CHAPTER 1

Toward a Prehistory of Territory

Thomas Hobbes, the Maryland Palatinate, and the Colonial Boundary Problem

EDWARD G. GRAY

Thomas Hobbes has no known connection to the Maryland colony. At the time King Charles I’s seal was applied to the colony’s charter, in 1632, Hobbes was probably living at Hardwick Hall, a grand Derbyshire house owned by his patrons, the Earls of Devonshire. In 1630, Hobbes had begun serving as advisor to the widow of the second earl and to the earl’s cousin, the Earl of Newcastle. In 1634, the year Maryland’s first colonists settled St. Mary’s City on a small eponymously named tributary of the Potomac River, Hobbes accompanied the third Earl of Devonshire on a European tour.

Insofar as there is any historical connection between seventeenth-century England’s greatest political philosopher and the obscure colonial enterprise of a prominent Jacobean Catholic family, it most likely lies with the much better known, better capitalized, and altogether more catastrophic colonial enterprise known as Virginia. Both Hobbes and the eventual founder of Maryland, George Calvert, member of James I’s Privy Council, owned shares in the quasi-private entity that controlled that other Chesapeake colony. Hobbes most likely received his share from his employer and former student, William, Lord Cavendish, the second Earl of Devonshire. Cavendish probably made the grant to his trusted former tutor as a means of strengthening his own position on the Virginia Company Court (as the company’s board was known). At Cavendish’s behest, between 1622 and 1624, Hobbes also seems to have attended no fewer than thirty-seven Virginia Company meetings. In this same period, Calvert served as a secretary of state and in the period Hobbes was active, Calvert’s responsibilities included corresponding with the Virginia Company Court. Hobbes surely knew of Calvert; Calvert surely knew of the associate and secretary of one of the Virginia Company’s most influential shareholders. Beyond this circumstantial intersection of the as yet little-known philosopher and the prominent courtier, the connection of Thomas Hobbes to Maryland is pure conceit.1

But it is, this chapter suggests, an illuminating conceit. Hobbes is obviously much less well known as a colonial bureaucrat than a political philosopher. And the work for which he is most known happened years after his service to Lord Cavendish—his masterpiece, Leviathan, appeared in 1651. That work has much to say about the relationship between colonies and the sovereign, but very little to say about any given colony and nothing to say about Maryland.2 And yet, it contains insights very much relevant to the Maryland colony and, ultimately, all of England’s mainland colonies. That so capacious and multifaceted a treatise should say something about contemporaneous historical developments is not, one must acknowledge, an especially bold proposition. Historians of English America have long found in Hobbes’s writings a useful interpretive frame through which to view their subject matter.

Hobbes’s famously dark characterization of the hideous, barbaric, and disordered condition beyond the sovereign state, often misunderstood as Hobbes’s characterization of human nature, has been especially appealing to historians of England’s Chesapeake colonies. As places where humans faced “continuall feare, and danger of violent death,” and where “the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” the plantations of the Chesapeake have seemed the embodiment of Hobbes’s characterization of the “natural condition of mankind,” an ungoverned state of permanent war.3 Whether historians’ characterization of a Hobbesian Chesapeake accords with Hobbes’s actual understanding of humans’ natural state is debatable. What is less debatable, despite American historians’ tendency to imply otherwise, is the fact that Hobbes’s larger philosophical project, especially as articulated in Leviathan, goes far beyond the terrifying characterization of human beings living in the absence of stable governing authority.

Although any brief characterization of Hobbes’s purpose in Leviathan is certain to miss the full complexity and subtlety of that masterpiece, for the purposes of what follows, we can say that Hobbes sought a rational, empirical justification for formally incorporated government—the state, or what Hobbes usually referred to as the “common-wealth.” The ecclesiastical implications of Hobbes’s argument have justifiably drawn historians’ attention. Contemporaries widely and correctly saw the book as an attack on political doctrine upheld by both the Church of England and its Puritan critics. The notion at the center of Hobbes’s analysis, that sovereignty was effectively indivisible, whether inhering in the person of the monarch or the abstraction of the state, left no place for an ecclesiastical sanction on the English sovereign—itself a not terribly controversial position. Hobbes went further, however, in dismissing the Anglican view that ordination conferred on clergy spiritual powers independent of the sovereign. Clergy were, according to Leviathan, little different from any other servants of the sovereign. The argument repelled Anglicans, but proved appealing both to ultra-royalists and Puritan Parliamentarians, the latter seeing in Hobbes’s conception of unitary sovereignty justification for rule by a unitary, godly Parliament.4 As a means of contextualizing Hobbes’s most celebrated work, it thus makes a good deal of sense to interpret Leviathan and its reception through England’s seventeenth-century confessional strife. Because the Maryland colony was a product of that same strife—albeit a very different phase in its eruptions—one might thus expect an analysis of Hobbes and Maryland to emphasize English religious politics.

