Traveling across the country in a small van

What happened in Maryland, Lord Baltimore’s planned refuge for Catholics? Cotholics feuded with the Protestant majority. The availability of land during the first half of the seventeenth century shaped what kind of society in the Chesapeake? A society with a degree of frontier equality.

What happened in Maryland Lord baltimores planned refuge for Catholics?

Cecil Calvert presenting to Lycurgus his Act Concerning Religion ” width=”200″ height=”309″> James Barry, 1793 In this engraving, Cecil Calvert presents his 1649 Act Concerning Religion to the ancient Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus, while libertarians throughout history, including Ben Franklin and William Penn, look on. New England was not the only destination sought by those fleeing religious persecution. In 1632, Cecelius Calvert, known as Lord Baltimore, was granted possession of all land lying between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay, Lord Baltimore saw this as an opportunity to grant religious freedom to the Catholics who remained in Anglican England. Although outright violence was more a part of the 1500s than the 1600s, Catholics were still a persecuted minority in the seventeenth century. For example, Catholics were not even permitted to be legally married by a Catholic priest. Baltimore thought that his New World possession could serve as a refuge. At the same time, he hoped to turn a financial profit from the venture. Maryland, named after England’s Catholic queen Henrietta Maria, was first settled in 1634. Unlike the religious experiments to the North, economic opportunity was the draw for many Maryland colonists. Consequently, most immigrants did not cross the Atlantic in family units but as individuals. The first inhabitants were a mixture of country gentlemen (mostly Catholic) and workers and artisans (mostly Protestant). This mixture would surely doom the Catholic experiment. Invariably, there are more poor than aristocrats in any given society, and the Catholics soon found themselves in the minority. The geography of Maryland, like that of her Southern neighbor Virigina, was conducive to growing tobacco. The desire to make profits from tobacco soon led to the need for low-cost labor. As a result, the number of indentured servants greatly expanded and the social structure of Maryland reflected this change. But the influx in immigration was not reflected in larger population growth because, faced with frequent battles with malaria and typhoid, life expectancy in Maryland was about 10 years less than in New England. Fearful that the Protestant masses might restrict Catholic liberties, the House of Delegates passed the Maryland Act of Toleration in 1649. This act granted religious freedom to all Christians. Like Roger Williams in Rhode Island and William Penn in Pennsylvania, Maryland thus experimented with laws protecting religious liberty. Unfortunately, Protestants swept the Catholics out of the legislature within a decade, and religious strife ensued. Still, the Act of Toleration is an important part of the colonial legacy of religious freedom that will culminate in the First Amendment in the American Bill of Rights. Historic Saint Mary’s City Visit Maryland’s first capital: Historic St. Mary’s City is an exciting mix of colorful living history and fascinating archaeology, all set in a beautiful Tidewater landscape. Lord Baltimore’s 17th century capital stands ready to be rediscovered.

1. Exhibits at the outdoor museum include the square-rigged ship, the Maryland Dove, Godiah Spray’s fine tobacco plantation, the reconstructed State House of 1676, a Woodland Indian hamlet, and much more.
2. With miles of walking trails and scenic river views, Historic St.
3. Mary’s City is indeed a special place where “Time & Tide Meet.” Report broken link Maryland Toleration Act The Toleration Act was a fairly progressive document written in 1649 allowing a broad latitude in religious toleration, particularly as it applied to Catholics.

Read the text of the Doctrine at this site. Report broken link c.10,000 B.C.: Indians known to have lived in Maryland by this date.c.1000 B.C. Indian introduction of pottery.c.800 B.C. Indian introduction of domesticated plants.c.1000 A.D. Permanent Indian villages established.1498.

What was Lord Baltimore’s aim in establishing the Maryland colony quizlet?

What was Lord Baltimore’s aim in establishing the Maryland colony? Lord Baltimore founded Maryland with the intent that it would serve as a refuge for English Catholics facing religious discrimination.

What was the religious motive in planting the Maryland colony?

English Catholics came to America to escape religious persecution. Maryland was founded as a refuge for Catholics by Lord Baltimore in 1634. The Maryland assembly passed the Toleration Act of 1649 to support religious tolerance.

Which colony was founded as a place for Catholics to practice their religion freely?

By the end of this section, you will: –

• Explain how and why various European colonies developed and expanded from 1607 to 1754
• Explain how and why environmental and other factors shaped the development and expansion of various British colonies that developed and expanded from 1607 to 1754
• Explain how and why the movement of a variety of people and ideas across the Atlantic contributed to the development of American culture over time

Virginia’s English colonists were nervous. Since founding Jamestown in 1607, they had endured cold winters, starvation, war with Indians, and changes in their colonial charter. Now, in 1634, they had a new concern: English Roman Catholics were about to become their neighbors to the north.

Remember that in this time, religion and politics were closely related, and since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, for whom the Virginia colony had been named, England had committed itself to Protestantism. Yet in 1632, King Charles I granted a charter to the second Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert, to begin a colony in the Chesapeake, right next to Virginia.

Cecil and his father, George, had converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1620s. All sorts of fears ran through the Virginians’ minds. What if the Catholics coming to the Calvert’s new colony converted Virginian Protestants to their faith? What if these English Catholics threw off the king’s authority once they were an ocean away? Worst of all, what if they allied with Florida’s Spanish Catholics or Canada’s French Catholics and conquered the entire Atlantic Coast under the banner of Roman Catholicism? The Calverts knew these fears could disrupt their plans.

In their minds, the colony would be a refuge for English Catholics, who had long been persecuted by their Protestant countrymen. They worried that anti-Catholic anger might keep their colony (named Maryland in honor of King Charles’ wife, Queen Henrietta Maria) from succeeding. In an attempt to address Protestant fears, the Calverts published a paper titled “Objections Answered Touching Maryland.” They insisted that they posed no threat to the Protestant colonies in Virginia and New England.

