Conceived in Liberty (24 page)

Miller quickly proceeded to use his double power with predictable ruthlessness. He zealously tried to suppress the illegal tobacco trade, and also to enforce the higher quitrents. In addition, Miller interfered with elections and arbitrarily set a price on the head of many prominent leaders of the province. On the always convenient pretext of “defense against the Indians,” Miller organized a military guard that terrorized Albemarle and imposed a heavy debt on the struggling colony.

With Miller now added to the provocation of the Navigation Act and other grievances, North Carolina was truly ripe for rebellion. George Durant had fearlessly threatened the proprietors with revolt upon hearing of East-church’s appointment. The revolutionary ferment was stirred further by the example of Bacon’s Rebellion in neighboring Virginia, by the influx of rebellious Baconian refugees from that colony, and by the influence in Albemarle of former governor William Drummond, one of the Baconian leaders. Furthermore, the popular opposition had another dynamic leader in John Culpeper, surveyor-general of Carolina, who had years ago been arrested in South Carolina for sedition and rebellion, and had escaped north to avoid the hangman. Arriving in Albemarle, he joined Durant and the opposition, and called upon the people to resist the enforcement of the Navigation
Act. The revolution, in short, needed but a spark to be ignited into flame. It found its spark in December 1677, when a New England merchantman arrived at Albemarle with a cargo of supplies. Miller arrested the skipper, who promised to leave at once and not return. When the North Carolinians tried to persuade the master of the cargo to stay, Miller arrested the eminent George Durant on the charge of treason. This tyrannical act touched off the rebellion and Culpeper, Valentine Byrd, and their men arrested the governor and his Council and called free elections for a new Assembly. The elections revealed the overwhelming popular support for the rebellion, and the newly elected Assembly appointed a Council and chose John Culpeper as governor and collector of the customs. The Assembly proceeded to indict Miller, appoint new justices in the colony, and warn Eastchurch, hurrying to the American mainland, to stay out of Albemarle.

Culpeper and his allies governed Albemarle for a period of two years. Culpeper justified his actions in a manifesto charging Miller with tyranny and corruption. The new governor was clearly in a difficult spot. With Virginia again tightly under the rule of the Berkeleyan oligarchy, and with the rebellion in Maryland a failure, Culpeper’s tiny colony could hardly hold out in independence indefinitely against the might of England. Culpeper could hardly take the route of ultimate independence, which Bacon had begun to envision before his death. An immediate threat from Virginia loomed when Governor Eastchurch arrived and prepared to lead a military force against the colony. Eastchurch’s death, however, ended that menace. Culpeper felt that he had to move quickly. Going to England, he pleaded his case there in conflict with Miller, who had escaped from prison in Albemarle. Culpeper convinced the proprietors of the Tightness of his case, but the Crown, more sensitive to rebellion, arrested Culpeper for treason. Culpeper was defended by the leading Carolina proprietor, the Earl of Shaftesbury (Lord Ashley Cooper), and was acquitted, but he had been permanently deposed from power.

Miller was deposed and Durant freed by the proprietors, but the whole system against which the rebellion had protested—including the attempt to levy a quitrent of a penny an acre—remained intact. For a few years, affairs proceeded smoothly, as the newly appointed governor, Seth Sothel, who had bought the Earl of Clarendon’s one-eighth share of Carolina, was captured on his way to America by pirates and held captive for three years. In the interim, the Durant party remained in control with Jenkins selected by the Council as acting governor, but now meekly enforcing the British regulations. Attempts by Miller and his associates to stir up counterrevolution met with no success. In 1683, however, the supposedly moderate Sothel was released from captivity, and the North Carolinians were soon to find that if they had been chastised with whips they were now to be chastised with scorpions. For Sothel proceeded to terrorize and plunder the colony without mercy. One of his favorite devices was to seize any property
that he fancied, and then to imprison any owner who had the temerity to object. A typical incident: when two ships arrived from the West Indies, Sothel seized their perfectly legitimate captains as “pirates” and confiscated their property. One of the captains died in prison from maltreatment. Before death, the captain made a will naming as executor of his estate one of the leading men of the Albemarle colony, Thomas Pollock. Governor Sothel, however, refused to probate the will and seized the dead man’s property hinself. When Pollock threatened to tell the story to England, Sothel imprisoned Pollock as well. The chain of imprisonments continued to lengthen: when George Durant protested against such proceedings as unlawful, Sothel immediately jailed Durant and confiscated his entire estate. Sothel withheld and pocketed the salaries of subordinate officials and accepted bribes from criminals. To make the cup of the Carolinians still more bitter, Virginia passed a law in 1679 prohibiting any importation of Carolina tobacco. The motives for the law were twofold: to stifle the competition of Albemarle tobacco and to assert an irredentist Virginia territorial claim to sovereignty over Albemarle. This crippled Albemarle’s tobacco still further and left it even more dependent on the illegal smuggling to New England. Moreover, the Virginians incited border Indians to make war upon the Albemarle settlers.