The conceit advanced here depends on a distinctly more arcane intersection of Leviathan and the Maryland colony. That intersection concerns the term territory, a term not formally associated with Maryland, but frequently used by Hobbes. There is a certain anachronism in introducing this term and its most familiar connotations in a chapter that deals with the seventeenth century. For the most part, contemporary scholars have understood territory and territoriality—the normative convergence of mapped space with governing authority—as contingent on variables associated with the modern nation-state. As one geographer has defined it, territory applies when an individual or group assert “influence, or control of people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.” What implies modernity in this definition is the correspondence of jurisdiction—“control”—to clearly articulated, lawful spatial limits, or borders. The latter make possible another attribute of the modern nation-state, the rights-bearing citizen-subject. States’ mechanisms for securing citizens’ rights are, in large measure, a function of clear insider-outsider status, and along with modern identity documentation, the national border represents a crucial instrument for achieving such totalizing forms of identity. In a global history of the bordered nation-state, Charles Maier writes that territory is space “empowered by borders.” For those borders “allow people to be governed or taxed or imbued with loyalty by virtue of their shared spatial location, not their race or their kinship ties or their faith or their professional affiliation.”5

Hobbes has a very different notion of territory. He assumes no clear, lineal borders because the Hobbesian common-wealth rests on a well-known premodern form of political affiliation. Rather than the kinds of horizontal, fraternal ties associated with citizenship, the Hobbesian state is bound by personal and contractual ties, the vertical bonds between subjects and sovereign. Although monarchical authority had clear spatial dimensions for Hobbes, those dimensions had less to do with the status of subjects within the realm than the specific legal claims of sovereigns to persons, land, and other resources.6 To grasp the point, we might consider Leviathan’s treatment of the common-wealth’s political economy. “The Nutrition of a Common-wealth,” as Hobbes characterizes the state’s economic life-blood, “consisteth, in the Plenty, and Distribution of Materials conducing to Life.” Those materials, the “matter” needed for the common-wealth’s survival, are “commonly called Commodities” and are of two kinds: the native and the foreign. The native is “that which is to be had within the Territory of the common-wealth: forraign, that which is imported from without.” What defines territory in this context, in other words, is not lineal borders or fraternal bonds of citizens, but the material yield of a kingdom. In an overwhelmingly agricultural age, this notion of territory obviously has a spatial dimension. Commodities come primarily from land, and if that land lies within the sovereign’s domain, those commodities are “native.” Insofar as territory is bounded for Hobbes, it is thus bounded in the way titled property is bounded. Title confers exclusionary rights to the produce of property, but indicates very little about the relationship between individual landholders and the sovereign. Bounded territory, according to this usage, thus does not denote territoriality—or the sovereign authority to confer rights-bearing subjecthood or citizenship.7

This is not to say that Hobbes has no conception of a spatial-limit to sovereignty, or even a kind of insider-outsider status. Hobbes notes, for example, a distinction between ordinary subjects and ambassadors or messengers. The distinction arises when the latter travel on state business. Hobbes does not explain exactly when a servant of the sovereign becomes an ambassador—there is no literal or metaphoric border crossing that turns servants of the realm into ambassadors. The same problem presents itself in the case of the criminal exile: Such a person is no longer a subject precisely because she or he is banished from the common-wealth, but banishment implies some kind of territorial limit—a point at which a subject becomes an exile. Again, Hobbes does not explain exactly where—as a spatial matter—exile begins. In a Europe still populated by city-states and kingdoms with vaguely defined frontiers and marchlands, what we get from Hobbes is an idea of territory subordinate to Hobbes’s contractual idea of sovereignty: The latter is limited in space, and the status of the subject implies spatial limits, but as a means of locating those spatial limits, actual international borders do not enter Hobbes’s analysis.8

In addition to trade and travel, there is a third context in which Hobbes’s analysis confronts the problem of sovereign territorial limits. Travel and trade suggest borders insofar as they involve transit between distinct sovereign domains, themselves defined by control of persons and produce. But Hobbes’s common-wealth does not exist in an international order defined solely by the presence of other common-wealths. It exists in a mosaic of adjoining territories and while some of those are governed, in theory, at least, some are not. These barbarous realms, enveloped in perpetual war, point to another spatial limit, one in which clearly articulated subject–sovereign relations give way to marchlands characterized by the absence of government. In the words of Annabel S. Brett, Hobbes’s common-wealth gives way to an “uneasy frontier,” one that affords passage between the civil and governed city and its obverse, the realm of nature where human beings are perpetually at war. Again, Hobbes offers little specificity about the conceptual nature of this frontier—he leaves his readers nothing that could, for instance, be represented on a map. Instead, he offers the distinction between barbarous humans in nature and the common-wealth as an “ontological ground on which [the common-wealth’s] structure of laws and rights is erected.”9

To summarize: Territory for Thomas Hobbes suggests a spatial dimension of sovereignty determined by various legal instruments that afford sovereigns control of subjects, lands, and the commodities they generate. International borders exist in Leviathan, but they exist as ontological abstractions—points at which envoys become ambassadors or subjects become banished exiles. Hobbes offers little about the exact nature of these points of transition. Insofar as the sovereign state is bounded, it is vaguely bounded by frontiers and marchlands. These are as likely to be zones in which one common-wealth’s jurisdiction gives way to another’s, as they are frontiers where governance gives way to the state of perpetual war.