They assured their Protestant countrymen that there was no conspiracy to subvert the English Crown, to ally with the Spanish, or to proselytize their Protestant neighbors. All the Maryland colonists wanted, the Calverts explained, was to worship freely as Catholics and live in peace and harmony with their neighbors. (a) Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, founded Maryland as a place for Catholics to worship freely. He is shown here in a seventeenth-century Dutch portrait. (b) Today, the Maryland state flag includes the black and yellow Calvert coat of arms, which you can also see in the center right of the document in Calvert’s hand.

• As it turned out, Maryland’s founders were in for a disappointment.
• Relatively few English Catholics made the long trek across the Atlantic.
• The colony founded to be a refuge for Catholics held greater appeal for Protestant dissenters, such as Quakers and Puritans who disagreed with the Church of England.

The Calverts had imagined a Catholic colony but ended up with religious diversity. Maryland’s real problem was figuring out how its religiously diverse people, a mix of England’s religious outsiders and members of the Church of England, could live with each other in harmony and order.

• In 1649, Maryland’s assembly proposed a remedy, passing a landmark bill called the “Act Concerning Religion,” also referred to as the Maryland Toleration Act or the Toleration Act.
• The act made it illegal for Marylanders to use derogatory religious terms for each other, including “heretic, schismatic, idolater – popish priest, Jesuited papist – or any other name or term in a reproachful manner relating to matters of religion.” More important, the act decreed all Christians free to worship as they wished, so long as they believed in the Trinity (the existence of God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

No Christians would be persecuted for their faith, and none could be forced to attend services of or pay tithes to any other denomination. The Act was truly ground breaking. For the first time in English law, all Christians were promised free exercise of religion. Broadsides were large sheets of paper that were plastered onto walls to display advertisements, political proclamations, and other information. This broadside was circulated in 1649, when Maryland’s assembly passed the Toleration Act, which decreed that no Christians should be persecuted for their faith.

• Unfortunately for Maryland’s Catholics, events back in England frequently disrupted colonial harmony.
• Ing Charles I’s own Catholic leanings, together with his high-handed use of monarchical power, eventually led to the English Civil War (1642-1645).
• After Charles’s defeat and execution for treason in 1649, England was ruled by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell.

Under the authority of the English Parliament, Puritans seized control of Maryland. These new overseers, staunch Reformed Protestants, were not friendly toward Catholicism. They immediately repealed the Toleration Act and banned Catholics from openly worshiping.

After the English monarchy was restored in 1660 by Charles I’s son, King Charles II, the Toleration Act was reinstated. But tensions between pro-Catholic Englishmen and Reformed Protestants continued. After Charles II’s death in 1685, his brother James II became king. Britain’s Protestants, increasingly nervous at James’s friendliness with France, decided they had had enough of pro-Catholic kings.

In 1688, England overthrew James and replaced him with the Dutch Protestant William of Orange, who was married to Mary, the daughter of James. This “Glorious Revolution” affirmed the Protestant character of the English monarchy once and for all. It also allowed simmering anti-Catholic sentiment in England and the North American colonies to boil over. Religion and politics were a deadly mix in England and its colonies in the mid to late seventeenth century. The English Civil War saw the execution of the pro-Catholic Charles I outside Whitehall Palace in London. Religious tensions continued during the reigns of the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell, Charles II (the son of the beheaded King Charles I), and James II (Charles II’s pro-Catholic brother) until the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

In Maryland, resentment against Catholic leaders had been growing for decades. Although the majority of the population was Protestant, Catholics retained control of the proprietary government and reinstated the Toleration Act. At least according to some Protestants, Maryland’s religious liberty was a farce.

Catholics appeared to enjoy all the power and all the wealth. Protestants complained that Catholic officials monopolized political offices, imposed unfair taxes, and lived in luxury while Protestant ministers struggled to make a living. Some non-Catholics whispered that Maryland Catholics had allied with the Seneca Indians for the “total destroying of all the Protestants.” When word of James II’s ouster came across the Atlantic, Protestants in Maryland rejoiced, while Catholics continued to hope that James II might still put down the rebellion.

1. Finally, Protestants acted against the Catholic proprietors.
2. John Coode, an Anglican minister and zealous anti-Catholic, led an armed force against the colonial capital, present-day Annapolis.
3. When the Catholic government tried to rally Marylanders to put down Coode’s Rebellion, it found few who were willing.

Eventually, Lord Baltimore’s men were forced to surrender on August 1, 1689. With a new Protestant governor in place, Marylanders openly passed a wave of repressive, anti-Catholic religious and civil measures. The Toleration Act was revoked again, Catholic worship was banned, and Catholics were barred from voting.

• The ground-breaking religious freedom that Maryland’s Catholics had extended to Protestants in 1649 was not enjoyed again until the time of the American Revolution.
• Eventually, the principle of religious liberty that Maryland first put forward in the Toleration Act was expanded to include non-Christians and was enshrined in U.S.

law.

What happened to Catholics in Maryland?

