Maryland Toleration Act

Examples of Maryland Toleration Act in the following topics:

• Maryland

  • The Calvert family recruited Catholic aristocrats and Protestant settlers for Maryland, luring them with generous land grants and a policy of religious toleration.
  • In 1649, Maryland passed the Maryland Toleration Act, also known as the Act Concerning Religion, a law mandating religious tolerance for Christians.
  • Passed by the assembly of the Maryland colony, it was the first law requiring religious tolerance in the British North American colonies.
  • Although Maryland was an early pioneer of religious toleration in the English colonies, religious strife among Anglicans, Puritans, Catholics, and Quakers was common in the early years.
  • Full religious toleration would not be restored in Maryland until the American Revolution.

• Religion in Early New England

  • Catholicism first came to the colonies in the form of the "Maryland Experiment," when King Charles I issued a generous charter to Lord Cecil Calvert, a prominent Catholic convert from Anglicanism, for the colony of Maryland.
  • In the new colony, religious tolerance (for Christians only) was preserved by Calvert until 1654, when Puritans from Virginia overthrew Calvert's rule.
  • In 1689, the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary ignited a new anti-Catholic revolt in Maryland.
  • In 1692, the famous Religious Toleration Act officially ended, and the assembly of Maryland established the Church of England as the official state religion supported by tax levies.

• Troubled Neighbors

  • In 1634, Maryland, a narrow strip of land north of Virginia and south of Pennsylvania, was settled as a Catholic colony via a royal charter.
  • Fifteen years later, in 1649, the Act of Toleration proclaimed religious freedom for its colonists, among whom Protestants would become the majority despite the original charter.
  • After the governor's death several years later, Margaret Brent, the wife of an esteemed landowner in Maryland, executed his will as governor of the colony.

• Early U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

  • Maryland, established the rights of power between federal and state governments.
  • On April 8, 1916, Congress passed an act providing the incorporation of the Second Bank of the US.
  • On February 11, 1818, the General Assembly of Maryland passed an act placing a tax on all banks not chartered by the legislature.
  • Maryland attempted to impede operations of a branch of the Second Bank of the US by imposing a tax on all bank notes not chartered in Maryland.
  • The Court rejected Maryland's interpretation of the clause and determined that Maryland may not tax the Bank without violating the Constitution.

• The Old South

  • Many individual acts of manumission freed thousands of slaves in total.
  • The percentage of free blacks in the Upper South increased sharply from one to ten percent, with most of that increase in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware.
  • For some that meant the immediate abolition of slavery because it was a sin to hold slaves and a sin to tolerate slavery.
  • The other states north of Maryland began gradual abolition of slavery between 1781 and 1804, based on the Pennsylvania model.
  • (Virginia had also attempted to do so before the Revolution, but the Privy Council had vetoed the act.)

• From Annapolis to Philadelphia

  • Prior to the Annapolis Convention and the 1787 Philadelphia convention that saw the drafting of the United States Constitution, delegates from Virginia and Maryland met at George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, Virginia in March 1785.
  • The report contained thirteen proposals known as the Mount Vernon Compact, ratified by both Maryland and Virginia.
  • It declared the Potomac, which was under Maryland's sole jurisdiction, to be a common waterway for use by Virginia as well.
  • Instead, he introduced a proposal in the Virginia General Assembly to act on the suggestion of the Compact commissioners for further debate of interstate issues.
  • New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and North Carolina had appointed commissioners who failed to arrive in Annapolis in time to attend the meeting, while Connecticut, Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia had taken no action at all.

• The Transformation of Law

  • In 1803, the Marshall Court struck down an act of Congress in Marbury v.
  • In 1819, the state of Maryland attempted to impose a tax on the Maryland branch of the Second Bank of the United States in McCulloch v.
  • Maryland .
  • Maryland decision, handed down March 6, 1819, as recorded in the minutes of the Supreme Court of the United States.
  • Marshall affirmed the supremacy of the federal government over the state of Maryland in this decision.

• Powers of the Assemblies

  • The Sugar Act increased duties on non-British goods shipped to the colonies.
  • The same year, the Currency Act prohibited American colonies from issuing their own currency.
  • The Massachusetts Assembly suggested a meeting of all colonies to work for the repeal of offensive Acts, and all but four colonies were represented.
  • Eventually the Maryland Convention formally asked the Governor to leave, and Governor Eden finally departed Maryland for England in the ship Fowey on June 23, 1776.
  • " speech against the Stamp Act of 1765.

• England and the High Seas

  • To ensure that the increasingly healthy profits of this trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 Navigation Acts that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies.
  • The introduction of Navigation Acts led to war with the Dutch Republic.
  • Fleeing from religious persecution would become the motive of many English would-be colonists to risk the arduous trans-Atlantic voyage: Maryland was founded as a haven for Roman Catholics (1634), Rhode Island (1636) as a colony tolerant of all religions and Connecticut (1639) for Congregationalists.

• The Expansion of the Federal Government

  • Maryland and Gibbons v.
  • The Court, with Marshall as chief justice, found that Marbury did have a right to his appointment, and that the Judiciary Act of 1789 provided him with a remedy known as a writ of mandamus.
  • This was the only time the Marshall Court would strike down an act of Congress; however, that precedent was enough to establish the Court as a co-equal branch by branding it as the final interpreter of the Constitution.
  • The state of Maryland had attempted to impede operation of a branch of the Second Bank of the United States by imposing a tax on all notes of banks not chartered in Maryland.
  • Though the law, by its language, was generally applicable to all banks not chartered in Maryland, the Second Bank of the United States was the only out-of-state bank then existing in Maryland, and the law was recognized in the Court's opinion as having specifically targeted the U.S.