Hobbes’s understanding of territory is generally consistent with the geopolitical order inhabited by seventeenth-century states and empires. Mountains and rivers often provided convenient territorial limits but artificial lineal boundaries were largely unknown. Insofar as there were clearly articulated, artificial limits on sovereignty, these tended to exist in the form of regulatory architecture—most notably, the walls and gates surrounding cities. What was true of the Old World also tended to be true of England’s first mainland American colonies. Beyond the palisades surrounding initial outposts, these were bounded not by any clearly articulated, artificial limits but by vague assertions of proprietary and jurisdictional control. Hobbes’s state of perpetual war may resonate with the nastiness, the brutishness, and the shortness of life in the English Chesapeake. But a far more resonant intersection of Hobbes’s political thought and English colonial reality lies in the territorial character of England’s first mainland North American colonies. These entities were defined in space above all by the goods and people over which they exerted putative legal control. Insofar as English authorities understood the spatial limits of England’s first colonies, they thus understood those limits in a way Hobbes would have recognized: a vague dissipation of jurisdiction rather than any clearly articulated territorial limits.

There is an important exception to this pattern of premodern territoriality in mainland English America. That exception emerged from a political problem of the kind that inspired Hobbes’s Leviathan: Under what circumstances does the common-wealth achieve for its citizen-subjects peace and security? The Chancery lawyers who drafted the Maryland charter in 1632 established a geopolitical entity with clearly articulated, lineal boundaries—the first in English North America. These territorial limits were born of political concerns—an emerging Anglo-Dutch contest and the fractious religious politics of the period of Charles I’s Personal Rule. That those political concerns—which obviously existed before Maryland’s founding and would exist after—yielded unique territorial form cannot be understood without first recognizing that, much like modern territorial limits, Maryland’s boundaries were of a fundamentally constitutional nature: They provided a crucial limit on governing authority. That such a limit was at all necessary was a function of Maryland’s peculiar constitutional order.

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As an instrument of colonial government, at least in the mainland colonies, Maryland’s constitution followed the charter of Avalon, a colony in Newfoundland established by George Calvert on lands he purchased in 1620 from a bankrupted former Oxford friend, Sir William Vaughan. Because Calvert would convert to Catholicism shortly before the actual colony was established, Avalon was England’s first colony founded by Catholics. In fact, this had very little impact on the colony’s charter, which Calvert received in 1623, before his conversion was public. For the most part, the Avalon colony would reflect the general religious attitudes of the court of James Stuart. A colony established by Catholics, as far as the Crown was concerned, was far from a Catholic colony.

Of much greater importance for the future Maryland colony was Avalon’s form of government. Avalon was to be a feudal palatinate, the latter a term derived from the Latin adjective palatinus. According to one authority, the term signified “a very close relation to the person of the sovereign.” In practice, what this meant was not so much political proximity as political authority: The lord or earl-palatine would effectively possess powers over his feudal grant undifferentiated from those of the sovereign.10 He would have the authority to enforce law; he would appoint and oversee the courts; he would levy taxes; he would dictate ecclesiastical affairs; he would make law, in consultation with his subjects; he would enfeoff land, and he would otherwise govern and defend his fiefdom. This palatinate model represented a sharp departure from earlier colonial charters. As commercial trading ventures, dependent on private capital, Maryland’s mainland predecessor colonies had been granted to limited-liability joint stock companies. With unitary ownership, governance of the Avalon colony would also be effectively unitary—it would reside with the person of a vice-regal Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore. There would be no feuding board of directors or intriguing shareholders to disrupt the work of governance.

The unitary propriety of a palatinate served aims consistent with ancient practice: rewarding a favorite with hereditary title to some portion of the realm. That a palatinate carried much greater constitutional autonomy than baronies or other common feudal conveyances had less to do with the political significance of the bequest than with political geography. James I’s Privy Council began granting proprietary charters with a palatinate clause not because of the perceived value of the grant—to grant palatine rights, in addition to normal feudal rights in capite, whereby land tenure is exchanged for direct service to the sovereign, did not reflect a judgment as to the value of the title. Instead, it reflected a geopolitical strategy. England’s palatinate counties, Cheshire, Lancashire, and the oldest of them, Durham, were all in the north of the country, far from the seat of monarchical authority. The Bishop of Durham, the ruler of that county-palatinate, had much broader powers to assemble armies and organize military action than did other feudal lords, and this proved vital in mobilizing defenses against Scottish invaders. In deference to geographic reality, in other words, the palatinate originated as a means of maintaining control in regions far beyond the reach of ordinary institutions of governance. In exchange for policing English borders, the Bishops of Durham could expect general immunity from royal writs and other proclamations; lawmaking was left to the bishops and their courts. Similarly, the bishops related to the king through diplomatic channels and the palatinate had no representation in Parliament. As one historian of the Durham Palatinate has observed, until reforms began in the sixteenth century, “the position of the palatinate of Durham in the legal machinery of the [English] kingdom . . . may well be compared to the status of a dependent foreign country.”11

In the 1620s, the pressing need was to preserve order in England’s expanding colonial periphery—a mandate made all the more urgent by the slaughter that enveloped Virginia in 1622. But the Avalon colony would never have the chance to establish the palatinate as a viable mechanism to do for the colonial periphery what it had been intended to do for the medieval English periphery. After less than a decade, the frigid colony had been able to attract only about a hundred English and Irish settlers, few of whom found much more than deprivation and illness.