Cecil Calvert presenting to Lycurgus his Act Concerning Religion ” width=”200″ height=”309″> James Barry, 1793 In this engraving, Cecil Calvert presents his 1649 Act Concerning Religion to the ancient Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus, while libertarians throughout history, including Ben Franklin and William Penn, look on. New England was not the only destination sought by those fleeing religious persecution. In 1632, Cecelius Calvert, known as Lord Baltimore, was granted possession of all land lying between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay, Lord Baltimore saw this as an opportunity to grant religious freedom to the Catholics who remained in Anglican England. Although outright violence was more a part of the 1500s than the 1600s, Catholics were still a persecuted minority in the seventeenth century. For example, Catholics were not even permitted to be legally married by a Catholic priest. Baltimore thought that his New World possession could serve as a refuge. At the same time, he hoped to turn a financial profit from the venture. Maryland, named after England’s Catholic queen Henrietta Maria, was first settled in 1634. Unlike the religious experiments to the North, economic opportunity was the draw for many Maryland colonists. Consequently, most immigrants did not cross the Atlantic in family units but as individuals. The first inhabitants were a mixture of country gentlemen (mostly Catholic) and workers and artisans (mostly Protestant). This mixture would surely doom the Catholic experiment. Invariably, there are more poor than aristocrats in any given society, and the Catholics soon found themselves in the minority. The geography of Maryland, like that of her Southern neighbor Virigina, was conducive to growing tobacco. The desire to make profits from tobacco soon led to the need for low-cost labor. As a result, the number of indentured servants greatly expanded and the social structure of Maryland reflected this change. But the influx in immigration was not reflected in larger population growth because, faced with frequent battles with malaria and typhoid, life expectancy in Maryland was about 10 years less than in New England. Fearful that the Protestant masses might restrict Catholic liberties, the House of Delegates passed the Maryland Act of Toleration in 1649. This act granted religious freedom to all Christians. Like Roger Williams in Rhode Island and William Penn in Pennsylvania, Maryland thus experimented with laws protecting religious liberty. Unfortunately, Protestants swept the Catholics out of the legislature within a decade, and religious strife ensued. Still, the Act of Toleration is an important part of the colonial legacy of religious freedom that will culminate in the First Amendment in the American Bill of Rights. Historic Saint Mary’s City Visit Maryland’s first capital: Historic St. Mary’s City is an exciting mix of colorful living history and fascinating archaeology, all set in a beautiful Tidewater landscape. Lord Baltimore’s 17th century capital stands ready to be rediscovered.

Exhibits at the outdoor museum include the square-rigged ship, the Maryland Dove, Godiah Spray’s fine tobacco plantation, the reconstructed State House of 1676, a Woodland Indian hamlet, and much more. With miles of walking trails and scenic river views, Historic St. Mary’s City is indeed a special place where “Time & Tide Meet.” Report broken link Maryland Toleration Act The Toleration Act was a fairly progressive document written in 1649 allowing a broad latitude in religious toleration, particularly as it applied to Catholics.

Read the text of the Doctrine at this site. Report broken link c.10,000 B.C.: Indians known to have lived in Maryland by this date.c.1000 B.C. Indian introduction of pottery.c.800 B.C. Indian introduction of domesticated plants.c.1000 A.D. Permanent Indian villages established.1498.

Why did the Catholics leave Maryland?

Faithful to Family The Goughs, the Mattinglys, the Mudds, the Abells. Their names grace mailboxes, businesses, church rolls and community newspapers throughout Southern Maryland. Nearly 640 miles away, the same names permeate the “Holy Land,” a tri-county region in central Kentucky where thousands of Roman Catholic Marylanders from Charles, Prince George’s and St.

Yesterday, 600 people with those surnames and scores more in common came to Leonardtown from around the country for the National Reunion of Descendants of Maryland to Kentucky, a biennial event held in one state or the other since 1990.Through Sunday, Maryland participants will visit with relatives that are all the more special because, although they left, they never forgot their origins.The “frontier Catholicism” of their ancestors – which carried as many as a third of Maryland’s Catholics westward to Kentucky from the 1780s to 1815 – has generated enduring cross-country kinships and a genealogical gold mine for progeny in both states.Even if family members haven’t met before this weekend, they can, after more than two centuries, spot one another in a crowd.

“The funny thing is we all look alike,” says Becky Proffitt, reunion organizer and vice president of the Leonardtown council. “The Abells look like Abells; the Mattinglys look like Mattinglys.” Through the weekend, Kentucky and Southern Maryland inflections and dialects will co-mingle as distant cousins talk genealogy, listen to lectures, visit historic sites, feast on local delicacies such as stuffed ham and crabs at a Saturday banquet in the Hollywood volunteer fire department hall.

1. On Sunday, they will attend mass on St.
2. Clement’s Island in the Potomac River, where in 1634, the first recorded Roman Catholic Mass in the New World was celebrated by those who arrived from England aboard the Ark and the Dove.
3. For Proffitt, 73, and other reunion faithful, getting to know Kentucky kin is a way of getting to know one’s self.

“My first trip out to Kentucky, I went to St. Thomas Church in Bardstown, and in the back pew were all these essays written by fifth-graders,” Proffitt says. “We sat and read how their families got to Kentucky. We thought, ‘My gosh, these people know more about St.

Mary’s County than we do and more on why they came out there.’ That was what was so amazing, and they were school kids!” Karen Fowler Caldwell, of Lebanon, Ky., was among the reunion participants. When she drove into St. Mary’s County for the first time several years ago, she immediately spied a street called Fowler, her maiden name.

“Even though I had never been there, I had an eerie sense of home,” says Caldwell, a 40-year-old computer specialist at a high school. “Oh yes, it is very true,” says Gerald Thompson, an avid genealogist who first proposed the reunion. “It’s definitely the same gene pool and it’s very, very odd to travel across the country almost 1,000 miles and drive into an area and start seeing the same names on signs and mailboxes and the shops as if you were in Lebanon, Springfield or Bardstown.” All of his life, “I’ve known we were Maryland Catholics.

• I think that’s very unusual,” says Thompson, 60.
• The administrator in Kentucky’s local records program traces his and his wife’s lineage back to their colonial Maryland ancestors.
• The idea for the reunion sprung from a smaller family gathering in 1988, Thompson says.
• The thought was: Why not invite families from “all of the different Catholic lines” to come together and share their family histories? He never anticipated that 500 relatives would turn up at the first reunion in Nelson County, Ky., brandishing “photo albums, our books and charts and our family group sheets.” Copy machines, tape and video recorders, and laptops whirred overtime as participants debriefed one another, scoured libraries, visited family homesteads and took measure of the land to which their relatives had moved.

