Community, morality and violence: Crime and the construction of a British-American society in eighteenth-century Charles County, Maryland

A look at the construction of a British-American society in Maryland using crime allows a look at how the colonists---the Assembly through its laws, the court through its actions, the people through their offenses, and the "public" through print---built a new society in the province of Maryland, beginning with the legal foundations they used to construct a standard of acceptable behavior.; The dissertation uses two main types of sources. The first are the laws made by the colonial legislature that defined criminal activity and specified penalties. These documents permit us to understand how Maryland settlers viewed the construction and maintenance of society through the suppression of misdemeanor offenses and the punishment of felonies. The second consists of the evidence generated by the court of one of Maryland's oldest political jurisdictions, Charles County. This material enables us to witness how local courts applied provincial statutes while at the same time illustrating the range of criminal activity in an important locality.; This body of evidence enables us to chart changes in the criminal justice system and the social concerns it represented as Maryland and Charles County changed from a frontier outpost to a settled colony. In the process, Maryland's seventeenth-century past, its eighteenth-century demographic developments, and its legislative and social ties to Britain all affected the ways the Assembly and courts worked to maintain order within the province. The result was clearly a British-American society, certainly not British, but not completely American either. Many similarities existed between the criminal justice system in England and Maryland, with capital crimes retaining the strongest resemblance to their English counterparts. On the other hand, in spite of the Assembly's restructuring of county court jurisdiction and the resulting expansion of the definition of minor theft, property crime trends remained very similar to their English counterparts. In the late seventeenth-century push to suppress vice, however, Maryland was able to go much further than England in criminalizing several types of immorality as misdemeanor offenses, including bastardy, as criminal---and moral---offenses in a manner totally different from that which occurred in England.