Built upon smoke: Politics and political culture in Maryland, 1630--1690

This dissertation offers an account of the politics of early Maryland organized around issues, ideas, and political culture. Specifically, it argues that both the volatility of Maryland politics and the substance of many of the conflicts were the result of longstanding and unresolved conflicts that the settlers brought with them from England, a number of which were of particular moment in Maryland because of the proprietary family's religion and political views. The political history of Maryland begins in the political history of England in the 1620s and 1630s, and it is the issues of those decades that provide the framework for much of what happened over the rest of the century. This approach allows us to tie together a variety of themes in Maryland's political history that have not yet been well integrated. The result is a systematic and coherent history of politics in seventeenth century Maryland.;Thus this study offers a contribution to both the historiography of the early Chesapeake and the growing literature on the English Atlantic world. Much British Atlantic history focuses on cultural exchange, economics, administration and migration in the developing colonial world. This study not only makes a contribution to the scholarship on seventeenth-century America and its Atlantic connections, but also addresses the literature on seventeenth-century Britain. One of the main claims made in this project is that the movement of authority and law from England to America exposed the strains and points of tension in the English system of politics; the result was that the governing circle, and the inhabitants, of Maryland had to work out some of the most serious issues in seventeenth-century English politics. More broadly, this study contributes to the growing consensus that the development of the English state, of the British polity and of the overseas possessions was a single process, with influence and ideas moving in all directions.;The dissertation is divided into two parts. Part One covers the first three decades of Maryland's history, from 1630 to 1660. Chapter One examines objections to the Maryland patent, the dispute between the proprietor of Maryland and investors in the erstwhile Virginia Company, and how this dispute turned on issues of particular political import in the 1630s. Chapter Two brings Lord Baltimore's dispute with the Society of Jesus into this context. Chapter Three offers a close analysis of confessional politics in England and Maryland during the 1630s and 1640s. Chapter Four shows how the issues raised in earlier chapters shaped the outcome of the English civil wars in Maryland. Chapters Five and Six address both the suspension of proprietary authority in the mid-1650s, and why this moment in colonial history was of great interest in England as well as in Maryland. Chapter Seven shows how the early history of the Maryland Assembly fits into the analytical structure laid out in previous chapters. Chapter Eight revises our view of the failed rebellion of early 1660. Overall, the argument offered in Part One is that the legal and confessional conflicts of early Stuart Britain---in particular, the conflict over how confessional identity mapped onto political stance and who posed the greatest threat to the stability of the state---provides the best framework for understanding the political history of early Maryland.;Part Two offers an analytical narrative of Maryland's history from the return to proprietary authority around 1660 to the Revolution of 1688 and its aftermath. Chapter Nine explores how the failed attempts to reform the tobacco economy in the 1660s reveal continuity with the political culture of the pre-war period, as well as some hints of change. Chapter Ten details the complex relationships between English colonists and various groups of Native Americans, with particular emphasis on the widening gulf between the reality of Maryland's Indian diplomacy as directed by proprietor and council and the perception of this policy by many of the colony's inhabitants. In Chapter Eleven, we look at both local grievances against the proprietary government and growing administrative concern in London as to how Maryland was being governed. Chapter Twelve offers an analysis of the role news and rumor played in Maryland's politics. Chapter Thirteen uses the themes of the foregoing chapters to offer a new account of the political turmoil of the late 1670s and early 1680s. In Chapter Fourteen, we build upon the analysis of Chapters Nine through Thirteen to reexamine the Revolution of 1688, with particular focus on the period between the Protestant Associators' coup in 1689 and the dispatch of the colony's new royal governor in 1692. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...