Maryland: Definition and Much More from Answers.com

A small state on the Atlantic coast, midway between the northern and southern boundaries of the United States, Maryland embraces the Chesapeake Bay and extends narrowly westward into the Appalachian Mountains. When the first European settlers arrived in the area, there were a dozen or more Native American tribes, each with 200 or more members crisscrossing the land, living mostly on the seafood from the Chesapeake. For sixty years after European settlement, relations between the Indians and the settlers were tense but short of war, and during the 1690s most of the Indians of the area moved south or west.

Seventeenth-Century Settlement

Explorers arrived in the 1580s, and in 1607 the London Company, with a British title to the land that is now Maryland, settled at Jamestown. The Virginians mapped the Chesapeake, traded with the Indians, and in 1631 William Claibourne from Jamestown established a furtrading settlement at Kent Island. Maryland's existence as a separate colony, however, emerged from the Calvert family. George Calvert was a personal friend of King James I, liked by the king for his Roman Catholic faith and his devotion to conservative feudal ideals. King James elevated him to the peerage as Lord Baltimore and gave him title to lands in Newfoundland. From 1620 to 1629, Calvert invested in the colony that he called Avalon, but the climate was too severe and the colony failed. In 1632, Calvert persuaded King Charles I to reclaim from the London Company the Potomac River and the Virginia lands to the north, and to transfer this land to him. Calvert diplomatically named the grant for the king's wife.

George Calvert died before settlement could proceed, but his sons ably took up the project. The oldest son Cecil became the second Lord Baltimore and managed colonization from London. The second son Leonard led the expedition of the Arc and Dove that landed at St. Clement's Island in the Potomac on 25 March 1634 and proceeded a few days later to settle permanently at St. Mary's. The first settlers included about seventeen gentlemen-investors who were mostly Catholic, about thirty freemen, and about eighty indentured servants who were mostly Protestant. The expedition also included two Africans who boarded the ship in the Caribbean, presumably as indentures. The Calverts gave at least 2,000 acres to investors who paid the way of five or more servants, and they gave 100 acres to freemen who paid their own way. The Calverts sold additional land, and they collected quitrents on the lands they gave away or sold.

Within a few years the settlers were widely scattered, cultivating corn for subsistence and tobacco for sale to England. At least until the end of the century, life was extremely rude. The ratio of men to women was three to one, and life expectancy was far below that in England. Still, there was easy upward mobility for those who survived, and for those who bought servants and collected the land bounty for them, and newcomers kept arriving. In 1649 the Calverts made the most of their settlers' religious diversity, accepting an Act of Religious Toleration to encourage more settlers. It was one of the first such acts in the history of Christianity.

Life was harsh enough on this outer edge of civilization, and eight decades of intermittent warfare made it harsher. From 1645 to 1660 Maryland repulsed at least three expeditions of attacking Virginians who proclaimed fear of their Catholic-led neighbors and who sought booty for themselves in the wilderness. Then, periodically, especially from 1689 to 1715, the colony was torn by civil war as younger planters revolted against the Calvert proprietors and their appointed governors. The rebellions expanded the power of the General Assembly over the governor, moved the capital from Catholic-leaning St. Mary's to Puritan-leaning Annapolis (1694), and repealed the Toleration Act in order to establish the Anglican Church (1702). The chastened Calverts—there were six generations from George Calvert to the American Revolution—joined the Anglican Church and regained most of their authority over the governor.

The Eighteenth Century and the American Revolution

The transition from rudeness to prosperity—from a population of 30,000 in 1700 to 340,000 in 1800—came largely with slavery. The Calvert proprietors and the settlers increasingly saw permanent bondage as an avenue toward stability and prosperity, and tolerance of slavery grew into active promotion. When slavery became fully legal in 1664, Africans numbered no more than 2 percent of the population, but their numbers surged to 20 percent in 1710, and 30 percent in 1750. The result was an economic takeoff—a surge in tobacco exports, and the rise of a money economy. A rich and stable planter class emerged, and fine Georgian country houses appeared. Scotch-Irish and Germans poured in, moving into the backcountry to establish new towns like Frederick and Hagerstown. Wheat came to supplement tobacco as an export crop, and Baltimore grew as a trade center. Artisan industry emerged and iron manufacturing began.

