The Battle of the Severn: Maryland's Civil War Before the Civil War

Near this stretch of the Severn River in sixteen fifty-five, Maryland fought a small battle that settled a large question: who controlled the colony, the Catholic proprietors who founded it, or the Puritan settlers who had flooded in from Virginia.

Maryland was born as a haven for Catholics. Lord Baltimore, the second Baron, Cecilius Calvert, received the charter in sixteen thirty-two, and his brother Leonard led the first colonists to a colony that, unusually, tolerated multiple Christian faiths under the Act Concerning Religion of sixteen forty-nine. But that same year, Parliament in England was executing King Charles the First and installing a Puritan Commonwealth. The tremors crossed the Atlantic.

Puritans who had settled along the Severn near what is now Annapolis grew restless under the proprietors. In sixteen fifty-four they seized control of the colonial assembly and ousted the proprietary governor, William Stone, a Protestant. Stone refused to yield. In March of sixteen fifty-five he raised a small fleet of vessels and moved up the Chesapeake toward the Puritan settlements with roughly one hundred thirty men.

The Puritans met him at the mouth of the Severn with a larger force. The battle lasted less than half an hour. Stone's men were routed; four of them were executed afterward, and Stone himself was captured and imprisoned. It was one of the first armed conflicts on American soil driven by the English Civil War.

The Puritans held Maryland for three years before Lord Baltimore's proprietorship was restored in sixteen fifty-eight. The episode foreshadowed something that would play out repeatedly in American history: the idea that religious tolerance, even when written into law, is only as stable as the political forces willing to enforce it. Within this quiet river bend, the first Maryland found out how fragile that guarantee could be.