Maryland Part II

Continued from April 28th, Part I.

Pictures are from our homeschooling block, Local History and Geography.

Marsh-Souza

 

Despite Maryland’s absence of gold, colonists benefited from another resource: tobacco, which grew well and had a ready market in England. It quickly became Maryland’s principal cash crop. (In rural areas tobacco was used to pay bills even into the 20th century.) Some planters made large fortunes and imported their style of living from England, spending their time at hunting meets, dances, card parties, horse races, and similarly useful pursuits.

Tobacco rapidly depleted the soil, however, requiring continual acquisition of acreage and labor, both hired and slave, and pushing Native Americans further from their homelands. In the first half of the 18th century, England helpfully sent 10,000 convicts, mainly petty thieves and other troublesome folk, to Maryland as indentured servants. But while they worked off their indentures and freed themselves, the slave population, permanently trapped, increased. (And that’s another story.)

Chogan-Susanna

Maryland’s coastlines were settled first, so when German and Scotch-Irish immigrants began to arrive in the 1740s, they moved into western Maryland, creating small farms like those in Europe and New England, raising animals, growing grains (rather than tobacco) on manured fields, rotating their crops, and feeling exasperated that large wasteful eastern plantation-holders had more say in land and trade policy than they did themselves. Iron was discovered in western Maryland, and its mining and forging, mostly by slaves, accelerated rapidly. The port of Baltimore grew as grain and iron passed through for the French and Indian Wars, warfare being ever a boon to industry. Annapolis very slowly became a center of society, acquiring the attendant accoutrements of high culture: a theater, newspaper, bookshop, and jail.

 In 1763-67 the final, and very peculiar, shape of Maryland was determined when astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon were hired to resolve an old boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania due to overlapping land grants made in the 17th century. They marked the border with 230 stones, some of which remain today, little knowing that their boundary would come to be regarded—inaccurately—as the division between slave and free territory.

By the 1770s, the now-numerous settlers (Maryland’s population was about 150,000, which included tens of thousands of African slaves and a few hundred remaining Native Americans) were inevitably, due to time, distance, and differences, less connected to Great Britain. In 1713 the currently reigning Calvert had converted to Protestantism. But Marylanders didn’t want ANY Proprietor, of any religion whatsoever. Parliament’s taxes and trading practices favoring Great Britain infuriated them, as it did colonists elsewhere. Although some were at first unsure about complete independence, Maryland sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in 1774. Four signers of the Declaration of Independence were from Maryland, including the only Catholic. Maryland militiamen fought with George Washington in the Revolutionary War (the state’s sole Tory regiment was chased across the border and later departed for Canada).

After the war finally ended in 1783—people forget how LONG it dragged on—and after the delegates to the Constitutional Convention spent the summer of 1787 heatedly wrangling over the creation of the Constitution (which story reads like a thriller in itself), Maryland ratified it the following spring, becoming the seventh of the new United States. Not only that, but Maryland provided two of the nation’s seven temporary capitals (Baltimore and Annapolis) throughout its formative years, and finally the permanent one in 1790: Washington, District of Columbia, carved from a 10-mile square on the Potomac. (Virginia took back its section in 1846.)

So, party down, Marylanders! and celebrate your stateliness by singing the Official State Song (to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”). Here are the first two verses. Just in case you don’t already know them by heart.

The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland!*
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!

Hark to an exiled son’s appeal,
Maryland!
My mother State! to thee I kneel,
Maryland!
For life and death, for woe and weal,
Thy peerless chivalry reveal,
And gird thy beauteous limbs with steel,
Maryland! My Maryland!

* Although the words as written, and as adopted by statute, contain only one instance of “Maryland” in the second and fourth line of each stanza, common practice is to sing “Maryland, my Maryland” each time to keep with the meter of the tune.

CakeDaisiesMichaela

CakeBalloons2John

Maryland, My Maryland

Pictures by my daughter from the Local History and Geography homeschooling block.

On this day in 1788, Maryland became the 7th state to ratify the Constitution. Perhaps you live in Maryland and never knew how this came about. Or perhaps Maryland is terra incognita because you live far away, in Nepal, or Virginia. In any case, I am going to tell you.

Campsite

For thousands of years human beings on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay fished, farmed, and fought one another without foreign interference. However, the seagoing vessels across the Atlantic Ocean grew ever-larger, and when Italian Giovanni Caboto, in the pay of Henry VII of England, wandered into codfish-rich Newfoundland/Maine waters in 1497, that was enough for England to claim the promising land. (They also insisted on referring to Caboto as “John Cabot” to help make their case.)

One hundred and ten years later Captain John Smith, although mainly concerned with the floundering colony in Virginia, ventured up the Chesapeake Bay, pronounced it goodly and pleasant, and produced a map that received much attention. So when George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, tired of the anti-Catholic feeling in Protestant England (Catholics were considered untrustworthy and could not hold office, vote, or worship openly), he asked his friend King Charles I to give him a piece of this New World land.

