in their practice, was to try the experiment of a democratic monarchy.
They would found a state the people of which should enjoy all the
freedom of action and thought that sane and well-disposed persons can
desire, within the boundaries of their personal concerns; they should
not be meddled with; each man's home should be his castle; they should
say what taxes should be collected, and what civil officers should
attend to their collective affairs. They should be like passengers on a
ship, free to sleep or wake, sit or walk, speak or be mute, eat or
fast, as they pleased: do anything in fact except scuttle the ship or
cut the rigging--or ordain to what port she should steer, or what
course the helmsman should lay. Matters of high policy, in other words,
should be the care of the proprietor; everything less than that,
broadly speaking, should be left to the colonists themselves. The
proprietor could not get as close to their personal needs as they
could: and they, preoccupied with private interests, could not see so
far and wide as he could. If then it were arranged that they should be
afforded every facility and encouragement to make their wants known:
and if it were guaranteed that he would adopt every means that
experience, wisdom and good-will suggested to gratify those wants: what
more could mortal man ask? There was nothing abnormal in the idea. The
principle is the same as that on which the Creator has placed man in
nature: man is perfectly at liberty to do as he pleases; only, he must
adapt himself to the law of gravitation, to the resistance of matter,
to hot and cold, wet and dry, and to the other impersonal necessities
by which the material universe is conditioned. The control of these
natural laws, as they are called, could not advantageously be given in
charge to man; even had he the brains to manage them, he could not
spare the time from his immediate concerns. He is well content,
accordingly, to leave them to the Power that put him where he is; and
he does not feel his independence infringed upon in so doing. When his
little business goes wrong, however, he can petition his Creator to
help him out: or, what amounts to the same thing, he can find out in
what respect he has failed to conform to the laws of nature, and, by
returning into harmony with them, insure himself success. What the
Creator was to mankind at large, Lord Baltimore proposed to be to his
colony; and, following this supreme example, and binding himself to
place the welfare of his people before all other considerations, how
could he make a mistake?
In arguments about the best ways of managing nations or communities, it
has been generally conceded that this scheme of an executive head on
one side, and a people freely communicating their wants to him on the
other, is sound, provided, first, that he is as solicitous about their
welfare as they themselves are; and secondly, that means exist for
continuous and unchecked intercommunication between them and him:--it
being premised, of course, that the ability of the head is commensurate
with his willingness. And leaving basic principles for the moment
aside, it is notorious that one-man power is far prompter, weightier,
and cleaner-cut than the confused and incomplete compromises of a body
of representatives are apt to be.
All this may be conceded. And yet experience shows that the one-man
system, even when the man is a Lord Baltimore, is unsatisfactory. Lord
Baltimore, indeed, finally achieved a technical success; his people
loved and honored him, his wishes were measurably realized, and, so far
as he was concerned, Maryland was the victim of fewer mistakes than
were the other colonies. But the fact that Lord Baltimore's career
closed in peace and credit was due less to what he did and desired,
than to the necessity his career was under of sooner or later coming to
a close. Had he possessed a hundred times the ability and benevolence
that were his, and had been immortal into the bargain, the people would
have cast him out; they were willing to tolerate him for a few years,
more or less, but as a fixture--No! "Tolerate" is too harsh a word; but
another might be too weak. The truth is, men do not care half so much
what they get, as how they get it. The wolf in Aesop's fable keenly
wanted a share of the bones which made his friend the mastiff so sleek;
but the hint that the bones and the collar went together drove him
hungry but free back to his desert. It is of no avail to give a man all
he asks for; he resents having to ask you for it, and wants to know by
what right you have it to give. A man can be grateful for friendship,
for a sympathetic look, for a brave word spoken in his behalf against
odds--he can be your debtor for such things, and keep his manhood
uncompromised. But if you give him food, and ease, or preferment, and
condescension therewith, look for no thanks from him; esteem yourself
fortunate if he do not hold you his enemy. The gifts of the soul are
free; but material benefits are captivity. So the Maryland colonists,
recognizing that their proprietor meant well, forgave him his
generosity, and his activities in their behalf--but only because they
knew that his day would presently be past. Man is infinite as well as
finite: infinite in his claims, finite in his power of giving. And for
Baltimore to presume to give the people all they claimed, was as much
as to say that his fullness could equal their want, or that his rights
and capacities were more than theirs. He gave them all that a democracy
can possess--except the one thing that constitutes democracy; that is,
absolute self-direction. It may well be that their little ship of
state, steered by themselves, would have encountered many mishaps from
which his sagacious guidance preserved it. But rather rocks with their
pilotage than port with his: and beyond forgiving him their magnanimity
could not go.