Yesterday, as the reunion got underway at the College of Southern Maryland, Doris Beavan Jones, who turns 81 today, studied photos of past get-togethers. She has every intention of attending the next reunion, in Springfield, Ky., said the spry woman, dressed in a crab cap and a Kentucky football T-shirt.

Virginia Keyes, Jeanine Head Miller and John Stanton clustered around a laptop and scanned some of the 80,000 names Keyes has entered into her Family Tree Maker database. Somewhere along the line, their families have all crossed paths, and if the right names are entered, family branches will connect, the screen will do a little dance and Keyes will give a gleeful whoop.

The point of their sleuthing is not only to build a family tree, but to find the “pieces of people’s lives that tell the larger story,” says Miller, 45. “It’s history that’s very personal to you and your family,” adds Miller, a curator at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

It’s the history of our country from an individual basis, but the individual happens to be related to you.” Nearby, Gerald Mattingly of Louisville, Ky., perused a typed family history discovered in someone’s attic and has inserted it into an enormous loose-leaf notebook filled with records. Mattingly, who works for Bell South, became interested in his Maryland ancestors fairly recently.

At his first reunion two years ago, “I didn’t know who my great grandfather was at that point,” he says. “I’ve made a lot of progress since then.” Weary of invasions Mattingly, 52, took to driving to the Holy Land on weekends where he pored over church records, explored old cemeteries, examined census data.

He can now tell you his entire Mattingly line and that his great, great, great grandfather came to Kentucky from Maryland in 1785, during the peak of the Catholic migration. Beginning in the 1780s and continuing through 1815, an estimated one-third to one-fourth of Maryland’s Catholics left for Kentucky, where it was believed they could provide more abundantly for their families.

Those who decided to leave were swept up in a westward-ho spirit, and had wearied of the risk of British invasions that had ravaged property and livestock during the Revolutionary War (and would do so again during the War of 1812). What’s more, Kentucky land was cheap, unlike in Maryland, where Catholic names often “appeared in the lists of “desperate debtors” in probate records, according to historian Thomas W.

Spalding. Maryland land also became increasingly scarce as families multiplied. At the same time, the diminishing acreage was exhausted by relentless cultivation of tobacco and other crops. Maryland was founded as a safe haven for Catholics, but scholars describe religious intolerance before and during the American Revolution.

Although that motive in the “great migration” is downplayed today, departing Catholics also sought a home where they could worship without being stripped of their civil rights. While as many Protestants as Catholics probably left Maryland for Kentucky, they often pulled up stakes upon discovering that much of the land they had settled was not as productive as presumed.

Unlike their Protestant counterparts, Catholic settlers “could not brook the idea of straggling off in different directions, where, though they might better their earthly condition, they and their children would, in all probability, be deprived of the consolations of religion,” Martin Spalding wrote in 1844.

In 1808, Bishop John Carroll petitioned Pope Pius VII to establish four new dioceses, including Bardstown, Ky. According to Spalding, by the time the new bishop, Benedict Flaget, arrived in Bardstown in 1811, “there were in Kentucky more than 1,000 families in some 30 congregations.” Their presence ensured that the town would become the center of a Catholic community that remains remarkably intact today.

Some Catholic settlers did leave Kentucky for Missouri, Indiana and other outposts, but a critical mass remained in the Holy Land, says Tim Riordan, chief archaeologist at Historic St. Mary’s City. “The thing that makes the Kentucky connection with St. Marys’ so strong and so unique is that residents are conscious of coming from a particular area and settling near each other for reasons of establishing themselves in separate community, so they could have access to a priest,” Riordan says.

History reveals “many, many settlements and colonization schemes from the East Coast moving inland,” he adds. “You pick up a group of people and you’re supposed to stay, yet within a few years, it kind of dissipates.” But the Maryland Catholics had a “very good, strong community relationship and that held them together.

• It is very much like the Mormons, who were held together by common religion and the idea that they were different.” “It’s a close-knit community,” says Rev.
• Steve Pohl, parish pastor of St.
• Thomas Church in Bardstown.
• We have our struggles and squabbles, but by and large, people just have a deep appreciation for their past.” Descendants of Maryland Protestants who went to Kentucky also attend the reunion.

Many have intermarried with Catholic descendants. “We not only have our Catholic lines, but our Protestant lines,” Thompson says. Kentucky descendants of Maryland’s founders have clung to numerous traditions associated with the state’s southern counties.

Some descendants such as Karen Fowler Caldwell stuff ham with cabbage, others with kale – just as in Southern Maryland. And in Kentucky, tobacco is grown and cured the Maryland way. Colonial Marylanders also brought with them “a love of dancing,” Thompson says. “Some of the priests were very down on that,

but their congregations went right ahead and that was their social life. They danced at corn huskings, quilting parties and barn raisings.” And then, there’s the ultimate Chesapeake Bay bounty, the oyster. There was never a Thanksgiving or a Christmas, Thompson says, “that you didn’t have a dish of scalloped oysters.” : Faithful to Family

What was Lord Baltimore’s goal in establishing a colony in the Chesapeake region?

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. Sir Anthony Van Dyck’s painting of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. Heritage Images / Getty Images 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.

What were Lord Baltimore’s original religious and economic intentions in creating the colony of Maryland?

Maryland – James Barry, 1793 In this engraving, Cecil Calvert presents his 1649 Act Concerning Religion to the ancient Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus, while libertarians throughout history, including Ben Franklin and William Penn, look on. Those who first settled in Maryland were also fleeing religious persecution.