Calvert had tried Newfoundland first, but his settlers died of harsh weather and disease. His request was granted, but the Virginians were unhappy about the potential nearness of Papists. Well, suggested Charles, how about just a northern sliver of Virginia, about 10,000 square miles around the Chesapeake Bay—nobody there except non-Christian native dwellers! Calvert accepted this parcel, to tax and govern as he saw fit, in exchange for two Indian arrowheads a year, an enviably low rent.

Shortly afterward George Calvert died, so his younger son Leonard set sail in the Ark and the Dove and a party that included settlers and adventurers, several gentlemen, a handful of women, a number of indentured servants, and three priests. The group was a mixture of Catholics and Protestants, as it was Calvert’s intention to set up a religious-tolerant community. When they arrived at the mouth of the Potomac in March 1634, they were kindly greeted by the surprised yet helpful Yaocomico inhabitants, who, tiring of attacks by their Susquehannah neighbors, were fortuitously planning a move west. They granted the newcomers their land, along with houses, fields, and useful botanical, zoological, and culinary tips. The settlers renamed the territory Terra Maria, in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria (daughter of King Henri IV of France). Terra Maria: Mary-Land.

Ark&Dove

The Maryland settlers were better prepared than their hapless predecessors in Jamestown, those aristocratic younger sons who arrived in their best clothes ready to pick up the gold and jewels lying scattered on the shores of America. No, these folks brought tools and seeds and useful skills like carpentry, and had been recruited by Calvert on condition of willingness to work hard. The village, now called Saint Mary’s City, Maryland’s capital, was quickly fortified and the surrounding lands divided and allotted according to size of the household living on it: for heads of household, wives, and indentured servants, 100 acres each; for children 50 acres each. You can imagine that this arrangement encouraged emigration of large groups. “And here is my cousin Robert… and his son John…and their three manservants…” Voilá—450 more acres!

Although the Calverts were Proprietors—they actually “owned” Maryland and could govern it as they saw fit—the settlers announced that they intended to make their own laws. Calvert objected, and an uneasy compromise was worked out, but this insistence on self-rule was, as we know, a harbinger of things to come. Calvert did convince them to pass his Act of Toleration in 1649, which guaranteed religious freedom to Christians, although the arrangement was: if you deny the divinity of Jesus Christ you will be executed. Such means of ensuring uniform worship have not entirely fallen out of favor in 2010. The Act lasted until the Puritans chopped off Charles I’s head for tyrannical cluelessness (no longer a capital offense in Great Britain). In 1692 England and its colonies were declared officially Protestant. The new leaders burned down the Catholic churches in Maryland and moved its capital to Puritan-founded Providence—renamed Annapolis for Protestant Queen Anne.

To be continued April 29th: Part II.

CakeBerries2Edith


Library of Congress-Part 1

JeffersonBooks

On this day in 1800, President John Adams approved legislation appropriating $5,000 to fund a hitherto nonexistent Congressional library.

Now, when the United States was young and the ink was still drying on the [mostly] ratified Constitution, its first Congress met for a short while (1790 to 1800) in Philadelphia. This contender for the role of Nation’s Capital was merely a disappointed temporary location, resigned to the government’s eventual transfer south. In the meantime, however, Philadelphia was, thanks largely to William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, a highly livable city—the most populated in the country (Washington, DC wasn’t even in the Top Twenty), with paved and lighted streets lined with sidewalks, fine masonry buildings, a university, a hospital, a fire department, gardens and parks, theaters and shops and philosophical societies and libraries—much like today, but without WiFi. The Library Company of Philadelphia offered the use of its fine collection to members of Congress free of charge, at a time when library use was by paid subscription.

When the government packed up and trudged southward to the Potomac in 1800, they said to one another in despair, “Where in this muddy village of farms, taverns, and unfinished government buildings will we do the research and study necessary for Congressional legislation and malediction?”

Fortunately, the previous Congress had been planning ahead, and in 1801, a collection of 740 books and three maps, purchased with the appropriated funds, arrived from London. They were stored, along with the papers Congress had brought from Philadelphia, in a room of the partially-built Capitol Building. It was primarily a collection of legal, economic, and historical works. The next President, Thomas Jefferson (He Who Must Not Be Named in Texas), a voracious scholar himself—if there was any subject that never interested him it is apparently unrecorded—signed a law creating the post of Librarian of Congress.

Fire is a perpetual threat to the flammable cities of civilization, and disaster can result merely from an unsnuffed candle. The Library has suffered from several, mostly minor, fires. But in August 1814, during the War of 1812, the British set about destroying Washington’s public buildings, to avenge the Americans’ destruction of the public buildings of Toronto. Although parts of the Capitol held up remarkably well, its interior, filled with wooden furniture, paintings, and irreplaceable documents and books, was highly flammable. That was the end of the library.

But only temporarily. Because Jefferson, now in retirement and short of cash, offered to sell his personal library to the U.S. government as the foundation of a new collection. So in 1815 he was paid $23,900 for his 6,487 books, which arrived by horse and wagon from Monticello.

