Mariland.' But once the Puritans were pushed out and the Toleration Act came back into force,
the Calverts got the Quakers back, arguing that they were good citizens and farmers. One leading
Quaker preacher, Wenlocke Christison, who had been whipped in Massachusetts, called his
Maryland land-patent `The Ending of Controversie.' Another, Elizabeth Harris, fleeing Boston
where the authorities had stripped her and other Quaker women to find marks of witchcraft, gave
sermons throughout the province, and George Fox himself came out there in 1672. By the late
1670s, Quakers held regular meetings in fifteen different places in Maryland.
The colony attracted Dutch and German dissenters too. One group, the Labadists, of Dutch
origin, had a remarkable German polymath leader, who drew the first good map of Maryland,
had himself naturalized, and built up by 1674 an estate of 20,000 acres, making him the largest
private landowner in America. Within ten years l00 Labadists were settled on this beautiful
domaine, farmed with fine German-Dutch neatness and efficiency, sloping down to the Bohemia
River and Chesapeake Bay. They followed the communal teaching of a Jesuit-turned-Calvinist
called Jean de Labardie, sleeping in single-sex dormitories, eschewing private property,
observing silence at meals, and denying themselves fires in winter. It was too strict and
eventually dispersed, but it set a pattern of individualist utopian colonies in America which
persists to this day and, in its own way, is one of the glories of the New World.
Studying the history of these early settlements one is astonished-and delighted-by the variety
of it all, and by the way in which accidents, events, and the stubborn individuality of ordinary
men and women take over from the deep-laid schemes of the founders. The Calverts of Maryland
attempted to create a perfect baronial society in America, based on status rather than wealth. But
such an idea, it was already clear, simply did not work in America. The basic economic fact
about the New World was that land was plentiful: it was labor and skills that were in short
supply. To get immigrants you had to offer them land, and once they arrived they were
determined to become individual entrepreneurs, subject to no one but the law. So the manorial
courts rapidly gave place to elective local government. St Mary's, like Jamestown, remained no
more than a village. People just spread out into the interior, out of control of everything except
the law, which they respected and generally observed. But they had to make the law themselves.
It is important to remember that the area of settlement of North America covered thousands of
miles of coastline and islands, from Providence Island off the coast of Central America, settled
by Puritans in 1629, right up to Newfoundland, first exploited by two groups of fishermen, one
Anglican, one Irish Catholic, who lived in separate areas there. Various towns claim to have `the
oldest street in North America.' The best claimants are Water Street, St John's, Newfoundland,
and Front Street in Hamilton, Bermuda-neither of them in what is now the United States. In the
17th century there were in fact many scores of colonies, only a few of which would acquire full
historical status. And not all of them were English. Leaving aside the French to the north, in
Canada, and the Spanish to the south, there were the Dutch on the Hudson. As early as 1614 they
settled upriver at Fort Nassau, opposite modern Albany. New York, or New Amsterdam as they
called it, was founded by them on May 4, 1626. During the Anglo-Dutch war of King Charles
II's day, it was conquered by Colonel Richard Nicolls on September 7, 1664, on behalf of
Charles' brother James, Duke of York, who got a charter to found a proprietary colony there.
Despite a brief Dutch reoccupation in 1673-4, the English were able to consolidate their power in
the Hudson Valley. One reason was that they left the Dutch settlers alone, with their lands and
privileges, or rather encouraged them to enter their system of local government. In North
America, the settlement and actual ownership of land came first. What flag you lived under was