There is little more than this to be derived from study of the Maryland
experiment. Let a man manage himself, in big as well as in little
things, and he will be happy on raw clams and plain water, with a
snow-drift for a pillow--as we saw him happy in Plymouth Bay: but give
him roast ortolans and silken raiment, and manage him never so little,
and you cannot relieve his discontent. And is it not well that it
should be so? Verily it is--if America be not a dream, and immortality
a delusion.
Lord Baltimore would perhaps have liked to see all his colonists
Catholics; but his experience of religious intolerance had not inflamed
him against other creeds than his own, as would have been the case with
a Spaniard; it seemed to awaken a desire to set tolerance an example.
Any one might join his community except felons and atheists; and as a
matter of fact, his assortment of colonists soon became as motley as
that of Williams in Providence. The landing of the first expedition on
an island in the Potomac was attended by the making and erecting by the
Jesuit priests of a rude cross, and the celebration of mass; but there
were even then more Protestants than Catholics in the party; and though
the leadership was Catholic for many years, it was not on account of
the numerical majority of persons of that faith. Episcopalians ejected
from New England, Puritans fleeing from the old country, Quakers and
Anabaptists who were unwelcome everywhere else, met with hospitality in
Maryland. Let them but believe in Jesus Christ, and all else was
forgiven them. Nevertheless, Catholicism was the religion of the
country. Its inhabitants might be likened to promiscuous guests at an
inn whose landlord made no criticisms on their beliefs, further than to
inscribe the Papal insignia on the signboard over his door. Thus
liberty was discriminated from license, and in the midst of tolerance
there was order.
The first settlement was made on a small creek entering the north side
of the Potomac. Here an Indian village already existed; but its
occupants were on the point of deserting it, and were glad to accept
payment from the colonists for the site which they had no further use
for. On the other hand, the colonists could avail themselves of the
wigwams just as they stood, and had their maize fields ready cleared.
Baltimore, meanwhile, through his agent (and brother) Leonard Calvert,
furnished them with all the equipment they needed; and so well was the
way smoothed before them, that the colony made progress ten times as
rapidly as Virginia had done. They called their new home St. Mary's;
and the date of its occupation was 1634. Their first popular assembly
met for legislation in the second month of the ensuing year. In that
and subsequent meetings they asserted their right of jurisdiction,
their right to enact laws, the freedom of "holy church": his lordship
gently giving them their head. In 1642, perhaps to disburden themselves
of some of their obligation to him, they voted him a subsidy. Almost
the only definite privilege which he seems to have retained was that of
pre-emption of lands. At this period (1643) all England was by the
ears, and Baltimore's hold upon his colony was relaxed. In Virginia and
the other colonies, which had governors of their own, the neglect of
the mother country gave them opportunity for progress; but the people
of Maryland, no longer feeling the sway of their non-resident
proprietor, and having no one else to look after them, became
disorderly; which would not have happened, had they been empowered to
elect a ruler from among themselves. Baltimore's enemies took advantage
of these disturbances to petition for his removal from the
proprietorship; but he was equal to the occasion; and by confirming his
colonists in all just liberties, with freedom of conscience in the
foreground, he composed their dissensions, and took away his enemies'
ground of complaint. In 1649, the legislature sat for the first time in
two branches, so that one might be a check upon the other. Upon this
principle all American legislatures are still formed.
But the reign of Cromwell in England gave occasion for sophistries in
Maryland. All other Englishmen, in the colonies or at home, were
members of a commonwealth; but Baltimore still claimed the Marylanders'
allegiance. On what grounds?--for since the king from whom he derived
his power was done away with, so must be the derivative power.
Baltimore stood between them and republicanism. To give edge to the
predicament, the colony was menaced by covetous Virginia on one hand,
and by fugitive Charles II., with a governor of his own manufacture, on
the other. Calamity seemed at hand.
