#112 That Time Maryland and Virginia Went to War
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2023
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
The founding of Maryland was contentious, because its territory falls within the original mandate of the Virginia Company. Longstanding and attentive listeners may recall that the patent from James I in 1606 conferred the right to settle along the Atlantic coast between 34 and 40 degrees, or from roughly Wilmington, North Carolina to Seaside Heights, New Jersey. The Crown revoked the Virginia Company’s charter in 1624, after the catastrophe of Opechancanough’s war, and thereafter it was a Crown Colony with a royal governor. On the one hand, that changed the legal rights of the colonists, as they would eventually find out. On the other, it seemed like a mere governance change, because in the revocation of the charter and the establishment of the Crown Colony, James wasn’t very clear about the borders changing.
That would become a problem when his son, Charles I, granted Cecil Calvert, the Second Lord Baltimore, the right to settle around the middle and northern Chesapeake for the annual rent of “two Indian arrows.” Virginians, who were already there, were more than a little grumpy about that. Lawsuits would be filed, shots would be fired, and men would be hung.
[Errata: The English translator’s name was not Henry Steele, as reported in this episode, but Henry Fleet. Serves me right for not taking better notes while listening to Jeremy.]
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Selected references for this episode
George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America, Volume 1
Timothy B. Riordan, The Plundering Time: Maryland and the English Civil War, 1645–1646
Manfred Jonas, “The Claiborne-Calvert Controversy: An Episode in the Colonization of North America,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 1966.
J. Herbert Claiborne, “William Claiborne of Kent Island,” The William and Mary Quarterly, April 1921.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 112. |
| 0:10.8 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman. |
| 0:13.3 | And I'm recording this episode on April 13th, 2023 in Austin, Texas, a little bit after 8 in the evening. It's a rare evening recording of this |
| 0:24.3 | podcast. Maybe you'll decide it sounds a little better, different, or worse. We are telling the |
| 0:30.6 | history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. |
| 0:41.1 | As this happened many times before, moral support for the writing of this episode, by which I mean tolerating my presence for hours on end, |
| 0:48.3 | was provided by the Cuban creation cigar bar on Toulouse Street in New Orleans. |
| 0:54.5 | Okay, so a couple of items to report. |
| 0:57.5 | One is that the first ever group meetup of fans of the podcast in Washington, D.C. |
| 1:04.4 | on April 11th, came off swimmingly. |
| 1:08.5 | We had about a dozen fans from the region come by a craft brewery, and I ended up |
| 1:13.3 | chatting with people from about 4.45 when the first showed up to 8.30. Great fun for me anyway, |
| 1:20.3 | and I hope also for the people who made the trip. Thank you very much. The other thing is that |
| 1:26.4 | this episode is coming a bit later than I'd planned. |
| 1:30.1 | I'd written almost all of it over last weekend. |
| 1:33.5 | But on April 12th, yesterday, the day after the meetup, I drove down to St. Mary's City, |
| 1:39.7 | the first place in Maryland officially settled, and for some decades the capital of the Maryland colony. |
| 1:47.1 | While there I ended up chatting with one of the docents at the site, a fellow named Jeremy, |
| 1:52.6 | who's charged with maintaining the museum's replica of the dove, one of the two ships that made |
| 1:58.6 | the journey across the Atlantic with that first batch of Lord Baltimore's settlers. |
| 2:05.0 | Jeremy straightened me out on a number of important Maryland historical factoids, |
| 2:10.3 | so I've had to do a certain amount of rewriting to get this episode in shape for recording. |
... |
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