For George Calvert, the fact that Avalon attracted only a few Catholics—mostly wealthy associates of the Calverts—was justification enough to consider the venture a failure. In 1629, Lord Baltimore and his family left Ferryland, the Calvert family seat at Avalon, and relocated to Virginia. With the collapse of the Virginia Company in 1624, local officials now served at the pleasure of King Charles I, who had succeeded his father and Calvert’s patron after James I’s death in March 1625. Although happy for such an esteemed courtier as Lord Baltimore to bring paying tenants and capital to bolster the growing tobacco trade, Virginians, who now included a powerful Puritan faction, were less happy about the presence of an influential Catholic. Calvert might have allayed the Virginians’ concerns, but he refused to take requisite oaths of allegiance and supremacy.12

With little hope for a cross-confessional political alliance in England’s Chesapeake colony, Calvert abandoned plans for a Virginian Avalon and returned to England. He would now spend the final two years of his life on the design for a new Avalon, one that avoided both the climatic constraints of Newfoundland and the religious ones of the king’s existing colonies. Because of his loyalty to the king’s late father, Calvert remained a royal favorite and worthy agent of the Stuart realm’s American expansion. With the help of friends on the Privy Council, Calvert petitioned to establish a colony south of the James River, and the petition was nearly approved before word reached former directors of the Virginia Company. Although the Crown had revoked the company’s charter, former shareholders expected to retain control of the company’s land claims. Because it meant parceling up portions of Virginia’s original grant, Virginia Company partisans argued that Calvert’s proposed colony was a violation of their property rights.13

It is a measure of how arcane and improvised the legal apparatus of English colony building was (and of how poorly understood the revocation of colonial or any other charters remains) that such a claim had any validity at all. The Crown had revoked the Virginia Company’s charter; but the former holders of that charter argued that the property rights it conferred were effectively unchanged. In revoking the charter the only thing the king had done, according to this logic, was affirm his authority to govern his dominions. Investors still controlled the land, at least as stipulated by the colony’s founding documents, and a grant to Calvert on lands so close to the company’s original settlements clearly violated land titles of former Virginia Company proprietors. The idea that the Crown was prepared to disburse former Virginia Company lands to another colonizer was all the more alarming when that colonizer was a Catholic who had already refused to subscribe to Virginia’s standing legal order.

Rather than settle the question of whether ownership by a joint-stock company carried the sorts of property rights associated with feudal land conveyance, whatever the status of an originating patent, the Crown accepted the opposition argument and proposed to Calvert a new location, this one in Virginia’s northern reaches. Here, it seemed, there was less danger of intruding on the former Virginia Company claims, but a northern location would also accomplish a pressing new strategic end, namely establishing a buffer between Virginia and an avaricious and expansive New Netherland, now extending its trading activities south into the Delaware River Valley.14

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George Calvert died on April 15, 1632, at the age of fifty-two, two months before the Maryland charter received its final royal seal. The charter would be granted to Calvert’s eldest son, Cecil, the second Baron Baltimore, and it would look very much like that awarded George for an earlier Calvert-family venture. Like Avalon, Maryland was to be a palatinate. Regarding civil and ecclesiastical affairs in the new colony, Lord Baltimore and his heirs would enjoy the same “Rights, Jurisdictions, Privileges, Prerogatives, Royalties, Liberties, Immunities, and Royal Rights, and temporal Franchises whatsoever . . . to be had, exercised, used, and enjoyed, as any Bishop of Durham, within the Bishopric or County Palatine of Durham, in our Kingdom of England, ever heretofore.” Cecil Calvert would have sweeping powers not only over the government of his new colony but also, much like the Bishops of Durham, over the ecclesiastical affairs of his colony. In fact, he would have far more control—at least in theory—than the seventeenth-century Bishops of Durham had. After 1536, King Henry VIII had constrained the judicial autonomy of the Durham bishops, and by the end of the century royal magistrates had assumed control of the palatinate’s courts. In Maryland, Lord Baltimore and his heirs would be empowered “by judges by them delegated, to award Process, hold Pleas, and determine in those Courts, Preaetorian Judicatories (equity courts), and Tribunals, in all Actions, Suits, Causes, and Matters whatsoever, as well Criminal as Personal, Real and Mixed, and Praetorian.”15

Cecil Calvert had more power than the seventeenth-century Bishops of Durham in another respect as well. Theirs was an elective office. The Maryland charter left no doubt that this palatinate would carry conventional feudal tenure: “Whereas our well beloved and right trusty Subject Caecilius Calvert, Baron of Baltimore . . . Son and Heir of George Calvert, Knight, late Baron of Baltimore . . . treading in the steps of his father, being animated with a laudable, and pious Zeal for extending the Christian Religion, and also the Territories of our Empire . . . with some certain Privileges, and Jurisdiction, appertaining unto the wholesome Government, and State of his Colony and Region aforesaid, may by our Royal Highness be given, granted and confirmed unto him, and his Heirs.”16

Whatever the precise political origins of the palatinate colony, the political consequences of a chartered entity enjoying such extensive constitutional autonomy were far-reaching. For Virginians and their London advocates, the fact that the Calvert family had such sweeping powers only made the Maryland colony that much more threatening. The first Lord Baltimore had already proven reluctant to disavow any papal allegiance, and now the second Lord Baltimore was being granted a minor kingdom in lands nominally claimed by Virginia. Able to conduct his own diplomacy and warfare, Lord Baltimore could ally his colony with his father’s old (and mostly alleged) Spanish-Catholic friends or perhaps even build direct ties to Rome. In a more basic sense, there was no constitutional clarity whatsoever about the palatinate’s powers relative to other colonies. Should Virginia and Maryland come to dispute their respective jurisdictions, for example, the terms of the palatinate suggested that Maryland would negotiate as a quasi-independent state while Virginia, now a royal colony, would have to defer to royal authority. For Virginia’s partisans, this presented a near-hopeless political predicament, given the king’s widely assumed Catholic sympathies and his continued support for the Calvert family.