The new prosperity gave way to new tensions, less between settlers and proprietor than among classes, sections, ideas, and especially between America and the British Empire. New ideas found expression in a newspaper, the Maryland Gazette, and in able local leaders like Daniel Dulaney, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Samuel Chase, and William Paca. Maryland planters and merchants howled against the British Stamp Act of 1765, and in June 1774, the anti-British faction in the General Assembly picked a fight with the proprietary governor who was enforcing the British laws. The patriot-secessionists formed a Provisional Convention that assumed control of the government. They drew up a conservative constitution that they adopted in 1776 without a referendum. It reestablished toleration for all Christians, and shifted taxes from a per capita base to land assessment, but it retained property qualifications for voting, limited voting to the election of delegates to the General Assembly, and actually increased property qualifications for holding office.

The General Assembly hesitated in calling out the state militia for its loyalty was doubtful, but numerous volunteers, encouraged by a state bounty, joined the Continental Army and gained renown as the "Maryland Line." Slave masters sometimes collected the bounty for enlistment, sent off their slaves to serve, and usually freed the slaves when the war ended. Maryland shipbuilders built warships for the Continental Navy, and Maryland shippers, with a subsidy from the General Assembly, armed their vessels to prey on British commerce.

Tobacco production declined after the Revolution, but otherwise the economy flourished and new institutions burgeoned—state banks, state-supported turnpikes and canals, organized medical and legal professions, and a multitude of colleges. In 1784 the Methodist Church was born in Maryland, the first formal separation from its Anglican parent. Marylanders were leaders in the establishment of American branches of the Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and African Methodist Churches. Maryland was a leader in calls for a stronger central government, a United States Constitution, and in the formation of political parties. Maryland happily ceded land for the new District of Columbia.

The Nineteenth Century and the City

The nineteenth century brought urbanization, democracy, industry, and the end of slavery. State population grew from 340,000 in 1800 to 1,200,000 in 1900, and Baltimore City grew from 8 percent of the total to 43 percent. The size and wealth of the city overwhelmed Annapolis and the state's long-established plantation culture.

The city—with its merchant, professional, artisan, and proletarian classes—led the statewide movement toward democracy and party politics. Property qualifications for voting ended in 1802; property qualifications for holding office ended in 1809; a public school system began, at least in theory, in 1825; Jews were allowed to vote in 1826; popular election of the governor came in 1837, election of city and county officials in 1851; African Americans were enfranchised in 1870; the secret ballot came in 1901; and women gained the vote in 1920. Actually, Maryland tended to lag behind other states in most of these reforms.

The city won its first notable struggle with the planters in the War of 1812. Federalist planters, eager to maintain their profitable trade with Great Britain, opposed the war, but Baltimore relished the alliance with France and another chance to loose its privateers on British commerce. When the British landed at Bladensburg in 1814, the planter-led militia let them pass; but three weeks later when the British attacked Baltimore, the city militia held firm. Francis Scott Key, watching the British bombardment, wrote a poem celebrating the victory over the British that became the words to the National Anthem. The planter-led Federalist party of Maryland never recovered.

Especially from the 1820s to the 1850s, Maryland's General Assembly, dominated by Whigs, promoted a frenzy of capital formation and construction projects. First came the turnpikes. The assembly gave rights-of-way to private companies to improve the roads, establish stagecoaches, and charge tolls. Most famous was the National Pike that, with its extensions, stretched from Baltimore to Ohio. Then came a craze for canals, the most famous of which was the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, designed to reach from Washington to Cincinnati. It nearly bankrupted the state and never got beyond Cumberland. The grandest and most successful of the projects were the railroads. The line from Baltimore to Ohio was one of the first and busiest in the country, and by 1840 other lines extended to Washington, Philadelphia, and central Pennsylvania.

