The Maryland colony government was a proprietary system created by a 1632 royal charter, which placed the Calvert family — the Lords Baltimore — in control of the province’s laws, land, courts, and officers, subject to the consent of the colony’s freemen through an elected assembly. A resident governor ran the colony day to day, a two-chamber assembly made law alongside the proprietor, and county courts handled most of the business ordinary colonists ever encountered. The structure held from 1634 until the American Revolution, broken only by a twenty-five-year period of direct royal rule between 1689 and 1715.
The Charter That Created the Government
King Charles I granted the Maryland charter in June 1632. George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, had secured the grant but died that April, so his son Cecilius inherited it and oversaw the founding of the colony in 1634.1Maryland State Archives. The Maryland State House – The First Lord Baltimore George Calvert
The charter made the Calverts “true and absolute Lords and Proprietaries” of Maryland, with powers modeled on those once held by the Bishop of Durham in medieval England. They held the land directly from the Crown in exchange for a symbolic annual tribute of two Indian arrows and a fifth of any gold or silver ore discovered.2Maryland State Archives. Charter of Maryland of 1632 In practical terms, the proprietor could appoint judges, magistrates, and officers of every kind; impose punishments from fines to death; and pardon or remit sentences at will.3Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library. The Charter of Maryland – 1632
One clause of the charter cut against all of that. The proprietor could only enact laws “with the Advice, Assent, and Approbation of the Free-Men” of the province or their elected representatives.3Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library. The Charter of Maryland – 1632 That single requirement produced Maryland’s legislative assembly and became the foundation for a running political contest between the Calverts and the settlers that lasted as long as the proprietary system did.
The Lord Proprietor and the Governor
The Lord Proprietor lived in England. To run the colony, he appointed a resident governor who exercised proprietary authority on the ground. Cecilius named his younger brother Leonard Calvert as Maryland’s first governor in 1634.4Maryland State Archives. Leonard Calvert (1606-1647)
The governor could veto legislation, dissolve the assembly, and enforce the proprietor’s instructions. He also sat as the colony’s chief judicial officer. Lord Baltimore’s 1637 commission to Leonard Calvert made him Lieutenant-General, Chief Justice, Chancellor, and Chief Magistrate at the same time, consolidating executive and judicial authority in one person.5Archives of Maryland Online. The Former Chief Judges of the Court of Appeals
A small council of wealthy men, chosen by the proprietor, advised the governor, helped decide major legal disputes, and during the early decades sat as the upper chamber of the legislature. Council members typically owed their seats to family ties to the Calverts or demonstrated loyalty to them, so the body operated as an extension of proprietary interests more than as an independent check. The overlap between executive, judicial, and legislative roles in the same handful of men became a lasting grievance for settlers who wanted the branches separated.
The General Assembly
The assembly started as a meeting of every freeman in the colony, each voting in person. As the population spread, travel to the capital became impractical and representation shifted to elected delegates. In 1650 the assembly formally split into two chambers. The governor and council made up the Upper House; elected delegates made up the Lower House.6Maryland Manual On-Line. Maryland Senate – Origin and Functions The Lower House would in time become the Maryland House of Delegates.7Maryland Manual On-Line. Maryland House of Delegates – Origin and Functions
The early power fight inside the assembly was about who could propose laws. The proprietor initially claimed sole right to introduce legislation, leaving the freemen only to approve or reject his drafts. Delegates pushed back over years and eventually secured the right to introduce their own bills. That shift gave settlers direct influence over taxation, the tobacco trade, criminal punishments, and public infrastructure, and it made the Lower House the main venue for pressing back against proprietary authority.
Participation was narrow. Freemen had to hold a certain amount of land or an estate of a specified value to vote or serve as delegates, which in practice limited politics to established planters and shut out indentured servants, the landless, women, and enslaved people.
County Courts and Local Government
Most colonists’ only contact with the government was the county court. The courts handled criminal cases, civil disputes over debts and property, and equity matters such as estate settlements and land title questions.8Maryland State Archives. The Judicial System of Colonial Maryland In the earliest years a single court at St. Mary’s City carried the full load, but as settlement spread the government stood up a court in each county.
Justices of the peace presided and served at the governor’s pleasure. A county might have anywhere from three to nineteen justices, and at least one designated to the quorum had to be present for the court to sit. A single justice could handle minor criminal cases and small debt disputes on his own.8Maryland State Archives. The Judicial System of Colonial Maryland
The courts did more than adjudicate. They set tax rates, supervised road maintenance, managed the courthouse and jail, appointed guardians for orphans, bound out children as apprentices, selected grand and petit juries from among taxpayers and voters, admitted attorneys to practice, and oversaw land records. The sheriff was the county’s chief executive officer, serving warrants, collecting taxes, and enforcing court orders. Taxes were typically levied as a poll tax payable in tobacco, which functioned as the colony’s working currency.
