The seventeenth century must have been a very disagreeable period for people who professed religion, for America from Newfoundland to Florida was dotted with little settlements almost entirely made up of people who had escaped from England to secure religious freedom at the risk of their lives.
In 1634 the first settlement was made by young Lord Baltimore, whose people, the Catholics, were fleeing from England to obtain freedom to worship God as they believed to be right. Thus the Catholics were added to the list of religious refugees, viz., the Huguenots, the Puritans, the Walloons, the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the Whigs, and the Menthol Healers.
Terra Mariæ, or Maryland, was granted to Lord Baltimore, as the successor of his father, who had begun before his death the movement for settling his people in America. The charter gave to all freemen a voice in making the laws. Among the first laws passed was one giving to every human being upon payment of poll-tax the right to worship freely according to the dictates of his own conscience. America thus became the refuge for those who had any peculiarity of religious belief, until to-day no doubt more varieties of religion may be found here than almost anywhere else in the world.
In 1635 the Virginia Colony and Lord Baltimore had some words over the boundaries between the Jamestown and Maryland Colonies. Clayborne was the Jamestown man who made the most trouble. He had started a couple of town sites on the Maryland tract, plotted them, and sold lots to Yorkshire tenderfeet, and so when Lord Baltimore claimed the lands Clayborne attacked him, and there was a running skirmish for several years, till at last the Rebellion collapsed in 1645 and Clayborne fled.
The Protestants now held the best hand, and outvoted the Catholics, so up to 1691 there was a never-dying fight between the two, which must have been entertaining to the unregenerate outsider who was taxed to pay for a double set of legislators. This fight between the Catholics and Protestants shows that intolerance is not confined to a monarchy.
In 1715 the fourth Lord Baltimore recovered the government by the aid of the police, and religious toleration was restored. Maryland remained under this system of government until the Revolution, which will be referred to later on in the most thrilling set of original pictures and word-paintings that the reader has ever met with.