What a collection it was. Not only works of law, economics, and history, to replace the lost books. But also: Biography. Geography. Chemistry. Botany. Medicine. Anatomy. Architecture. Philosophy. Painting and sculpture. Theater. Music. Literature. Essays. Mythology. Religion (including a copy of the Koran). And not only in English, but also works in French, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, and Russian, several of which languages Jefferson spoke or read.

Some members of Congress objected to the collection’s breadth, explaining rather myopically, “the library was too large for the wants of Congress,” but Jefferson famously responded, “There is…no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer,” and that statement has guided the Library in its acquisitions over the years.

For Library of Congress-Part 2: Please see May 7th

Earth Day

From my sketchbook. My husband regarding the earth from a Shenandoah Valley peak.

ShenandoahCliff600

Today is Earth Day, a day on which we attempt to recall that Mother Earth is the source of all life and nourishment and that we ought to stop greedily stuffing ourselves with her resources and dumping toxic waste all over her. Human beings are clearly a bunch of sloppy ungrateful thankless brats. What’s a mother to do? Lose her cool? Blow her top?

A holiday to celebrate the Earth was proposed in 1969 by peace activist John McConnell and was originally, and logically, intended to be celebrated on the Equinox, around March 22nd. In fact the first Earth Day WAS celebrated on March 22nd, 1970, in San Francisco, California.

However, U.S. Senator Gayelord Nelson of Wisconsin had, coincidentally, planned an environmental awareness day to take place that same year, on April 22nd. This event coordinated the efforts of a number of autonomous grass-roots environmental groups who had been working independently of one another on different issues for a while—air and water pollution, oil spills, pesticides, loss of green space, extinction of species, various other environmental disasters—and who recognized their common purpose. The April 22nd event received more attention and thus determined the future “official” date. It was a movement in embryo just waiting for its birthday. Millions participated in the celebration, all over the country.

Only a few years earlier Rachel Carson had been vilified for her condemnation of DDT; now the brand-new Environmental Protection Agency burst onto the scene. Then the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Followed by a slew of environmental legislation: The Clean Air Act. The Water Pollution Control Act. The Safe Drinking Water Act. The Endangered Species Act. The Toxic Substances Control Act. Then we got fuel efficiency standards for cars. That one’s been harder for Americans to get used to, given their love of enormous cars, and their increasingly enormous rear ends. It’s amazing how quickly things moved along in the first decade (grinding to a standstill and retreating for a while in the 80s under the Reagan “You’ve Seen One Tree You’ve Seen Them All” administration).

In 1990 Earth Day was declared an annual national holiday, and it went global. Now it’s a huge international event marked by every conceivable environment-friendly related activity. “The environment” is no longer a fringe issue. We recycle, we compost, we buy organic, we conserve water, we take public transportation, we use the energy-efficient bulbs with their repellent prison-like glow. (I am told they are getting better.) Living green is not only socially acceptable; it’s a Madison Avenue device to sell more products (kind of defeats the goal of preserving the environment). The White House, the EPA, the National Park Service, Greenpeace, National Geographic, every community large and small (except perhaps the NRA), you name it, has its Earth Day events, publicized on their websites, through which citizens can do something to educate themselves and/or make a difference. I am going to tell my own neighbors about two of them right now:

April 22nd, 2010: 7:00pm at the Cleveland Park Library, Melanie Choukas-Bradley, author of City of Trees, will give a talk about the botanical history and diversity of Washington, DC. For more information, please call (202) 282-3080.

April 24th, 2010: 9 to 11am, a neighborhood ivy-pulling-and-trash-cleanup event in the park along Rock Creek Drive and Normanstone Drive. All ages. For more information, please email woodlandnormanstoneneighbors@gmail.com.

I hope you are finding a useful and jolly community event in your own neighborhood. And remember…“every day is Earth Day.”

CakeBerries2Gunilla

CakeBalloons2Hasse


Farm Skills Day

Three times a year Claude Moore Colonial Farm (a small corner of McLean, Virginia that is frozen permanently in the year 1771) holds a Farm Skills Day to teach 21st century children about what life was like for colonial Virginia families way back when. The content varies somewhat with the season. This was an April visit, and the children carded wool and dipped candles.

FarmSkillsDay

Easter Garden

EasterGarden

Some years ago I was moved to paint a still life based on our Easter customs.

Every year during Lent we plant a tiny garden of rye or clover seed and set it in the middle of the dining room table. And every year it’s startling (even though I’ve seen it so often before!) to find one morning that new, fragile green sprouts have pushed their way upward through the weight of earth. What fortitude. What will to live. So may we all find our way toward the light this springtime season.

CakeDaisiesSaul

Season of Life 1

Each year Discovery Theater at the Smithsonian offers a performance in celebration of spring festivals in various cultures. My daughter and I attended as part of a homeschoolers’ outing, and I took along my sketchbook. The homages to the season were skillfully woven together with music, dancing, brief dramatic episodes, and rapid costume and prop changes by the very small yet impressive multi-talented cast. It was lively and engaging, but really tough to sketch and make notes! More like a series of scrawls. Since these fill a spread of my sketchbook, it’s too big for one post, so just the left side today: Passover, the Maypole, and Hana Matsuri.

SeasonOfLifeL