In defense of their putative claims, former directors of the Virginia Company railed against a Catholic Maryland. The well-connected supporters of the company knew full well that popular anti-Catholicism retained much political potency. In aligning themselves with Puritan opponents of the Stuarts’ tolerance, they hoped to pressure the king and his ministers to restore the Virginia Company charter. A rechartered anti-Catholic Virginia Company, they seem to have believed, would be a price the king would pay to quiet critics of the Maryland venture. But the Virginia partisans were wrong. Charles and his ministers never restored Virginia’s charter but neither did they ignore partisan hostility to Maryland.17

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The true novelty of the Maryland charter lay not in the powers it afforded its proprietors but in the limits it imposed on those powers—limits in the form of lineal boundaries. The contrast with the early joint-stock colonial charters is instructive.18

According to the first Virginia Company charter (which effectively established two joint-stock entities, the London Company, which controlled a southern portion of Virginia, and the Plymouth Company, granted control of a northern portion that would become New England), the London Company was entitled to establish “a Plantation and Habitation in some fit and convenient Place” between thirty-four and forty-one degrees of latitude. The company’s plantation could be situated anywhere along the coast between those lines of latitude or “on the islands thereunto adjacent, or within one hundred miles of the coast thereof.” Any additional claims would be a function of the first settlement. Much like a medieval fortress town or a walled city-state, that initial settlement’s territorial control would radiate outward, fifty miles north and south along the coasts and one hundred miles inland. Two subsequent charters expanded the company’s legal claim to two hundred coastal miles north and south.

Virginia would encompass “all those lands, countries, or territories situate, lying, and being in that part of America called Virginia, from the point of land called Cape or Point Comfort [at the mouth of the James River] all along the sea coast to the southward two hundred miles, and all that space and circuit of land lying from the sea coast of the precinct aforesaid up into the land throughout from sea to sea west and northwest.”19 Neither the southern Virginia colony nor any northern counterpart would, in effect, be bounded grants. Any limits on the colonies’ respective claims would be a function of initial settlement and subsequent conquest. From the first outposts, there would be a rough extension of some sort of jurisdiction for some two hundred coastal miles, including any territory “not now actually possessed by any Christian Prince or People.”20 But beyond these terms, the Crown made no effort to create anything that could be mistaken for firm, territorial boundaries. The original colonies would have influence over hinterlands and frontiers, but nothing that suggested a bounded, spatial estate.21

  In its efforts to appease Virginia Company partisans and their Puritan allies, the lawyers of the Chancery took a very different tack with the Maryland charter. Lord Baltimore and his heirs would have title to a tract as clearly defined as seventeenth-century cartographic technology afforded. Maryland would include what is now known as the Delmarva Peninsula, excluding its southern tip, which would remain in Virginia, affording the latter control of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. That section of Eastern Shore Virginia would be separated from Maryland by a lineal boundary running from Watkins Point on the west, due east to the Atlantic coast. Maryland’s northern boundary, and the one that would eventually be a point of bitter and prolonged contestation with William Penn and his heirs, would begin “unto that part of the Bay of Delaware . . . which lieth under the Fortieth degree of North Latitude . . . where New England is terminated” and would follow a direct westward line to a “true meridian” intersecting the “first Fountain of the River of Pattowmack.” From that point, the colony’s boundary would form a southward, lineal boundary and then travel along the Potomac’s far bank to “a certain place . . . where [the river] disembogues into the aforesaid Bay of Chesapeake, and thence by the shortest Line unto the aforesaid Promontory of Place, called Watkin’s Point.”22

In the history of English colony building, the Maryland charter was momentous. It represents the first time the Crown authorized extensive lineal, territorial limits on a portion of its American claims. It also marks the beginning of a cartographic and political process that would ultimately make eastern North America the birthplace of one of settler colonialism’s most familiar features: its reliance on arbitrary geometric boundaries, imposed by distant authorities in deference to political imperatives far removed from colonized lands. In some ways this pattern suggests growing sophistication: from boundaries defined by the organic expansion of fortress-like outposts, England’s colonies came to have lineal boundaries, facilitated by improvements in cartographic knowledge. But progress would be the wrong frame through which to view Maryland’s boundaries. Maryland was, at base a feudal conveyance. It represented a monarch’s efforts to reward a favorite while serving some larger geopolitical aim. In this way, it differed little from the palatinates of the middle ages or really any other form of feudal estate. What made the Maryland palatinate distinct was the Crown’s efforts to forestall territorial conflict by imposing clear jurisdictional limits.

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Understanding his colony’s jurisdiction as a function of carefully articulated territorial boundaries, the second Lord Baltimore interpreted his own powers accordingly. Territorial control, as articulated in the Maryland charter, was essentially absolute within the bounds of Maryland. Native peoples and Europeans who happened to reside in the Maryland grant would, accordingly, become subjects of their new Lord Baltimore. But, of course, political authority is not so readily fungible—as Hobbes recognized. Insofar as the early Chesapeake was a place of nastiness, brutishness, and shortness of life, it was so in no small measure precisely for this reason. A bounded palatinate in a geopolitical order populated by Native nations and European colonies was akin to a Protestant city-state among Catholic kingdoms, or a republic surrounded by monarchies. Without a common state system, a bounded palatinate among unbounded Native nations and European colonies was, as Hobbes would surely have recognized, destined for perpetual, internecine conflict. Within a very short time after the settlement of St. Mary’s City, Maryland’s first and, in some ways, most damaging jurisdictional crisis began. The crisis centered on the Kent Island fur-trading factory controlled by a Virginian named William Claiborne.

