Colony of Maryland: From Toleration to Revolution

Maryland was founded as a Proprietary Colony on March twenty-fifth of sixteen thirty-four, when the Ark and the Dove landed on the shores of the Chesapeake, carrying Catholic settlers under the charter of Lord Baltimore. From the beginning, the colony was an experiment in religious toleration unusual for its time. An Act of Assembly in sixteen forty-nine formally protected freedom of worship for all Christians, a landmark in the history of American religious liberty.

More than a century later, Maryland colonists drew the Mason-Dixon Line to settle a border dispute with Pennsylvania, a survey completed between seventeen sixty-three and seventeen sixty-seven that would later define the boundary between slave and free states. When the British Stamp Act arrived in seventeen sixty-five, Maryland repudiated it. And when a colonial ship carrying taxed tea sailed into Annapolis Harbor in seventeen seventy-four, Marylanders burned it, their answer to the Boston Tea Party.