Sixteen eighty-eight was the year of the Glorious Revolution in England, the year when Great Britain experienced the last of its great political upheavals of the turbulent seventeenth century. The Stuart king, the Catholic James II, was deposed in that year and the monarchy secured to the impeccably Protestant William and Mary of Orange. This year of upheaval signaled the troubled and oppressed colonies to seize the opportunity of Britain’s distraction at home to try to secure their own freedom.

By ironic coincidence, Lord Baltimore sent William Joseph as deputy governor to run the Maryland colony in late 1688, and Joseph opened the Assembly only nine days after James II had been deposed by William and Mary. In his opening address—delivered considerably before news of the Glorious Revolution reached America—Joseph proved himself to be an extreme advocate of divine and feudal right to rule. He declared: “The power by which we are assembled here is undoubtedly derived from God, to the King, and from the King to his Excellency the Lord Proprietary, and from his said Lordship to us.”

When news came of the change of regimes in England, people angrily remembered that Joseph had, in the fall of 1688, insisted on the colony’s giving thanks for the birth of a Catholic heir to the throne. Agitation also arose in the colony because Lord Baltimore’s courier, coming to order the colony to proclaim allegiance to William and Mary, died en route and left Maryland in unresolved ferment. All the latent anti-Catholicism of the Protestant masses in the colony rose to the surface, aided by the fact that the proprietor was Catholic and the privileged oligarchy in Maryland
largely so—the appointed Council, for example, had a Catholic majority. Was a Catholic plot under way? Would the proprietary refuse to acknowledge William and Mary and join James II in his plans for war against his successor? James soon landed in Ireland with French troops, and the colonists well remembered that James’ proconsul in Ireland was Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnel, a relative and close friend of Lord Baltimore. Rumors swept all the American colonies, not only Maryland: the French colonies were about to march on the English colonies in alliance with James; Catholic subversives were planning to help them; and Catholics and Indians were conspiring together to massacre Protestants. It is understandable that the agitation would be most severe in Maryland, where the proprietor was Catholic and the bulk of the people Protestant.

In April 1689 there was formed “an Association in arms for the defense of the Protestant Religion, and for asserting the right of King William and Queen Mary to the Province of Maryland and all the English Dominions.” Leading the association was John Coode, the old revolutionary who had been freed for his part in the Fendall revolt of 1681. Coode had married a daughter of his old confrere, Thomas Gerrard. Other leaders included many eminent men in the colony: Nehemiah Blakiston, collector of the customs; another son-in-law of Gerrard, Kenelm Chesseldine, Speaker of the House of Burgesses; and Colonel Henry Fowles of the militia. When rumors spread that the Catholics were arming themselves in the statehouse at St. Marys, Coode, at the head of several hundred armed men, marched on the capital. On August 1, Joseph and the Council surrendered to the Coode rebels. Coode and the Assembly petitioned William and Mary to end the proprietary regime and finally, in 1691, the new king agreed.

Coode and his followers engaged in violent anti-Catholic propaganda in the course of their revolutionary agitation. However, Coode’s close association with Catholics and his ancient opposition to the proprietary lead to the conclusion that, at least on Coode’s part, the anti-Catholic agitation was but a convenient
point d’appui
for his aim of ridding Maryland of the tyrannical and feudal proprietary. In Coode’s own history of the rebellion, he stressed the “injustice and tyranny under which we groan... the absolute authority exercised over us in the seizure of their persons, forfeiture and loss of their goods.”

