded some territory to create the new District of Columbia after the American Revolution.

Maryland and the American Revolution
In the later colonial period, the southeastern part of the Province continued to grow tobacco, but as the revolution approached, northern and central Maryland increasingly became centers of wheat production. This helped drive the expansion of interior farming towns like Frederick and the major port city of Baltimore. The Province was an active participant in the events leading up to the American Revolution, and hosted its own tea party similar to that in Boston.

Maryland declared independence from Britain in 1776, and Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, and Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence for the Colony. Maryland joined the other twelve American Colonies in establishing the United States and became the U.S. state of Maryland.

SOURCES
Maryland History
Province of Maryland

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Maryland Colony | History of American Women

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Thirteen Colonies A Southern Colony The Province of Maryland was an English colony in North America that was founded in 1632. It began as a proprietary colony of Lord Baltimore, who wanted to create a haven for English Catholics in the New World, and to demonstrate that Catholics and Protestants could live together harmoniously.

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- Helped Leonard diffuse tensions with neighboring colonies

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- First woman to receive land grant in Maryland

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- Patriarchal family/social structure

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Margaret Brent: "North America's First Feminist"

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Learn more about Margaret Brent here:

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Margaret Brent, (born c. 1600, Gloucestershire, Eng.-died 1669/71, Westmoreland county, Va. [U.S.]), powerful British colonial landowner who, because of her remarkable business and legal acumen, has been called North America's first feminist.

Margaret Brent was the daughter of Richard Brent, Lord of Admington and Lark Stoke. Attracted by the promise of natural abundance in the New World, Brent immigrated to the United States in 1638, with her sister, two brothers, and a number of indentured servants. She settled in St. Mary's, Maryland's principal town. Her original land grant, 70.5 acres (28.5 hectares) that she called "Sisters Freehold," was the first made to a woman in Maryland. It was increased by the proprietor of the colony, Lord Baltimore, and over the next few years was further augmented through family connections, business transactions, and bounties offered for the transportation of more colonists. By 1657 she had become one of the largest landowners in the colony.

Brent aided the governor, Leonard Calvert, in an armed dispute with William Claiborne of Virginia in 1644-46, herself raising a group of armed volunteers. Calvert, who according to some reports was her brother-in-law, appointed her executor of his estate. In 1647 she settled a dispute (over back pay owed to the governor's soldiers) that had nearly brought the colony to civil war.

Convinced that she needed a voice in the Maryland Assembly if she was to discharge her obligations, on January 21, 1648, she requested one vote for herself and another as Calvert's administrator and Baltimore's attorney. The votes were denied her, and Lord Baltimore condemned her actions. Resenting his lack of support, she moved to Westmoreland county, Virginia [U.S.], where she spent the remainder of her life.

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Margaret Brent, powerful British colonial landowner who, because of her remarkable business and legal acumen, has been called North America's first feminist. Margaret Brent was the daughter of Richard Brent, Lord of Admington and Lark Stoke. Attracted by the promise of natural abundance in the New

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- 40% of the population was African in 1755 due to high slavery demand from the tobacco industry

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- Provided Susquehannock technology to defend themselves

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- Provided settlers with a barrier between themselves and Iroquois

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1652: Peace treaty was agreed upon and became allies against the Iroquois Confederacy

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1644: Defeated by natives but continued to be in state of war

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1642: Declared war on Susquehannock Indian nation

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The vision for the colony was one of religious freedom for Roman Catholics

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- Freedom of worship ONLY within Trinitarian Christianity

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- General Assembly formalized religious tolerance ideas brought by the Calvert family

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1649: ACT CONCERNING RELIGION

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John Coode

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- Puritans now in power repealed the Act of Religious Toleration in 1692

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1715: Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, claimed to be a Protestant and regained power

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1689: “Glorious Revolution” lead by John Coode to banish Cecil Calvert, the 2nd Baron Baltimore, and remove the Calvert family from power

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- when tobacco prices dropped, demand for cheap labor rose even higher

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- cheap labor desired by tobacco industry

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SLAVE TRADE

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- corn was REQUIRED to be grown by tabacco farmers to avoid famine

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- center of the economy

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TOBACCO INDUSTRY

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1634: The first group of settlers arrived and were governed by the brother of Cecil Calvetr, Leonard Calvert

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1632: The charter was given to his son Cecil Calvert who had a similar mission

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Leonard Calvert

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1632: Wanting to escape discrimination of Roman  Catholics, George Calvert received a charter to found a colony from King Charles I but died the same yar

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George Calvert

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1608: "Discovered" by Captain John Smith