Eventually urbanization, democracy, and capitalism came up against the continued existence of slavery. After the collapse of tobacco, slavery was barely profitable in Maryland, and by midcentury there were almost as many free blacks as slaves. African Americans like Richard Allen, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass were leaders of their people. Still, battered Maryland planters clung desperately to the institution. Roger B. Taney of Mary-land, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was a powerful spokesman for slavery's expansion.

By the 1850s change was coming too fast and tensions were too great, and Maryland drifted toward chaos. Party structure collapsed, rioting turned Baltimore into mobtown, and for a while the Know-Nothings ruled the state with a platform that made a scapegoat of immigrants.

When the Civil War came, Maryland was overwhelmingly pro-slave; in the presidential election of 1860 only 2 percent of the votes went to Abraham Lincoln. But the state was also mostly opposed to secession. After his inauguration, Lincoln intervened forcibly, arresting some 3,000 community leaders who were Southern sympathizers and allowing many more to be disfranchised. Southern sympathy waned. About 50,000 Marylanders eventually enlisted in the Union army, including 9,000 African Americans. About 20,000 Maryland whites fled to join the army and navy of the Confederacy.

From 1864 to 1867, with pro-Southern Marylanders disfranchised, the state launched its own radical reconstruction, foreshadowing what was to come in the South. The radicals abolished slavery, threatened to seize slave-holders' property to pay for the war, and established an authoritarian and far-reaching school system for whites and former slaves. As the war ended, however, and as Southern sympathizers returned home, radicalism collapsed and conservative leadership reasserted itself.

After the war people were concerned mainly with things economic. The railroads, led by the aggressive John W. Garrett, spread into every county. Coal mining expanded in the western counties, oystering expanded on the Eastern Shore, and in Baltimore came vast steel mills, copper and tin smelting, a ready-to-wear clothing industry, canning, and meat packing. Immigrants poured into the city and state—Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, and others—often into crowded tenements. Industry and labor sometimes fought; scores died in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Many people still lived on farms, although the farms were usually small and poor. The very rich provided grand philanthropies—the Garrett State Forests, the Enoch Pratt libraries, the Walters Art Gallery, and the great Johns Hopkins University. The two political parties—Democrats and Republicans—were nearly balanced after the war, both run by bosses who were closely allied with business, both offering generous patronage to faithful followers.

Twentieth-Century Suburbanization

Twentieth-century change was measurable in a demographic shift—the rise of the suburbs and the corresponding decline of the city and farm. Maryland population grew from 1,200,000 in 1900 to 5,200,000 in 2000, and the suburbs grew from 2 percent to about 80 percent of that total. People moved from factory and farm into middle-class, white-collar, and service occupations.

As the century began, the rising middle classes—doctors, lawyers, managers, engineers, accountants, bureaucrats—were asserting themselves as a Progressive movement, less concerned with creating new wealth than with its management, by people like themselves, for the benefit of all society. Working through both political parties, the Progressives forced through a mass of new laws in the 1900s and 1910s establishing nonpartisan citizen boards to replace politicians in control of the schools, parks, hospitals, and libraries. Other citizen boards gained control over rates charged by electric, water, telephone, railroad, and shipping companies. In 1904, in the midst of these reforms, much of Baltimore burned in what was until then the greatest conflagration in American history, but this only stimulated city planning and new housing codes. Progressivism, however, also had its dark side. The middle class was eager to disfranchise illiterate voters, especially African Americans. Disfranchisement failed in Maryland as blacks and immigrants joined to protect their right to vote, but the reforms succeeded in legalizing racial segregation in most public and commercial facilities. World War I provided a culmination of Progressivism as citizen commissions promoted war production and patriotism with equal fervor.

By the 1920s people were tired of reform and eager to enjoy themselves. Local police refused to enforce the national prohibition laws that lasted from 1919 to 1933, and illegal booze may have flowed more freely in Maryland than in any other state. Eubie Blake and Cab Calloway played in the local jazz clubs. Marylanders like H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ogden Nash caught the mood of the times. Baseball was the rage, and its greatest hero was Baltimore's Babe Ruth, even if he played for New York. Maryland became famous for its horse racing and slot machines. Albert Ritchie was the state's all-time most popular governor, serving from 1919 to 1934. Aristocratic and autocratic, he believed in state rights and unfettered capitalism. Three times he tried to gain the Democratic nomination for president, arguing that Presidents Coolidge and Hoover were spendthrift radicals.