Land, Quitrents, and Proprietary Revenue
Land was both the Calverts’ main inducement to settlers and their main source of income. Cecilius Calvert established a headright system under which anyone who transported colonists to Maryland could claim acreage for each person brought over, and the Land Office recorded every grant.9Maryland State Archives. Foreword to Supplement to Early Settlers – Section: The Conditions of Plantation The acreage allotted per headright shifted over the colony’s lifetime as the Calverts adjusted terms.
Once land was patented, the owner owed an annual quitrent to the proprietor. The rate began in 1633 at twenty pounds of wheat per hundred acres, rose to two shillings per hundred acres by 1642, and later climbed to four shillings. Between 1671 and 1733, the colony replaced traditional quitrents with a per-hogshead tobacco export duty, and after 1733 collection reverted to the four-shilling rate.10Maryland State Archives. Land Office and Prerogative Court Records of Colonial Maryland
Quitrents outweighed every other source of proprietary income, averaging five to six thousand pounds sterling a year against roughly 1,000 pounds from manor rents and 1,500 to 2,500 pounds from land purchase fees. The Calverts pushed to raise collections and settlers pushed back, making quitrent policy one of the recurring fights inside the assembly.10Maryland State Archives. Land Office and Prerogative Court Records of Colonial Maryland
Religion as a Governing Question
The Calverts were Catholic, but a Catholics-only colony would not have attracted enough settlers to survive. The response was a formal policy of coexistence among Christians, written into the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649. The act declared that no person “professing to beleive in Jesus Christ” would be “troubled, Molested or discountenanced” for their religion or “compelled to the beleife or exercise of any other Religion against his or her consent.”11The Avalon Project. Maryland Toleration Act
The act was enforced with fines, whippings for those who could not pay, and in the case of blasphemy or denial of the Trinity, death and forfeiture of all lands and goods to the proprietor.11The Avalon Project. Maryland Toleration Act Its protection reached only Trinitarian Christians; non-Christians and anti-Trinitarians were outside its shield. The policy also proved fragile. Protestants briefly seized control in the mid-1650s and Catholics lost its protections until Lord Baltimore regained power.
After the 1689 revolution and the shift to royal rule (discussed below), religion stopped being a question of coexistence and became a tool of exclusion. The 1692 Act for the Service of Almighty God established the Church of England as the colony’s official religion and required every taxable person to pay forty pounds of tobacco a year to support Anglican churches and ministers. To sit on juries or hold public office, a person had to swear loyalty to the Church of England, reject papal authority, and deny the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The 1704 Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery escalated matters by making priests who said Mass liable to transportation to England and barring Catholics from running schools or taking charge of the boarding and education of youth.12Maryland State Archives. Archives of Maryland, Volume 0026, Page 0341 Catholic worship moved into private homes, and the restrictions stayed on the books even after the proprietary government was restored.
The 1689 Protestant Revolution and Royal Government
By the late 1680s most Marylanders were Protestant, but political power still sat with a largely Catholic elite tied to the Calverts. When England’s Glorious Revolution brought William and Mary to the throne in 1688, Maryland Protestants acted. In July 1689, John Coode led roughly 700 armed men of the Protestant Association to the capital at St. Mary’s City. The pro-Calvert garrison of eighty to a hundred men refused to fight, and the city surrendered without bloodshed.
The new regime pushed all Catholics and Calvert loyalists out of office and military command. The Crown took direct control of Maryland, and for the next twenty-five years the colony operated as a royal province. The Calverts kept their land rights and quitrent income but lost the power to govern.
The proprietary system came back in 1715 by way of a conversion. In 1713, Benedict Leonard Calvert, the fourth Lord Baltimore, renounced Catholicism and became an Anglican. After his father’s death in 1715 he petitioned the Crown to restore the charter. He died almost immediately afterward, the title passed to his sixteen-year-old son Charles, and Maryland went back to the Calverts.13Maryland State Archives. The Maryland State House – Benedict Leonard Calvert The restored proprietors governed as Protestants, and the anti-Catholic laws stayed in force.
Who the Laws Applied To
The reach of the colonial government looked very different depending on who you were. Indentured servants were under contracts that obligated their masters to provide food, clothing, and lodging for the term of service. When the term ended, servants were entitled to clothing, a year’s supply of corn, and fifty acres of land. They could not marry before their term ended or they bought their freedom.14Maryland State Archives. Indentured Servants During the Colonial Era The protections were thin, but they rested on the premise that servitude was temporary.
For enslaved Africans, the assembly wrote the opposite rule. A 1664 law declared that all “Negroes or other slaves” in the province would serve for life and that children born to enslaved people inherited their father’s status as slaves. The statute also imposed severe penalties on free English women who married enslaved men. One of its purposes was to close a loophole in the courts, where enslaved people had argued that Christian baptism entitled them to freedom; the legislature wrote that argument out of the law.15Maryland State Archives. Blacks before the Law in Colonial Maryland The structure of Maryland’s government — proprietor, governor, council, assembly, county courts — reached everyone in the colony, but it did so on radically unequal terms.