In 1650, the year after Charles I.'s execution, the Parliament
appointed commissioners to bring royalist colonies into line; Maryland
was to be reannexed to Virginia; Bennett, then governor of Virginia,
and Clairborne, unseated Stone, Baltimore's lieutenant, appointed an
executive council, and ordered that burgesses were to be elected by
supporters of Cromwell only. The question of reannexation was referred
to Parliament. Baltimore protested that Maryland had been less royalist
than Virginia; and before the Parliament could decide what to do, it
was dissolved, carrying with it the authority of Bennett and
Clairborne. Stone now reappeared defiant; but the Virginians attacked
him, and he surrendered on compulsion. The Virginian government decreed
that no Roman Catholics could hereafter vote or be elected.
Baltimore, taking his stand on his charter, declared these doings
mutinous; and Cromwell supported him. Stone once more asserted himself;
but in the skirmish with the Virginians that followed, he was defeated,
yielded (he seems to have had no granite in his composition), and, with
his supporters, was ordered to be shot. His life was spared, however;
but Cromwell, again appealed to, refused to act. The ownership of
Maryland was therefore still undetermined. It was not until 1667 that
Baltimore and Bennett agreed to compromise their dispute. The boundary
between the two domains was maintained, but settlers from Virginia were
not to be disturbed in their holdings. The second year after Cromwell's
death, the representatives of Maryland met and voted themselves an
independent assembly, making Fendall, Baltimore's appointee, subject to
their will. Finally, being weary of turmoil, they made it felony to
alter what they had done. The colony was then abreast of Virginia in
political privileges, and had a population of about ten thousand, in
spite of its vicissitudes.
But the quiet, invincible Lord Baltimore was still to be reckoned with.
At the Restoration, he sent his deputy to the colony, which submitted
to his authority, and Fendall was convicted of treason for having
allowed the assembly to overrule him. A general amnesty was proclaimed,
however, and the kindliness of the government during the remainder of
the proprietor's undisputed sway attracted thousands of settlers from
all the nations of Europe. Between Baltimore and the people, a
give-and-take policy was established, one privilege being set against
another, so that their liberties were maintained, and his rights
recognized. Though he stood in his own person for all that was opposed
to democracy, he presided over a community which was essentially
democratic; and he had the breadth of mind to acknowledge that because
he owned allegiance to kings and popes, was no reason why others should
do so. Suum cuique. Could he but have gone a step further, and denied
himself the gratification of retaining his hard-earned proprietorship,
he would have been one of the really great men of history.
The ripple of events which we have recorded may seem too insignificant;
of still less import is the story of the efforts of Clairborne, from
1634: to 1647, to gain, or retain possession of Kent Island, in the
Chesapeake, on which he had "squatted" before Baltimore got his
charter. Yet, from another point of view, even slight matters may weigh
when they are related to the stirring of the elements which are to
crystallize into a nation. Maryland, like a bird half tamed, was ready
to fly away when the cage door was left open, and yet was not averse to
its easy confinement when the door was shut again. But, unlike the
bird, time made it fonder of liberty, instead of leading it to forget
it; and when the cage fell apart, it was at home in the free air.
The settlement of the Carolinas, during the twenty years or so from
1660 to 1680, presented features of singular grotesqueness. There was,
on one side, a vast wilderness covering the region now occupied by
North and South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific. It had been
nibbled at, for a hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but
no permanent hold had been got upon it. Here were thousands upon
thousands of square miles in which nature rioted unrestrained, with
semi-tropic fervor; the topography of which was unknown, and whose
character in any respect was a matter of pure conjecture. This
wilderness was on one side; on the other were a worthless king, a
handful of courtiers, and a couple of highly gifted doctrinaires, Lord
Shaftesbury and John Locke, the philosopher. We can picture Charles II.
lolling in his chair, with a map of the Americas spread out on his
knees, while the other gentlemen in big wigs and silk attire, and long
rapiers dangling at their sides, are grouped about him. "I'll give you
all south of Virginia," says he, indicating the territory with a sweep
of his long fingers. "Ashley, you and your friend Locke can draw up a
constitution, and stuff it full of your fine ideas; they sound well:
we'll see how they work. You shall be kings every man of you; and may
you like it no worse than I do! You'll have no France or Holland to
thwart you--only bogs and briers and a few naked blacks. Your charter
shall pass the seals to-morrow: and much good may it do you!"
