A History of the American People

milking the cow, making cheese and butter, raising chickens, tending to the vegetable garden-
mainly peas, beans, squash, and pumpkins. The men butchered but the wives cured, usually pork,
which was the commonest meat. Corn was ground with pestle and mortar until the family could
afford a grist-mill. These vigorous women were more partners than inferiors to their husbands.
They lived longer and inherited more property than was usual in England.
Despite the hardship, there was a feeling of nature's bounty, thanks to tobacco. It was
everything to the Marylanders. It was, in practice, the local currency. One settler, who wrote an
account of the place, the Rev. Hugh Jones, called it our meat, drinke, cloathing and moneys.' The highest-priced variety, which was sweet-scented, thetrue Virginia,' would flourish only in a
few counties in Virginia itself. Maryland grew mainly Orinoco, from South America. By the end
of the 1630s a Maryland planter could produce 1,000 pounds a season, which rose to 1,500 or
even 1,700 later in the century. It is true that the soil soon became exhausted, the yield dropped,
and planters had to move on. But they did so-land was cheap and plentiful-and thus the colony
scattered and spread. Only four of the original gentlemen-adventurers stuck it out. But they
became major landowners, with manor-houses, which in the next generation were rebuilt in fine
brick. One of them, Thomas Gerard, soon farmed 6,000 acres. Four-fifths of the land worked fell
within such manors; only one in five freemen claimed land, preferring to work as tenants or
wage-earning landowners. Thus society rapidly became far more stratified than in New England.
Maryland had a difficult time during the English Civil War. It was invaded by a shipmaster-
pirate and parliamentary fanatic called Richard Ungle who, in conjunction with the still-
smouldering and discontented Claiborne, pillaged the settlement, claiming the authority of
parliament to do so. At one point, Claiborne and a fellow-parliament man went to London,
ingratiated themselves with the authorities, and were made governor and deputy governor. They
came back and sought to wage an anti-papist war of terror. Not only did they ban Catholic
worship but they passed an Act outlawing sin, vice, and the most minute infractions of the
sabbath. Throughout the 1640s and 1650s, religion as well as the proprietorial form of
government were the issues: more particularly, the degree of toleration to be allowed to different
faiths, and which exactly were to be excluded from it. But by the late 1650s toleration had won
the battle. Maryland's Toleration Act, based upon an Act Concerning Religion first pushed
through the Assembly in 1649, not only laid down the principle of the free practice of religion
but made it an offence to use hostile language about the religion of others, such as Heretick, Schismatic, Idolator, Puritan, Independent, Presbyterian, Popish Priest, Jesuite, Jesuited Papist, Roundhead, Separatist and the like.' But you could also be penalized for denying Christ was the Savior, the doctrine of the Trinity, or the Existence of God. A free-thinking Jew, Dr Jacob Lumbrozo, was later bound over for saying that Christ's miracles were 'magicianship and body- snatching.' Thus toleration did not extend to outspoken Jews and atheists. But, for its time, it was an astonishing measure. Henceforward, no Christian whatever couldbee any wais troubled,
molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise
thereof. '
The Toleration Act proved invaluable to the colony. The upheavals in England, followed by
the reassertion of royal authority and the imposition of the so-called Clarendon Code against
dissenters, brought a rush of refugees of all religious persuasions to America, and large numbers
chose to go to Maryland, where they lived perfectly happily together. The population had risen
slowly to pass the 2,500-mark about 1660, but in the next twenty years it increased by 20,000.
Maryland even took in Quakers. During its brief period of Puritan rule they were fined, whipped,
jailed, and banished: they claimed the Indians treated them better than `the mad, rash rulers of