While the Coode rebellion succeeded in overturning the proprietary, the success was only temporary. Aside from the fact that the structure of land tenure remained the same, the proprietor was only displaced for a short period of years. When the third Lord Baltimore died in 1715, the Crown granted the proprietorship once again to the Baltimore family, which had converted from Catholic to Protestant. In the meanwhile, the Crown continued to turn over part of the collected quitrents to the proprietary.

What did change was the religious complexion of the government and society in Maryland. The old tradition of religious toleration in Maryland was abandoned, taxes immediately began to be levied in 1692 for the establishment of the Anglican church, and any further immigration of Catholics into the colony was prohibited under severe penalties. Furthermore, the public celebration of the mass was outlawed. The capital city was summarily shifted from St. Marys, the center of Catholicism in the colony, to Protestant Providence, now renamed Annapolis. (So much was St. Marys strictly a governmental city that it now rapidly diminished to the virtual status of a ghost town.)

Only a small minority of the colony were Anglicans. The Puritans, leaders in the rebellion against the proprietary, were naturally chagrined to be confronted with an established church, but they were appeased when assured in 1702 of freedom of worship, which extended even to Quakers. This limited toleration was established despite the strenuous efforts of the head of the Anglican church in Maryland, Dr. Thomas Bray. Bray had persuaded the Assembly to pass a bill outlawing all forms of worship but the Anglican form in the colony, but fortunately this extreme provision was disallowed by the Crown. Also irritating was the fact that the Anglican ministers were paid by a new poll tax, which was most heavy on the poor. The spirit of Crown toleration, however, did not spread to the Catholics, against whom William pursued his long-time vendetta. The spirit of the government of the time may be seen from a 1704 incident, in which two Catholic priests were arrested for saying mass. They were refused the benefit of counsel; the chapel of St. Marys, venerated by Catholics as the first church in Maryland, was closed down as “scandalous and offensive to the government”; and Governor John Seymour delivered to the priests the following diatribe:

It is the unhappy temper of you and all your tribe to grow insolent upon civility and never know how to use it... if the necessary laws that are made were let loose, they are sufficient to crush you, and which (if your arrogant principles have not blinded you) you must need to dread. You might, methinks, be content to live quietly as you may, and let the exercise of your superstitious vanities be confined to yourselves, without proclaiming them at public times and in public places, unless you expect by your gaudy shows and serpentine policy to amuse the multitude and beguile the unthinking weakest part of them—an act of deceit well known to be amongst you.... In plain and few words, if you intend to live here, let me hear no more of these things; for if I do... be assured I’ll chastise you.... I’ll remove the evil by sending you where you will be dealt with as you deserve.... Pray take notice I am an English Protestant gentleman and can never equivocate.

The House of Delegates was so pleased by this tirade that they formally commended the governor for protecting “Her Majesty’s Protestant subjects here against the insolence and growth of Popery....”

Anti-Catholic hysteria surged through England and the colonies, in the course of a lengthy war waged by England against Catholic France, and of attempts by the Stuart pretender to return to the throne. The crackdown on Catholics was pursued zealously in Maryland. No Catholic was permitted to buy real estate or to practice as a lawyer. Loyalty oaths were to be forced upon all Catholics, and any who refused would be incapable of inheriting land or holding office. The oaths were deliberately worded in such a way that no conscientious Catholic could swear to them. The Test Oath, as required by an Act of 1699, compelled the oath-taker to swear: “I do believe that in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper there is not any transubstantiation.... And that the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other saints, and the sacrifice of the Mass as they are now used in the Church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous.” If a Catholic widow had married a Protestant, her children could be forcibly seized by the state and placed under Protestant guardians. Catholics were also assessed at rates for emergency tax levies double those of everyone else. A special duty was also levied on all Irish “papist” servants coming into the colony: the duty was doubled in 1717. Catholic priests were in 1698 even prevented by proclamation of the governor (as urged by the House of Delegates) from visiting the sick and dying during a plague. The proclamation ranted: