#112 That Time Maryland and Virginia Went to War

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.