Toleration Act

The Indians, alarmed by the rapid increase of Englishmen in their country, and made suspicious by the false testimony of Clayborne, at length took a hostile position and made war on the intruders in 1642. The war was mild, but lasted between two and three years. It had just ended when Clayborne, assisted by Captain Richard Ingle, stirred up the people to rebellion. The insurrection flamed out with greater vehemence than the Indian war, but was not so long. Civil war was then raging in England, and the proprietor could not expect aid from the virtually dethroned monarch. The rebels, assisted by disaffected Indians, instantly triumphed, and the governor and his council were compelled to fly into Virginia. For about a year and a half the insurgents held the reins of power, and the horrors of civil war brooded over fair and once happy Maryland. The rebellion was crushed in the summer of 1646, when the governor returned to his chair of state. During the turmoil many of the records of the province were destroyed, and a greater portion of them were carried into Virginia by Captain Ingle and were lost. A wise clemency extended a general pardon to the rebels, excepting Ingle, and tranquillity was speedily restored.

Lord Baltimore displaced Green, a Roman Catholic, who had been acting-governor since the decease of Leonard Calvert, and commissioned William Stone of Virginia, a Protestant and warm friend of Parliament. Through his influence the Virginia Puritans came to the waters of the Chesapeake, insisting upon liberty of conscience. Soon after that the Maryland Assembly of 1649 met, says John Hammond (a friend of Lord Baltimore, in a pamphlet published in London in 1656), composed of Puritans, Church of England men, and a few Roman Catholics. It was this body of a majority of Protestants that passed the Toleration Act of which so much has been written. That act seems to have been an outgrowth of statutes passed by the British Parliament in 1645 and 1647, and adopted by the Maryland Legislature under the pressure of the strong Puritan influence then existing there. By that act, every believer in Jesus Christ and the Trinity, was allowed the free exercise of his or her religious opinions, but from this "toleration" Jews and Unitarians were alike excluded, and it was far from being a full "Toleration Act." No man was allowed to reproach another on account of his peculiar religious doctrines, excepting under the penalty of a fine to be paid to the person so insulted; and to Maryland the persecuted in other colonies now flocked to enjoy this broader freedom--Churchmen from New England, Puritans from Virginia, and Roman Catholics from all. That act is the pride and glory of Maryland's early legislation, yet it was not the first act of the kind (as has been often alleged) passed by a colonial assembly in America. In May, 1647--two years before--the General Assembly of Rhode Island adopted a code of laws which closed with the declaration that "all men may walk as their consciences persuaded them, without molestation--every one in the name of his God." This would include Jew or Mohammedan, Parsee or Pagan. It was absolute toleration.

For more than ten years republicanism prevailed in England. Lord Baltimore, whose politics and theology were easy-fitting garments, professed to be a republican when the king lost his head, but he had too lately been a decided royalist to secure the confidence of Parliament. They appointed a commission, of which Clayborne was a member, to govern Maryland. These commissioners entered upon their duties there with a high hand. They demanded a sight of Governor Stone's commission, and when he produced it, they snatched it from his hands, removed him and his subordinates from office, took possession of the record and abolished the authority of the proprietor of the province. A few months afterward they reinstated Governor Stone, put Kent and Polmer's islands into the possession of Clayborne, and so enabled the vigorous "outlaw" to trample over his enemy, Lord Baltimore.

When the Long Parliament was dissolved in 1653, Cromwell restored full power to Baltimore as proprietor. Stone proclaimed the movements of the commissioners to have been rebellious. He displaced all officers appointed by them, and in other ways acted very unwisely. The incensed commissioners returned to Maryland and compelled the governor to surrender his authority. Then they vested the government of the province in a board of ten commissioners.

Now the passions of the opposing political and religious parties were aroused into vehement action. The Protestants, who were still the majority in the General Assembly which convened in the fall of 1654, were imbued with the narrow bigotry of the early Puritans of Massachusetts, and, unmindful of the better principles of the Toleration Act of 1649, they wantonly disfranchised the Roman Catholics and members of the Church of England, by passing a law which declared that Papists and Churchmen were not entitled to the protection of the laws of Maryland. These zealots flogged and imprisoned Quakers; and their unworthy triumph was celebrated in a book published in London entitled "Babylon's Fall in Maryland."