Claiborne was a Cambridge graduate with Puritan leanings who had migrated to Virginia in 1621. Like many of Virginia’s early settlers, he was not the kind to take up axe and hoe and face the hard work of carving an agricultural settlement from the Virginia countryside. His parents were of middling status but with his Cambridge education, Claiborne clearly expected to achieve a higher social rank. He was initially employed as the Virginia Company’s chief land surveyor, a lucrative post, but not lucrative enough to place him among the colony’s emerging planter elite. For that, Claiborne would need political office, something that came to him after the 1622 Powhatan Rebellion. As member of a faction favoring royal governance for the colony, Claiborne was rewarded with an appointment to the Governor’s Council, a position he retained after 1624, the year the Crown assumed control of the colony. Among the benefits of council membership was access to the colony’s Indian trade. No single member of the Governor’s Council exploited this commercial advantage more effectively than Claiborne.

In 1630, just after the first Lord Baltimore had visited Virginia, Claiborne found partners in London whose investments allowed him to expand his stake in the northern Chesapeake Indian trade. By the time Lord Baltimore’s colonists had settled on the banks of the St. Mary’s River, Claiborne had established his factory on Kent Island, a Chesapeake outcropping near present-day Annapolis. From this outpost, which Claiborne had acquired from the Susquehannock Indians, his agents were able to dominate the Indian trade of the northern Chesapeake.23

Given Claiborne’s Puritan sympathies, it is not surprising that Lord Baltimore identified him as a serious security threat. It was, after all, unlikely that a Puritan would accede to Catholic rule. Similarly, Claiborne’s business interests rested on a trading alliance with the Susquehannocks, the dominant Native group in Maryland’s far north. As long as this was the case—that the region’s most powerful Native group was allied with Virginians and that those Virginians had little reason to embrace the authority of a new Catholic proprietor—Cecil Calvert could claim no real territorial integrity for his colony. The far north remained, in effect, part of Virginia. The second Lord Baltimore complained about the matter to Claiborne’s London partners, to little effect. Maryland’s government at St. Mary’s City, meanwhile, minuscule and largely powerless, did its best to ignore the Kent Island outpost.

The continued expansion of Dutch colonial activities south from Manhattan Island along the Delaware River (which the Dutch called the South River) brought an infusion of wampum, firearms, textiles, and other European trade goods to Maryland’s far north. The Susquehannocks had attempted to capitalize on this new Dutch trade, sending emissaries to Manhattan in 1626 to negotiate a trading alliance. Fortunately for Lord Baltimore, the alliance was never secured. Dutch traders chose instead to trade primarily with the Lenape of the lower Delaware and the Eastern Iroquois, or Mohawks, initiating what would be a decade of mercantile rivalry among these Native groups. Instead of a powerful Indian nation allied with England’s Dutch rivals, Maryland’s northern neighbor was thus a powerful Indian nation dependent largely on English trade, although dependency is not an entirely accurate characterization of Susquehannock trading relations. Despite struggles with their neighbors, the Susquehannocks, from their settlements near present-day Lancaster, Pennsylvania, exerted immense power over the mid-Atlantic fur trade, mostly by controlling the movement of beaver pelts acquired from Huron allies in the Great Lakes. Advantageous as this trade was for the Susquehannocks, Dutch trade, particularly with the Lenape to the east, meant increased pressure on fur supplies throughout the Native northeast, a circumstance that only exacerbated Native trade rivalries. By the late 1620s, this competition for furs had ignited a decade-long war between the Susquehannocks and the Lenape.24

Although founded as a fur-trading outpost, like most such outposts, the Kent Island factory was actually a fairly diverse economic enterprise. Its residents engaged in a variety of agricultural pursuits, including tobacco production, dairy farming, and cattle ranching—the latter proving particularly well-served by the factory’s island location. Natural and human predators were mostly nonexistent. By 1637, there were somewhere near 150 head of cattle on the island. As a political entity, Kent Island was unambiguously Virginian—the islanders sent a representative to the Virginia House of Burgesses. As prescribed in its original charter, the Virginia colony was less a contiguous territory than a sort of inland archipelago composed of distinct plantations, engaged in trade and agriculture under the auspices of a single governing authority. Now that archipelago stretched across contiguous territory claimed by the second Lord Baltimore. As James Rice has written, the Kent Island factory is thus best viewed as “a thriving colony within a colony.”25

By the time the Maryland colony was established, in sum, Claiborne had built a thriving Virginia outpost in the upper Chesapeake, secured by a trading alliance with the region’s dominant Native nation. Whatever legal dispensations Lord Baltimore enjoyed, whatever the intentions of the English Crown, the reality was that the most powerful European geopolitical entity between Virginia and New Netherlands was not the colony of Maryland, but the Kent Island factory of Claiborne and his English partners. The crucial qualifier here is “European.” Powerful as Claiborne and his London partners may have been, the reality was that their power depended on Native allies. Perhaps, then, the best way to characterize the geopolitical entity that dominated the northern Chesapeake in the early 1630s is as a fur-trading network consisting of Susquehannock Indians and English factors associated with William Claiborne’s Kent Island factory.

