commissary Blair, whose zeal for future generations was aided by subscriptions, by a gift of quitrents from the king, by an endowment from the royal domain, and by a tax of a penny a pound on tobacco exported to other plantations.

The powers of the governor were exorbitant; he was at once lieutenant-general and admiral, lord treasurer and chancellor, the chief judge in all courts, president of the council, and bishop, or ordinary; so that the armed force, the revenue, the interpretation of law, the administration of justice, the church, all were under his control or guardianship.

The checks on his power existed in his instructions, in the council, and in the general assembly. But the instructions were kept secret; and, besides, they rather confirmed his prerogatives. The members of the council owed their appointment to his recommendation, their continuance to his pleasure, and, moreover, looked to him for advancement to places of profit. The assembly was restrained by the prospect of a negative from the governor and from the crown, was compelled to solicit the concurrence of the council, was exposed to influence from royal patronage, was watched in its actions by a clerk whom the governor appointed, and was always sure of being dissolved if complaints began to grow loud or opposition too ardent. It had, moreover, lost the method of resistance best suited to the times, since, in addition to quitrents, a former legislature had already established a perpetual revenue.

Yet the people of Virginia still found methods of nourishing the spirit of independence. The very existence of the forms of representation led to comparison; and "the assembly concluded itself entitled to all the rights and privileges of an English parliament;" and the records of the house of commons were examined in search of precedents favorable to legislative freedom.

The constitution of the Church in Virginia cherished colonial freedom; for the act of 1642, which established it, reserved the right of presentation to the parish, and

the vestry kept themselves the parson's master by preventing his induction, so that he acquired no freehold in his living, and might be removed at pleasure.

But the greatest safeguard of liberty in Virginia was the individual freedom of mind, which formed, of necessity, the characteristic of independent landholders living apart on their plantations. In the age of commercial monopoly, Virginia had not one market town, not one place of trade. It did not seek to share actively in the profits of commerce; it had little of the precious metals, and still less of credit; it was satisfied with agriculture. Taxes were paid in tobacco; remittances to Europe were made in tobacco; the revenue of the clergy, and the magistrates, and the colony, was collected in the same currency; the colonial tradesman received his pay in straggling parcels of it; and ships from abroad were obliged to lie whole months in the rivers, before boats, visiting the several plantations on their banks, could pick up a cargo. In the season of a commercial revolution, the commercial element did not enter into the character of the colony. Its inhabitants "daily grew more and more averse to cohabitation." All royalists and Churchmen as they were by ancestry, habit, and established law, they reasoned boldly in their seclusion, making their own good pleasure their rule of conduct. "Pernicious notions, fatal to the royal prerogative, were improving daily; and, though Virginia protested against the charge of "republicanism," as an unfounded reproach, yet colonial opinion, the offspring of free inquiry, which seclusion awakened, the woods sheltered, and the self-will of slaveholders fortified, was more than a counterpoise to the prerogative of the British crown. former ages, no colony had ever enjoyed a happier freedom. From the days of the insurrection of Bacon, for a period of three quarters of a century, Virginia possessed uninterrupted peace. On its own soil, the strife with the Indians was ended; the French hesitated to invade the western frontier, on which they lowered: if sometimes alarm was spread by privateers upon the

In

coast, a naval foe was not attracted to a region which had neither town nor magazines, where there was nothing to destroy but a field of tobacco, nothing to plunder but the frugal stores of scattered plantations. The soil was stained by nothing but the sweat of the laborer. In such scenes of tranquil happiness, the political strifes were but the fitful ebullitions of a high spirit. Like schoolboys of old at a barring out, the Virginians resisted their government, not as ready for independence, but as resolved on a holiday.

Protestant" revolu

The English revolution was a tion of the Roman Catholic proprietary of Maryland it sequestered the authority, while it protected the fortunes. The deputies of Lord Baltimore hesitated to proclaim the new sovereigns. The delay gave birth to an armed association, formed in April, 1689, for asserting the right of King William; and the deputies were easily driven to a garrison on the south side of Patuxent River, about two miles above its mouth. There they capitulated, obtaining security for themselves, and yielding their assent to the exclusion of Papists from all provincial offices. A convention of the associates, "for the defence of the Protestant religion," assumed the government.