In England in 1632, Cecelius Calvert, known as Lord Baltimore, was given all of the land between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. Lord Baltimore decided to grant religious freedom to the Catholics who remained in Anglican England and let them settle on the land. At this time in England, Catholics were still a persecuted minority.

For example, it was illegal for anyone to be married by a Catholic priest. Lord Baltimore thought that his land could serve as a refuge. But his intentions were not purely religious. He also hoped to make a profit on the settlement and use of the land. Maryland, named after England’s Catholic queen Henrietta Maria, was first settled in 1634.

Although it was seen as a refuge for Catholics to practice their religion, economic opportunity was the draw for many Maryland colonists. Consequently, most immigrants did not cross the Atlantic in family units but as individuals. The first settlers were a mixture of country gentlemen (mostly Catholic) and workers and artisans (mostly Protestant).

This mixture would doom the Catholic experiment. With more and more workers immigrating, Catholics soon found themselves in the minority. But the Maryland legislature still represented a pro-Catholic cause. Fearful that the Protestant masses might restrict Catholic liberties, the House of Delegates passed the Maryland Act of Toleration in 1649.

This act granted religious freedom to all Christians. Like Roger Williams in Rhode Island, Maryland thus created these laws to protect religious liberty. Within ten years, however, Protestants outnumbered Catholics in the legislature, which caused a lot of conflict between the two groups. The Act of Toleration, however, is an important part of the colonial legacy of religious freedom.

In fact, this Act was very influential to the First Amendment in the American Bill of Rights.

Why did the Calverts want more Catholics to settle in Maryland?

Why did the Calverts want more Catholics to settle in Maryland? They wanted to give Catholics a safe place to live, What caused the slave population in the Chesapeake colonies to grow? Slaves formed families and had children.

Was Maryland a Catholic colony?

Pre-Colonial History – George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, applied to Charles I for a royal charter for what was to become the Province of Maryland. After Calvert died in April 1632, the charter for “Maryland Colony” was granted to his son, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, on June 20, 1632.

• The colony was named in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I.
• Led by Leonard Calvert, Cecil Calvert’s younger brother, the first settlers departed from Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, on November 22, 1633 aboard two small ships, the Ark and the Dove.
• Their landing on March 25, 1634 at St.

Clement’s Island in southern Maryland, is commemorated by the state each year on that date as Maryland Day. This was the site of the first Catholic mass in the Colonies, with Father Andrew White leading the service. The first group of colonists consisted of 17 gentlemen and their wives, and about two hundred others, mostly indentured servants who could work off their passage.

• After purchasing land from the Yaocomico Indians and establishing the town of St.
• Mary’s, Leonard, per his brother’s instructions, attempted to govern the country under feudalistic precepts.
• Meeting resistance, in February 1635, he summoned a colonial assembly.
• In 1638, the Assembly forced him to govern according to the laws of England.

The right to initiate legislation passed to the assembly. In 1638, Calvert seized a trading post in Kent Island established by the Virginian William Claiborne. In 1644, Claiborne led an uprising of Maryland Protestants. Calvert was forced to flee to Virginia, but he returned at the head of an armed force in 1646 and reasserted proprietarial rule.

Maryland soon became one of the few predominantly Catholic regions among the English colonies in North America. Maryland was also one of the key destinations where the government sent tens of thousands of English convicts punished by sentences of transportation. Such punishment persisted until the Revolutionary War.

The founders designed the city plan of the colonial capital, St. Mary’s City, to reflect their world view. At the center of the city was the home of the mayor of St. Mary’s City. From that point, streets were laid out that created two triangles. Located at two points of the triangle extending to the west were the first Maryland state house and a jail.

Extending to the north of the mayor’s home, the remaining two points of the second triangle were defined by a Catholic church and a school. The design of the city was a literal separation of church and state that reinforced the importance of religious freedom. The largest site of the original Maryland colony, St.

Mary’s City was the seat of colonial government until 1708. Because Anglicanism had become the official religion in Virginia, a band of Puritans in 1642 left for Maryland; they founded Providence (now called Annapolis). In 1650, the Puritans revolted against the proprietary government. They set up a new government prohibiting both Catholicism and Anglicanism.

In March 1655, the 2nd Lord Baltimore sent an army under Governor William Stone to put down this revolt. Near Annapolis, his Roman Catholic army was decisively defeated by a Puritan army in the Battle of the Severn. The Puritan revolt lasted until 1658, when the Calvert family regained control and re-enacted the Toleration Act.

The Puritan revolutionary government persecuted Maryland Catholics during its reign. Mobs burned down all the original Catholic churches of southern Maryland. In 1708, the seat of government was moved to Providence, renamed Annapolis in honor of Queen Anne.

St. Mary’s City is now an archaeological site, with a small tourist center. Just as the city plan for St. Mary’s City reflected the ideals of the founders, the city plan of Annapolis reflected those in power at the turn of the 18th century. The plan of Annapolis extends from two circles at the center of the city – one including the State House and the other the Anglican St.

Anne’s Church (now Episcopal). The plan reflected a stronger relationship between church and state, and a colonial government more closely aligned with the Protestant church. Tobacco was the main export crop in the colonial era; it involved a great deal of hand labor, usually done by slaves, the original royal charter granted Maryland the Potomac River and territory northward to the fortieth parallel. This was found to be a problem, as the northern boundary would have put Philadelphia, the major city in Pennsylvania, within Maryland.

1. The Calvert family, which controlled Maryland, and the Penn family, which controlled Pennsylvania, decided in 1750 to engage two surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, to establish a boundary.
2. They surveyed what became known as the Mason–Dixon Line, which became the boundary between the two colonies.

The crests of the Penn family and of the Calvert family were put at the Mason–Dixon line to mark it. Later the Mason–Dixon line was used as a boundary between free and slave states under the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

What was the main religion of the Maryland Colony?