So the theorists and the courtiers set out to subdue the untutored
savageness of nature with a paper preamble and diagrams and rules and
inhibitions, and orders of nobility and a college of heralds, and
institutions of slavery and serfdom, and definitions of freeholders and
landgraves, caciques and palatines; and specifications of fifths for
proprietors, fifths for the nobility, and the rest for the common herd,
who were never to be permitted to be anything but the common herd, with
no suffrage, no privileges, and no souls. All contingencies were
provided against, except the one contingency, not wholly unimportant,
that none of the proposals of the Model Constitution could be carried
into effect. Strange, that Ashley Cooper--as Lord Shaftesbury was
then--one of the most brilliant men in Europe, and John Locke, should
get together and draw squares over a sheet of paper, each representing
four hundred and eighty thousand acres, with a cacique and landgraves
and their appurtenances in each--and that they should fail to perceive
that corresponding areas would never be marked out in the pathless
forests, and that noblemen could not be found nor created to take up
their stand, like chessmen, each in his lonely and inaccessible morass
or mountain or thicket, and exercise the prerogatives of the paper
preamble over trees and panthers and birds of the air! How could men of
such radiant intelligence as Locke and Shaftesbury unquestionably were,
show themselves so radically ignorant of the nature of their fellowmen,
and of the elementary principles of colonization? The whole thing
reads, to-day, like some stupendous jest; yet it was planned in grave
earnest, and persons were found to go across the Atlantic and try to
make it work.
Lord Shaftesbury was one of the Hampshire Coopers, and the first earl.
He was a sort of English Voltaire: small and thin, nervous and
fractious, with a great cold brain, no affections and no illusions; he
had faith in organizations, but none in man; was destitute of
compunctions, careless of conventions and appearances, cynical,
penetrating, and frivolous. He was a skeptic in religion, but a devotee
of astrology; easily worried in safety, but cool and audacious in
danger. He despised if he did not hate the people, and regarded kings
as an unavoidable nuisance; the state, he thought, was the aristocracy,
whose business it was to keep the people down and hold the king in
check. His career--now supporting the royalists, now the roundheads,
now neither--seems incoherent and unprincipled; but in truth he was one
of the least variable men of his time; he held to his course, and king
and parliament did the tacking. He was an incorruptible judge, though
he took bribes; and an unerring one, though he disregarded forms of
law. He was tried for treason, and acquitted; joined the Monmouth
conspiracy, and escaped to Holland, where he died at the age of
sixty-two. What he lacked was human sympathies, which are the beginning
of wisdom; and this deficiency it was, no doubt, that led him into the
otherwise incomprehensible folly of the Carolina scheme.
Locke could plead the excuse of being totally unfamiliar with practical
life; he was a philosopher of abstractions, who made an ideal world to
fit his theories about it. He could write an essay on the
Understanding, but was unversed in Common-sense. His nature was more
calm and normal than Shaftesbury's, but in their intellectual
conclusions they were not dissimilar. The views about the common people
which Sir William Berkeley expressed with stupid brutality, they stated
with punctual elegance. They were well mated for the purpose in hand,
and they performed it with due deliberation and sobriety. It was not
until five years after the grant was made that the constitution was
written and sealed. It achieved an instantaneous success in England,
much as a brilliant novel might, in our time; and the authors were
enthusiastically belauded. The proprietors--Albemarle, Craven,
Clarendon, Berkeley, Sir William Berkeley, Sir John Colleton and Sir
George Carteret, and Shaftesbury himself--began to look about for their
serfs and caciques, and to think of their revenues. Meanwhile the
primeval forest across three thousand miles of ocean laughed with its
innumerable leaves, and waved its boughs in the breath of the spirit of
liberty. The laws of the study went forth to battle with the laws of
nature.