The privy council, bigoted against Catholics, advised the forfeiture of the charter by a process of law; but King William, heedless of the remonstrances of the proprietary, who could be convicted of no crime but his creed, and impatient of judicial forms, in June, 1691, by his own power, constituted Maryland a royal government. The arbitrary act was sanctioned by a legal opinion from Lord Holt. In 1692, Sir Lionel Copley arrived with a royal commission, dissolved the convention, assumed the government, and convened an assembly. Its first act recognized William and Mary; its second established the Church of England as the religion of the state, to be supported by general taxation. Thus were the barons of Baltimore superseded for a generation. Under Protestant auspices, the an

1694-1715.]

MARYLAND.

91

cient capital, sacred to the Virgin Mary, was, in 1694, abandoned, and Annapolis became the seat of government. The system of a religion of state, earnestly advanced by the boastful eagerness of Francis Nicholson, who passed from Virginia to the government of Maryland, and by the patient, the disinterested, but unhappily too exclusive, earnestness of the commissary Thomas Bray, became the settled policy of the government. After many efforts, Episcopacy was, in 1702, established by the colonial legislature, and the right of appointment and induction secured to the governor ; but the English acts of toleration were at the same time put in force. Protestant dissent was, therefore, safe. The Roman Catholics alone were left without an ally, exposed to English bigotry and colonial injustice. They alone were disfranchised on the soil which, long before Locke pleaded for toleration, or Penn for religious freedom, they had chosen, not as their own asylum only, but, with catholic liberality, as the asylum of every persecuted sect. In the land which Catholics had opened to Protestants, the Catholic inhabitant was the sole victim to Anglican intolerance.

It was not till 1715, that the power of the proprietary was restored. In the mean time, the administration of Maryland resembled that of Virginia. Nicholson and Andros were governors in each. Like Virginia, Maryland had no considerable town, was disturbed but little by the Indians, and less by the French. Its staple was tobacco; yet hemp and flax were raised, and both, like tobacco, were sometimes used as currency. In Somerset and Dorchester, the manufacture of linen, and even of woollen cloth, was attempted. This province surpassed every other in the number of its white servants. The market was always supplied with them, the price varying from twelve to thirty pounds. By its position, also, Maryland was connected with the north; it is the most southern colony which, in 1695, consented to pay its quota towards the defence of New York, thus forming, from the Chesapeake to Maine, an imperfect con

federacy. The union was increased by a public post. Eight times in the year, letters might be forwarded from the Potomac to Philadelphia. During the period of the royal government, the assembly still retained influence; for it firmly refused to establish a permanent revenue. Education was neglected; yet a legislative enactment promised a library and a free school to every parish a proof of the zeal of the commissary and the good intentions of the assembly. The population of the colony increased, though not so rapidly as elsewhere. In 1710, the number of bond and free must have exceeded thirty thousand. In 1715, the authority of the infant proprietary was vindicated in the person of his guardian.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE CENTRAL STATES, AFTER THE REVOLUTION OF 1688.

MORE happy than Lord Baltimore, the proprietary of Pennsylvania recovered his authority without surrendering his principles. Accepting the resignation of the narrow and imperious but honest Blackwell, who, at the period of the revolution, acted as his deputy, the Quaker chief desired "to settle the government in a condition to please the generality." And, as the council of his province was, at that time, elected directly by the people, that body collectively was constituted his deputy. Of its members, Thomas Lloyd, from North Wales, an Oxford scholar, universally beloved as a bright example of the integrity of virtue, the oracle of "the patriot rustics" on the Delaware, was, by free suffrage, constituted president of the council. But the lower counties were jealous of the superior weight of Pennsylvania; disputes respecting appointments to office grew up; the council