"Life, Liberty, and Opportunity: The Struggle for Freedom in Tidewater Maryland, 1634-1865"

June 19-24 and June 26-July 1, 2005

A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Landmarks of American History Program

Content of the Workshops

School teachers will come away from the week-long workshops with a greater understanding of several key subject areas in American history that pertain to pluralism, liberty, and inclusion.  

1.      “Liberty of Conscience” and Representative Government: In seventeenth-century St. Mary’s City, Catholics and Protestants were permitted to profess any Christian belief without penalty or harassment. This freedom attracted Puritans, Quakers, Roman Catholics, and members of the Church of England, and Presbyterians to colonial Maryland. St. Mary's seventeenth-century experiment represented an important early effort to devise a civil society that redefined the relationship between religion and government. In the usage of the era, the early settlers enjoyed "liberty of conscience." Maryland's early mandate for religious toleration, first announced in Lord Baltimore's 1633 instructions to colonists as they departed England, was made law in the 1649 Act Concerning Religion. Separation of religion and state was dramatically symbolized on the landscape by the placement of the State House at one end of St. Mary's City and the chapel at the other end.

2.            Maryland as a Border State:  Maryland was a border state during the Civil War and had more free blacks than any other state in the Union from 1810 until the time of emancipation. However, in the southern part of the state (including St. Mary’s), where tobacco was king, slavery predominated. The northern part of the state, including Baltimore, was never subservient to the slave system – at least, not economically. By 1850, there were two Marylands: one founded upon slavery and the other upon free labor. During the Civil War, at the nearby Point Lookout prison camp, freed African-American Union soldiers often guarded Confederate POWs. In some cases freed slaves guarded their former masters, which led to instances of either brutality or kindness, depending on the previous nature of their relationship. Among the Union guard soldiers were Sergeant Christian A. Fleetwood, a Baltimore native who had never been a slave and was later a Medal of Honor winner, and Sergeant Charles Douglass, of the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, and son of Frederick Douglass the noted black abolitionist.

3.            Minority Rights:  Mathias de Sousa became the first person of African ancestry to vote in a North American legislature at a session of the Maryland General Assembly in St. Mary’s City in 1642.  His participation in the legislature suggests the fluidity of social status in the early colony. The tragic counterpoint to this progressive story is that Maryland joined Virginia in the 1660s to legalize lifelong slavery for Africans and their descendants, providing a compulsory labor pool for the tobacco economy of the Chesapeake. Slavery had a great impact on the government, economy and the social system of the region. There are continuing historical connections regarding the state's legacy of slavery that are taking place in southern Maryland at the nearby Sotterley Plantation. Sotterley is older than Mount Vernon and Monticello and has standing architecture from the early eighteenth century, including a rare slave cabin. Its interpretive master plan interweaves the stories of owners and slaves.

4.            Relations with the Indigenous Population: The Maryland colony heeded the mistakes made by some of the early Virginia colonists whose poor treatment of the Powhatan Chiefdom almost led to Jamestown’s annihilation in 1622. Maryland's first governor, Leonard Calvert, purchased the lands for St. Mary's City from the Yaocomaco tribe and made friendly overtures to other native American groups in the region. Lord Baltimore purchased the lands for St. Mary’s City from the indigenous population and made friendly overtures to Native American groups in the region. In 1651, the Chaptico tribe petitioned the Maryland Assembly for protection and land where they could live in peace from white settlers.  The Assembly granted the request in the hope it will bring to the indigenous population civility and Christianity. Nevertheless, under pressure from the growing influx of European colonists, by 1700 most Native Americans in St. Mary’s County had moved across the Potomac River to lands less populated. 

These links to Maryland's past weave a historical narrative that will help teachers prepare their students to understand the “significant ideas, beliefs, and themes; organize patterns and events; and analyze how individuals and societies have changed over time…[sot that] Students will use historical thinking skills to understand how individuals and events have changed society over time.”

The quote is taken from the Social Studies component of the Voluntary State Curriculum of Maryland, which defines what students should know and be able to do at each grade level from K-12. http://www.mdk12.org/mspp/vsc/social_studies/bygrade/grade8.html