Ignorant of these courtly and scholarly proceedings, a small knot of
bonafide settlers had built their huts on Albemarle Sound, and had for
some years been living there in the homeliest and most uneducated peace
and simplicity. Some had come from Virginia, some from New England, and
others from the island of Bermuda. They had their little assembly and
their governor Stevens, their humble plantations, their modest trade,
their beloved solitudes, and the plainest and least obtrusive laws
imaginable. They paddled up and down their placid bayous and rivers in
birch-bark canoes; they shot deer and 'possums for food and panthers
for safety, they loved their wives and begat their children, they wore
shirts and leggins of deerskin like the Indians, and they breathed the
pure wholesomeness of the warm southern air. When to these backwoods
innocents was borne from afar the marvelous rumors of the
silk-stockinged and lace-ruffled glories, originated during an idle
morning in the king's dressing-room, which were to transfigure their
forest into trim gardens and smug plantations, surrounding royal
palaces and sumptuous hunting pavilions, perambulated by uniformed
officials, cultivated by meek armies of serfs, looking up from their
labors only to doff their caps to lordly palatines and lily-fingered
ladies with high heels and low corsages: when they tried to picture to
themselves their solemn glades and shadow-haunted streams and inviolate
hills, their eyries of eagles and lairs of stag and puma, the savage
beauty of their perilous swamps, all the wild magnificence of this pure
home of theirs--metamorphosed by royal edict into a magnified
Versailles, in which lutes and mandolins should take the place of the
wolf's howl and the panther's scream, the keen scent of the pine balsam
be replaced by the reek of musk and patchouli, the honest sanctity of
their couches of fern give way to the embroidered corruption of a fine
lady's bedchamber, the simple vigor of their pioneer parliament bewitch
itself into a glittering senate chamber, where languid chancellors
fingered their golden chains and exchanged witty epigrams with
big-wigged, snuff-taking cavaliers:--when they attempted to house these
strange ideas in their unsophisticated brains, they must have stared at
one another with a naive perplexity which slowly broadened their tanned
and bearded visages into contagious grins. They looked at their hearty,
clear-eyed wives, and watched the gambols of their sturdy children, and
shook their heads, and turned to their work once more.
The first movements of the new dispensation took the form of trying to
draw the colonists together into towns, of reviving the Navigation
Acts, of levying taxes on their infant commerce, and in general of
tying fetters of official red tape on the brawny limbs of a primitive
and natural civilization. The colony was accused of being the refuge of
outlaws and traitors, rogues and heretics; and Sir William Berkeley,
governor of Virginia, one of the proprietors under the Model
Constitution, was deputed to make as much mischief in the virgin
settlement as he could.
The colonists numbered about four thousand, spread over a large
territory; they did not want to desert their palmetto thatched cabins
and strenuously-cleared acres; they disliked crowding into towns; they
saw no justice in paying to intangible and alien proprietors a penny
tax on their tobacco exports to New England--though they paid it
nevertheless. They particularly objected to the interference of
Governor Berkeley, for they knew him well. And when the free election
of their assembly was attacked, they sent emissaries to England to
remonstrate, and meanwhile, John Culpepper leading, and without waiting
for the return of their emissaries, they arose and wiped out the things
and persons that were objectionable, and then returned serenely to
their business. They did not fly into a passion, and froth at the
mouth, and massacre and torture; but quietly and inflexibly, with
hardly a keener flash from their fearless eyes, they put things to
rights, and thought no more about it.
Such treasonable proceedings, however, fluttered the council chambers
in London sorely, and stout John Culpepper, who believed in popular
liberty and was not afraid to say so, went to England to justify what
had been done. He was arrested and put on trial, though he demanded to
be tried, if at all, in the place where the offense was committed. The
intent of his adversaries was not to give him justice, but simply to
hang him; and why go to the trouble and expense of carrying him to
Carolina to do that? He went near to becoming a martyr, did stout John;
but, unexpectedly, Shaftesbury, who might believe in despotism, but who
fretted to behold injustice, undertook his defense and brought him out
clear. The rest of the "rebels" were amnestied the following year,
1681. But one Seth Sothel, who had bought out Lord Clarendon's
proprietary rights, was sent out as governor; and after escaping from
the Algerine pirates, who captured and kept him for a couple of years,
he arrived at Albemarle, commissioned, as Bancroft admirably puts it,
to "Transform a log cabin into a baronial castle, a negro slave into a
herd of leet-men." Sothel was not long in perceiving that this was
beyond his powers, but he could steal: and so he did for a few years,
when the colonists, thinking he had enough, unseated him, tried him,
and sentenced him to a year's exile and to nevermore be officer of
theirs.