Maryland: Catholic Haven

Maryland-the second plantation colony but the fourth English colony to be planted-was founded in 1634 by Lord Baltimore of a prominent English Catholic family. He embarked upon the venture partly to reap financial profits and partly to create a refuge for his fellow Catholics.

Protestant England was still persecuting Roman Catholics; among numerous dis criminations, a couple seeking wedlock could not be legally married by a Catholic priest.

Absentee proprietor Lord Baltimore hoped that the two hundred settlers who founded Maryland at St.Marys, on Chesapeake Bay, would be the vanguard of a vast new feudal domain.

Huge estates were to be awarded to his largely Catholic relatives, and gracious manor houses, modeled on those of England's aristoc racy, were intended to arise amidst the fertile forests.

As in Virginia, colonists proved willing to come only if offered the opportunity to acquire land of their own. Soon they were dispersed around the Chesa peake region on modest farms, and the haughty land barons, mostly Catholic, were surrounded by resent ful backcountry planters, mostly Protestant.

Resentment flared into open rebellion near the end of the century, and the Baltimore family for a time lost its proprietary rights.

Despite these tensions Maryland prospered. Like Virginia, it blossomed forth in acres of tobacco. Also like Virginia, it depended for labor in its early years mainly on white indentured servants-penniless per sons who bound themselves to work for a number of years to pay their passage. In both colonies it was only in the later years of the seventeenth century that black slaves began to be imported in large numbers.

Lord Baltimore, a canny soul, permitted unusual freedom of worship at the outset. He hoped that he would thus purchase toleration for his own fellow wor shipers. But the heavy tide of Protestants threatened to submerge the Catholics and place severe restric tions on them, as in England.

Faced with disaster, the Catholics of Maryland threw their support behind the famed Act of Toleration, which was passed in 1649 by the local representative assembly.

Maryland's new religious statute guaranteed tol eration to all Christians. But, less liberally, it decreed the death penalty for those, like Jews and atheists, who denied the divinity of Jesus. The law thus sanc tioned less toleration than had previously existed in the settlement, but it did extend a temporary cloak of protection to the uneasy Catholic minority.

One result was that when the colonial era ended, Mary land probably sheltered more Roman Catholics than any other English-speaking colony in the New World.