The Calverts and the Colony That Was Built for Catholics

On the twenty-fifth of March, sixteen thirty-four, two ships called the Ark and the Dove anchored at a Piscataway island in the Potomac River. The passengers who came ashore were not the usual mix of English adventurers and indentured servants looking for tobacco land. They were, in significant part, English Catholics fleeing a country where practicing their faith had been a criminal offense for half a century.

The man who arranged the voyage was Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. He never set foot in the colony he founded. He managed it from London, where the political pressure on Catholics remained intense, and he sent his younger brother Leonard as the first governor. Their father George had sought the Maryland charter from King Charles the First, but died before it was sealed, so it was issued to Cecil in sixteen thirty-two. The Calverts were Catholic. The king was not. The charter was granted anyway, because the Calverts were well-connected, because tobacco revenue was attractive, and because the crown sometimes found it useful to deposit troublesome minorities at a safe distance.

What the Calverts built in the first two decades was genuinely unusual for its time. Maryland was not theologically neutral. The Calverts were Catholic and they knew it. But they also understood that Protestant colonists would outnumber Catholics almost immediately, and that a colony run as a Catholic enclave would collapse. So they established a policy of religious tolerance for all Christians, administered quietly, without fanfare.

That policy acquired formal legal weight on the twenty-first of April, sixteen forty-nine. The Maryland General Assembly passed An Act Concerning Religion, known ever since as the Maryland Toleration Act. It was one of the earliest laws in the American colonies to guarantee freedom of worship by statute. The act was imperfect. It protected only Christians; it prescribed death for anyone who denied the divinity of Christ. But within its limits it was real law, enforced by real courts, in a time and place when religious difference routinely produced execution.

The Calverts lost control of Maryland before the end of the seventeenth century. The Protestant Revolution of sixteen eighty-nine stripped them of the proprietorship. Anglicanism became the established religion of the colony. The Toleration Act was repealed. Catholics were barred from public office. The Catholic experiment in Maryland lasted fifty-five years. Its legal innovation lasted three hundred and seventy.