Maryland’s religious history is unique in colonial British North America. We largely remember Maryland as the Catholic colony that embraced religious toleration and religious freedom, in contrast to New England’s stodgily Puritan establishment or Virginia’s scattered Anglican church.

Scholars and commentators looking for sources or influences on the First Amendment are consistently drawn to the colony’s justifiably famous 1649 “Act concerning Religion.” This act made it a crime to “declare call or denominate any pson or psons whatsoever inhabiting” Maryland “an heritick, Scismatick, Idolater, puritan, Independant, Prespiterian popish prest, Jesuite, Jesuited papist, Lutheran, Calvenist, Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barro-wist, Roundhead, Sepatist, or any other name or terme in a reproachfull manner relating to matter of Religion.” “he free exercise” of Christian religion was explicitly protected by the act, with repeat violators of their fellow colonialists’ conscience were to be “severely punished by publick whipping & imprisonmt.” The “Act concerning Religion” places Maryland next to Rhode Island and Pennsylvania as one of the colonial regimes committed, for European Christians at least, to religious freedom in the seventeenth century.

The problem, and what makes the colony unique, is that Maryland’s experiment in religious freedom failed. In 1688, thanks to the opportunity provided by the political turmoil back in Britain, the Catholic Calverts were toppled by a Protestant-led coup.

• In 1701 the Church of England, with toleration for dissenting Protestants, was established in Maryland.
• Catholics were largely excluded from political power and their legal rights sharply curtailed.
• Maryland would become a success story for Anglicanism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

While Anglican establishments were created in some colonies, such as New York, and missionaries flooded into others, like Connecticut, only in Maryland did the Church of England firmly establish itself and become the central social and political denomination until the American Revolution.

1. For modern Americans this Protestant revolution in the Old Line State is a step backwards.
2. The history of American religion is supposed to be progressive: from the darkness of the establishments of New England and Virginia to the beginnings of religious freedom during the Revolution to our modern pluralistic society.

Why did Marylanders misstep? Why did they replace a regime of religious toleration with one of restriction? Late seventeenth-century Maryland was a religiously bifurcated society. A small Catholic minority, headed by the Calvert family, reigned over a growing Protestant majority.

In 1676 Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert, reported that “he greatest part of the Inhabitants of (three of four at least) doe consist of Prsesbiterians, Independents Anabaptists and Quakers, those of the Church of England as well as those of the Romish being the fewest.” Each of these denominations supported “a sufficient number of Churches and Houses called Meeting Houses for the people there and these have been built and are still kept in good repaire by a free and voluntary contribution of all such as frequent the said Churches and Meeting Houses.” Calvert painted this situation as placid, and in ways that should be familiar to modern Americans.

Maryland was a religiously free colony through laws “made by the advice and consent of the Freemen by their Delegates assembled as well as by the Proprietor and his Council.” Yet this tolerant regime, committed to the voluntary principle, spawned deep discontent.

There was a ceiling to the political aspirations of Protestants. Local elites could, and did, wield considerable influence but the most powerful colony-wide positions were largely reserved for Catholics. The “Act concerning Religion” was also nominally illegal, for the original charter given to the first Lord Baltimore ordered that the new “be dedicated and consecrated according to the Ecclesiastical Laws of our Kingdom of England.” Lack of a privileged place for the Church of England within Maryland violated this instruction.

There were also fears on the frontier, where some Marylanders Protestants saw Catholics as dangerous potential allies with the Natives and French—that “the Maryland Papists, to drive us Protestants to Purgatory within our selves in America, with the help of the French spirits from Canada.” An undercurrent within this unrest against the Calverts’ regime of religious toleration was a conflict between the Protestant majority and their Catholic proprietors over the nature of religious freedom.

This conceptional collision comes across clearly in the justification for their revolution provided by Protestant Associators, those who overthrew the proprietary government. These Protestant leaders noted that “Churches and Chappels, which by the said Charter should be built and consecrated according to the Ecclesiastical lawes of the Kingdom of England, to our greate regrett and discouragement of our religion, are erected and converted to the use of popish Idolatary and superstition, Jesuits and seminarie preists are the only incumbents.” This favoring of Catholicism, in a nominally tolerate colony, had a withering effect on Protestantism.

Lands “given for the maintenance of the Protestant Ministry become escheats, and are taken as forfeit, the ministers themselves discouraged, and noe care taken for their subsistance.” This breach in the supposed neutrality of Maryland’s government ran much deeper just economic privileges.

Lord Baltimore and his cronies were accused giving Protestant orphans to be raised by Catholics and “a young woman that has been lately forced by order of Council from her husband committed to the custody of a papist, and brought up in his religion.” “These and many more even infinit pressures and Calamitys” were subjected to Protestants by Catholics.

These outrages had a common origin: the failure of the religious regime created by the Calverts. It was not just that Maryland’s supposedly tolerant regime actually favored Catholics over Protestants. To the Associators toleration was not true religious freedom at all.

The lack of a institutional center of gravity created a situation, in the words of the 1692 Associator-dominated assembly, where “many wicked Lewd and disorderly people Prophaned and Neglected” the Sabbath “by working Drunkeness Swearing Gaming & other unlawfull pastimes and debaucheries.” Vice and corruption was allowed to run rampart by the fact that in embracing religious toleration and the voluntary principle the Calverts failed to provide their colony with a moral center.

True freedom to the Protestant revolutionaries of late seventeenth-century Maryland was an established, Protestant freedom. The ordered system of the Church of England provided the moral structure necessary for Marylanders to truly practice their religion in freedom—from popery, vice, and irreligion.

That is why Maryland “misstepped” on the path to our modern pluralist conception of religious freedom. Marylanders did not see it as a misstep at all. Rather, what happened in late seventeenth-century Maryland was a collision of conceptions of religious freedom—the pro-Catholic toleration of the Calverts with the Protestant freedom of the Associators.