The Great Depression descended relentlessly, first to the farms, then to the city and suburbs. From 1929 to 1933, Maryland's per capita income dropped 45 percent, industrial production dropped 60 percent. Maryland received less from the New Deal than most states because of its unwillingness to provide matching funds. The New Deal built the model town of Greenbelt in Maryland, with cooperative housing and stores. The town was a success but opponents scuttled its experiment in socialism.

In World War II, Maryland, because of its location, became a center of military training, arms and aircraft production, and shipments abroad. African Americans and women made major inroads into the labor market, where they would remain. After the war, prosperity continued but politics grew shrill. A liberal governor, William P. Lane, enacted a sales tax and built airports and a spectacular bridge across the Chesapeake Bay; but a conservative General Assembly enacted the Ober Law, the country's most far-reaching loyalty oath and a forerunner of McCarthyism.

Meanwhile, burgeoning suburbanization was transforming the state's economic and political landscape. The movement began with the trolley lines of the 1890s and the automobile of the 1920s, mostly into affluent enclaves out from Washington and Baltimore. Then the suburban population doubled in the late 1940s, this time mostly into inexpensive housing tracts, bringing shopping strips and drive-in movies; it doubled again in the 1950s and 1960s with planned bedroom cities like Bowie and Columbia; it doubled again in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing beltways and malls; and it continued after that, bringing office towers, mass transit, and ethnic diversity.

The other side of suburban growth was urban and rural decline. Baltimore reached its peak about 1920 with half the state's population and by far its highest per capita income; but in 2000 it had fallen to 12 percent of the state population and by far the lowest per capita income. Urban renewal programs lurched forward by trial and error. In the 1970s, Mayor Donald Schaefer built a sparkling Harborplace development that attracted tourists into the city for spending and recreation.

Suburbanization provided a liberal tilt to Maryland politics, and Maryland kept pace and occasionally offered leadership to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. African American leaders like Lillie Mae Jackson and Thurgood Marshall worked comfortably with Governors Theodore McKeldin and Millard Tawes. Baltimore was the first major segregated city to integrate its schools, a year before court requirements, and state laws were ahead of federal laws in promoting civil rights. The state suffered from race riots in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement did not go backward for state agencies promoted school busing and affirmative action, and an ever larger portion of the African Americans entered the middle class.

Idealism slumped into malaise in the 1970s. Two successive governors, Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel, plus many other local officials, pled guilty to accepting bribes. They were caught between the old politics of favors and the newer middle-class ethic that was tinged with hostility to politics of all sorts.

The last decades of the century, however, were happy as personal income soared, especially for those already prosperous. Government and business bureaucracies expanded and clean high-tech industries grew. Government in the 1980s and 1990s was mostly corruption-free and progressive, with abundant funding for education and for the environment. Women increasingly entered politics. Universities, claiming to be the engines of the new economy, especially flourished. As the century ended, optimism prevailed.

Bibliography

Argersinger, Jo Ann E. Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Baker, Jean H. The Politics of Continuity: Maryland Political Parties from 1858 to 1870. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Brugger, Robert J. Maryland, A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. A full and excellent history. Callcott, George H. Maryland and America, 1940 to 1980. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Carr, Lois Green, Russell R. Menard, and Louis Peddicord. Maryland—At the Beginning. Annapolis, Md.: Department of Economic Development, 1978.

Evitts, William J. A Matter of Allegiances: Maryland from 1850 to1861. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Fields, Barbara Jeanne, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground:Maryland During the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Hoffman, Ronald. Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and theRevolution in Maryland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

Kulikoff, Alan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of SouthernCultures in the Chesapeake. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Land, Aubrey C. Colonial Maryland: A History. Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1981.

Main, Gloria L. Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.

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