*  *  *

That Maryland’s proprietor ever thought his colony could free itself of Claiborne was mostly owing to Claiborne’s London business partners. After eight years, they saw modest returns, but at a steep political price. Their North American agent’s refusal to recognize the second Lord Baltimore’s authority had infuriated a close Stuart ally and emboldened Virginia’s fractious Puritan faction. When approached by Lord Baltimore about Claiborne’s expansive Kent Island presence, the London partners ultimately reversed course, and in 1638 Maryland authorities were able to evict Claiborne. But an end to the Kent Island fur-trade factory was far from an end to the Claiborne problem. Claiborne moved his traders to Palmer’s Island, now known as Garrett Island, at the mouth of the Susquehanna River. Again, Lord Baltimore protested and ultimately Maryland’s militia, reinforced by Potomac Indian allies, seized Claiborne’s Susquehanna outpost. These actions obviously infuriated Claiborne but now the greater threat to Maryland were Claiborne’s Native trading partners. Seeking access to Dutch trade, the Susquehannocks had forged a peace with their old Lenape enemies, effectively replacing one European trading alliance with another.26

Claiborne’s absence, in sum, changed very little for Lord Baltimore. Maryland’s northern borderlands were still controlled by Native groups and European traders overwhelmingly hostile to Lord Baltimore’s great American experiment. The Maryland palatinate, however clearly defined in space and however unitary its putative palatinate powers, faced problems much like those of its neighbor colony to the south. If on a map (although no such map would exist for decades) Maryland suggested sharply bounded territory, in geopolitical reality it functioned as all of England’s colonies did—a collection of far-flung legal claims and mercantile alliances with little territorial or jurisdictional clarity.

It is significant that Claiborne’s Kent Island factory occupied an island and that its successes were in no small measure a function of its island circumstances. In some ways, we might say that Hobbes’s ideal of territorial sovereignty is applicable above all to island polities. As long as the shoreline is contiguous with sovereignty, islands present a much simpler answer to the question of territory. From Thomas More’s Utopia to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the island stands as the ideal setting for the polity of fantasy, precisely because it solves the problem of territorial sovereignty. There is no question of boundaries or frontiers, leaving rulers unchallenged in their benignity or their tyranny. As Lauren Benton has written, “as naturally bounded spaces that could be thoroughly discovered and surveyed, islands seemed by their very nature to simplify the processes of taking possession and making dominion transparent.”27 They seemed, in other words, utopian precisely because they made possible the fantasy of total and complete contiguousness of authority and spatial limits. Land-bound colonies presented precisely the opposite problem. Territorial sovereignty would never be more than a political fiction for England’s mainland colonies.

*  *  *

Hobbes, it seems, understood geopolitical reality much better than the Privy Counsellors and Chancery lawyers responsible for Maryland’s charter. Sovereignty, even a layered, composite, colonial sovereignty, was unlikely to be territorial in any modern, spatial sense. It would remain, throughout the colonial era, a matter of persons and produce and although the Lords of Trade would employ lineal boundaries in limiting the jurisdiction of future colonial governments, those boundaries would accomplish little. As a political matter, regions adjoining colonial borders would look much more like transnational borderlands than nationalized and bordered lands. Nowhere would this be more true than along the borderlands separating Maryland from its future northern neighbor, Pennsylvania. Ultimately, the proprietors of the two colonies would turn to two English astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, to transform their common frontier from borderlands into bordered lands. But here too, as the struggles of a new American federal government would make clear, boundaries did little to resolve the jurisdictional tensions inherent in federated empire.

Hobbes would surely have anticipated the failure of Maryland’s northern boundary. Unable to translate constitutional principle into geopolitical reality, Maryland’s northern borderlands descended into decades of ruthless conflict that often bore hallmarks of Hobbes’s war of all against all. In considering the metaphoric virtues of Hobbes’s state of nature, historians of early America might thus shift their gaze from the Chesapeake to the region’s northern borderlands. Although violence pervaded the Chesapeake from very early in its colonial history, by the early eighteenth century the region had stabilized, its violence assuming a more institutionalized form. To the north, along the newly incorporated Maryland-Pennsylvania borderlands, that violence continued and, in fact, would intensify across most of the eighteenth century.