The subsequent Protestant revolution exposes the fundamental weaknesses of religious toleration in seventeenth century. The religious landscape shaped by the “Act concerning Religion,” while committed to the voluntary principle, was one where the minority tolerated the beliefs of the majority,

• Protestants were locked out of substantial political, social, and economic influence, despite being able to practice their faith openly.
• In the seventeenth century tolerance bred resentment, not acceptance of other faiths or a pluralist commitment to diversity.
• Resentment bred revolution.
• Maryland’s largely forgotten seventeenth-century Protestant Revolution might have much to remind us about nature of religious toleration and freedom.

What the Free State’s experience suggests is that for a regime of religious toleration to survive it must provide more than the narrow ability to practice one’s faith openly. Religious life is intimately tied to political life, thus a regime that commits itself religious freedom without complying political freedom is asking for the sort of contempt bred by the Calverts among Maryland’s Protestants.

The same is true in reverse—political freedom without religious freedom can bred the same sort of unrest. Religious practices without political practices to support them, and vice verse, are troubled from the start. The problem of religious freedom in seventeenth-century Maryland is in some ways a problem for us today.

If we are to learn the lesson that Calverts overlooked, we must remember that religious practice, free or no, is intimately linked to political practice. _ For the full text of the act, see William Hand Browne, ed., Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland, January 1637/8-September 1664, Reprint, vol.1, Archives of Maryland (Baltimore: Harry S.

• Scott Inc., 1965), 244-7, quotations on 244, 246.
• This toleration had its clear boundaries.
• The “Act concerning Religion” declared those who “blaspheme God, that is Curse him, or deny our Saviour Jesus Christ to bee the sonne of God, or shall deny the holy Trinity the ffather sonne and holy Ghost, or the God-head of any of the said Three psons of the Trinity or the Vnity of the Godhead, or shall use or utter any reproachfull Speeches, words or language concerning the said Holy Trinity, or any of the said three psons thereof, shalbe punished with death and confiscaton or forfeiture of all his or her lands and goods to the Lord Proprietary and his heires.” There is, in the words of Owen Stanwood, “relatively little scholarship” on Maryland’s Protestant revolution.

As I hope this post makes clear this is an interpretative tragedy! The best place to begin is an old, but still excellent and useful, book: Lois Green Carr and David William Jordan, Maryland’s Revolution of Government, 1689-1692 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971).

1. For a brief recent treatment see: Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 106-12.
2. The literature on the late seventeenth and eighteenth century Anglican Church in Maryland is even scarcer.
3. The best (and only) starting point is: Nelson Waite Rightmyer, Maryland’s Established Church (Lebanon: Sowers Printing Company, 1956).

The account narrated in this post draws from these secondary sources and my reading of the primary sources. For Lord Baltimore’s report see: William Hand Browne, ed., Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1667-1687/8, Reprint, vol.5, Archives of Maryland (Baltimore: Harry S.

• Scott Inc., 1972), 133-4.
• For a sense of these anti-French, Catholic, and Indian fears, see the “Complaint from Heaven with a Huy and crye and a petition out of Virginia and Maryland” in Ibid., 134-42.
• Quotation on 134.
• For both this and the above paragraph, see “The Declaration Of the reason and motive for the prest appearing in arms of His Majtys Protestant Subjects in the Province of Maryland” in William Hand Browne, ed., Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1687/8-1693, Reprint, vol.8, Archives of Maryland (Baltimore: Harry S.

Scott Inc., 1972), 101-7. William Hand Browne, ed., Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly, April 1684-June 1692, Reprint, vol.13, Archives of Maryland (Baltimore: Press of the Friedenwald Company, 1972), 421.

When did Maryland stop being Catholic?

Legacy – The Protestant Revolution ended Maryland’s experiment with religious toleration. Religious laws were backed up with harsh sanctions. In the early 18th century Marylanders who “should utter any profane words concerning the Holy Trinity” would find themselves “bored through the tongue and fined twenty pounds” for a first offence.

1. Maryland established the Church of England as its official church in 1702 and barred Catholics from voting in 1718.
2. Full religious toleration would not be restored in Maryland until the American Revolution, when Darnall’s great-grandson Charles Carroll of Carrollton, arguably the wealthiest Catholic in Maryland, signed the American Declaration of Independence,

The United States Constitution would guarantee freedom of worship for all Americans for the first time.

Why was Maryland a safe place for English Catholics?

Maryland Day

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Annapolis, home of the Naval Academy

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Maryland Day March 25, 1634 Catholics escaping religious persecution in England saw Maryland as a safe haven. The colony even passed an act ensuring religious liberty and justice to those who believed in Jesus Christ in 1649. Besides the busy port of Baltimore, another important city in Maryland is Annapolis, established as the capital in 1694 and home to the U.S. Naval Academy, founded in 1845. You can see the grounds and surrounding city in this photo. When do you think Maryland became a state, and what famous song was written here? page 2 of 3

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Maryland Day

What was the first Catholic colony?

Catholicism was introduced to the English colonies in 1634 with the founding of the Province of Maryland by Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, based on a charter granted to his father George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore.

What was Maryland a refuge for?

Toleration Act

Part of English Civil War and Protestant Revolution of Maryland
A small broadside reprint of the Maryland Toleration Act
Date	April 21, 1649
Location	Maryland Colony
Also known as	Act Concerning Religion
Participants	Colonial Assembly of Maryland
Outcome	Repealed in October 1664

The Maryland Toleration Act, also known as the Act Concerning Religion, the first law in North America requiring religious tolerance for Christians, It was passed on April 21, 1649, by the assembly of the Maryland colony, in St. Mary’s City in St. Mary’s County, Maryland.

It created one of the pioneer statutes passed by the legislative body of an organized colonial government to guarantee any degree of religious liberty. Specifically, the bill, now usually referred to as the Toleration Act, granted freedom of conscience to all Christians. (The colony which became Rhode Island passed a series of laws, the first in 1636, which prohibited religious persecution including against non-Trinitarians; Rhode Island was also the first government to separate church and state.) Historians argue that it helped inspire later legal protections for freedom of religion in the United States.

The Calvert family, who founded Maryland partly as a refuge for English Catholics, sought enactment of the law to protect Catholic settlers and those of other religions that did not conform to the dominant Anglicanism of Britain and her colonies. The Act allowed freedom of worship for all Trinitarian Christians in Maryland, but sentenced to death anyone who denied the divinity of Jesus,

It was revoked in 1654 by William Claiborne, a Virginian who had been appointed as a commissioner by Oliver Cromwell ; he was an Anglican, a Puritan sympathizer, and strongly hostile to the Catholic Religion. When the Calverts regained control of Maryland, the Act was reinstated, before being repealed permanently in 1692 following the events of the Glorious Revolution, and the Protestant Revolution in Maryland.

As the first law on religious tolerance in the British North America, it influenced related laws in other colonies and portions of it were echoed in the writing of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which enshrined religious freedom in American law. Cecil Calvert, proprietor of the Maryland colony when the Maryland Toleration Act was passed The Maryland colony was founded by Cecil Calvert in 1634. Like his father George Calvert, who had originated the efforts that led to the colony’s charter, Cecil Calvert was Catholic at a time when England was dominated by the Anglican Church.

The Calverts intended the colony as a haven for Catholics fleeing England and as a source of income for themselves and their descendants. Many of Maryland’s first settlers were Catholic, including at least two Catholic priests, one of whom became the earliest chronicler of the colony’s history. But whatever Calvert’s intentions, Maryland was a colony of an Anglican nation.

Its charter had been granted by an Anglican king and seems to have assumed that the Church of England would be its official church. Anglican and later Puritan newcomers quickly came to outnumber the early Catholic settlers. Thus, by 1649 when the law was passed, the colonial assembly was dominated by Protestants, and the law was in effect an act of Protestant tolerance for Catholics, rather than the reverse.

• From Maryland’s earliest days, Cecil Calvert had enjoined its colonists to leave religious rivalries behind.
• Along with giving instructions on the establishment and defense of the colony, he asked the men he appointed to lead it to ensure peace between Protestants and Catholics.
• He also asked the Catholics to practice their faith as privately as possible, so as not to disturb that peace.

The Ordinance of 1639, Maryland’s earliest comprehensive law, expressed a general commitment to the rights of man, but did not specifically detail protections for religious minorities of any kind. Peace prevailed until the English Civil War, which opened religious rifts and threatened Calvert’s control of Maryland.

• In 1647, after the death of Governor Leonard Calvert, Protestants seized control of the colony.
• Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, quickly regained power, but recognized that religious tolerance not specifically enshrined in law was vulnerable.
• This recognition was combined with the arrival of a group of Puritans whom Calvert had induced to establish Providence, now Annapolis, by guaranteeing their freedom of worship.

Partially to confirm the promises he made to them, Calvert wrote the Maryland Toleration Act and encouraged the colonial assembly to pass it. They did so on April 21, 1649.

Who envisioned Maryland as a refuge for persecuted Catholics?

The first colonists to Maryland arrive at St. Clement’s Island on Maryland’s western shore and found the settlement of St. Mary’s. In 1632, King Charles I of England granted a charter to George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, yielding him proprietary rights to a region east of the Potomac River in exchange for a share of the income derived from the land.

The territory was named Maryland in honor of Henrietta Maria, the queen consort of Charles I. Before settlement began, George Calvert died and was succeeded by his son Cecilius, who sought to establish Maryland as a haven for Roman Catholics persecuted in England. In March 1634, the first English settlers–a carefully selected group of Catholics and Protestants–arrived at St.

Clement’s Island aboard the Ark and the Dove, Religious conflict was strong in ensuing years as the American Puritans, growing more numerous in Maryland and supported by Puritans in England, set out to revoke the religious freedoms guaranteed in the founding of the colony.

1. In 1649, Maryland Governor William Stone responded by passing an act ensuring religious liberty and justice to all who believed in Jesus Christ.
2. In 1654, however, the so-called Toleration Act was repealed after Puritans seized control of the colony, leading to a brief civil war that ended with Lord Baltimore losing control of propriety rights over Maryland in March 1655.

Although the Calverts later regained control of Maryland, anti-Catholic activity persisted until the 19th century, when many Catholic immigrants to America chose Baltimore as their home and helped enact laws to protect their free practice of religion.

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What was created to protect Catholics in Maryland?

Long before the First Amendment was adopted, the assembly of the Province of Maryland passed “An Act Concerning Religion,” also called the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649. The act was meant to ensure freedom of religion for Christian settlers of diverse persuasions in the colony.

The law made it a crime to blaspheme God, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, or the early apostles and evangelists. It also forbade one resident from referring to another’s religion in a disparaging way and it provided for honoring the Sabbath. Maryland was settled by George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, (pictured above) who was a Roman Catholic, so the law has sometimes been interpreted as a means of providing Roman Catholics with religious freedom.(Image via Archives of Maryland, painted by John Alfred Vinter circa 1881, public domain) Long before the First Amendment was adopted, the assembly of the Province of Maryland passed “An Act Concerning Religion,” also called the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.

The act was meant to ensure freedom of religion for Christian settlers of diverse persuasions in the colony.

Why did Catholics immigrate to Maryland?

Soon after, Maryland’s reputation for religious tolerance motivated many Catholics throughout the British Isles to emigrate. Maryland was a place for both profit and worship. It was also an opportunity for Catholics to introduce their religion to the Native population of the region.