Notes

1. 1.  Although it is likely that Hobbes attended meetings of the Virginia Company, some qualification is necessary since his given name is never used and company records refer variously to a “Mr. Hobbs,” “Hobs,” and “Hobbes.” Historians have found no plausible alternative to Cavendish’s secretary and associate. Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company,” The Historical Journal vol. 24 (1981), 297–321. On Calvert’s early engagement with the Virginia Company court, see 1623 correspondence listed in “List of Records,” The Records of the Virginia Company of London: Volume I: The Court Book, ed. Susan M. Kingsbury (Govt. Printing Office, 1906), 174, 175, 177.
2. 2.  For an insightful analysis of Hobbes’s colonial concerns, see Alexander B. Haskell, For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (UNC Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2017), esp. 272–89.
3. 3.  Leviathan, I, xiii, 89. References to Richard Tuck, ed. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). For Hobbesian characterizations of the Chesapeake, see for example, James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Univ. of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 1994), 334; Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988), 12; Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown, 1990), 1. The formulation has had particular appeal for textbook writers. See, for instance, David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Mel Piehl, The Brief American Pageant, 9th ed. (Cengage Learning, 2017), 49.
4. 4.  See, for example, Johann P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (St. Martin’s Press, 1992), esp. ch. 6; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 325–35; Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), esp. ch. 3; and Haskell, For God, King, and People, esp. 287–88.
5. 5.  Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 19; Charles S. Maier, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016), 1–2. I am not suggesting that borders are the only mechanisms available to states for this purpose or that insider-outsider status is purely a function of international borders. As a historical matter, domestic, national law very clearly had a more central role in defining subjects and citizens. See, for example, Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), and more generally, Josep M. Fradera, The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton Univ. Press, 2018).
6. 6.  The relationship between territory and subjecthood is explored in Michel Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978, ed. Michelle Snellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Picador, 2007), esp. 12–16, 100–105. Foucault’s interest is neither territory nor subjecthood per se, but what he terms governmentality, or the exertion of governance over the subject. Territorial sovereignty or “territorial monarchies” represent one of the preconditions for governmentality to the extent that a territorial monarch must take stock of the geographic limits of her or his powers. This implies some kind of data gathering, perhaps of a cartographical sort, and it lays the groundwork—in Foucault’s interpretation—for a more thoroughgoing statistical understanding that allows the sovereign to identify and define subjects. What is most helpful in Foucault’s analysis, for my purposes, is the recognition that sovereignty is more a legal than a political or governmental fact. The premodern head of state may be sovereign and exert bounded, territorial authority, but that in no way means that the sovereign governs in any sense comparable to governance in the modern liberal state. In Foucault’s interpretation, the former controls things and persons in the service of the sovereign through the use of legally sanctioned violence; the latter controls things and persons in the service of abstractions such as safety, security, health, and well-being and does so through more tacit, constitutional, and normative disciplinary systems. Where the distinction lies for Foucault is in efficacy: The modern liberal order is much more effective than the territorial sovereign at achieving the aims of government. What is crucial for the present analysis is the notion that a form of territoriality (or sovereignty with specific, delineated cartographical limits) existed before the modern nation-state. My interest is not the relative power of these geopolitical forms, but the historical shifts they suggest. See also Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), esp. Part I.
7. 7.  Leviathan, I, xxiv, 170–71.
8. 8.  Leviathan, I, xxiii, 169; I, xxviii, 218–19. See also, Arash Abizadeh, “Sovereign Jurisdiction, Territorial Rights, and Membership in Hobbes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. A. P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), www.oxfordhandbooks.com. David Runciman has observed that in fact Hobbes’s conception of the state rejects the very notion of boundaries, implying a kind of universal imperium. For Hobbes, “the state does not exist within the state, so it is not a world that can be mapped on the co-ordinates given by its laws—it has none, beyond the laws of nature, which ascribe the ownership of actions to natural persons alone. Instead, it must be described though whatever encounters take place between the sovereign representative and an audience who take his words and actions to be the state’s own. This audience has only two possible constituencies: either the sovereign addresses his subjects, or he addresses the sovereigns of other states.” Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 16–17.
9. 9.  Annabel S. Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton Univ. Press, 2011), 5, 7. Hobbes’s De cive quoted in ibid., 5.
10. 10.  Gaillard Thomas Lapsley, The County Palatine of Durham: A Study in Constitutional History (Longmans, Green, 1900), 3.
11. 11.  Lapsley, The County Palatine of Durham, 257; Albert J. Martinez Jr., “The Palatinate Clause of the Maryland Charter, 1632–1776: From Independent Jurisdiction to Independence,” American Journal of Legal History vol. 50:3 (July 2008–2010), 308–309; Francis A. Mullin, “The Palatinate of Durham,” Catholic Historical Review vol. 21:2 (July 1935), 186; Viola Florence Barnes, “Land Tenure in English Colonial Charters of the Seventeenth Century,” in Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by His Students (1931; reprint ed., Books for Libraries Press, 1966), 4–40; and see Ken MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), esp. 89–105.
12. 12.  Antoinette Sutto, Loyal Protestants & Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630–1690 (University of Virginia Press, 2015), 23–24. More generally on Maryland’s creation and early history, Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), ch. 6.
13. 13.  Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History: The Settlements, Volume 2 (1936; pbk, Yale Univ. Press, 1964), 277–80, 282, 283–85.
14. 14.  Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History: The Settlements, Volume 2, 279.
15. 15.  “Charter of Maryland Granted to Lord Baltimore June 20, 1632,” Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History, Volume II, Part I, Middle Atlantic Colonies, W. Keith Kavenagh, ed. (Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), 757–59 (hereafter FCA). It should be said that the charter also suggests that the Maryland Lords Palatine would make laws “with the Advice, Assent, and Approbation of the Free-Men of the same Province, or the greater Part of them, or of their Delegates or Deputies, whom we Will shall be called together . . . when, and as often as Need shall require.” Scholars have seen this as a concession by Calvert to attract settlers by reassuring them that proprietary rule would not be absolute. An alternative perspective is suggested by the fact that similar consensual elements had long been instituted in the Durham palatinate. These included a parliamentary-like assembly, called by the bishops to offer judicial advice and consider fiscal matters. The bishops also relied on a Bishop’s Council for advice in civil and ecclesiastical affairs. That the Maryland charter is so vague about the nature of freemen’s legislative authority might even suggest that far from a concession to potential colonists, the representative element of the charter involved a weakening of earlier patterns of colonial representation. This ambiguity would further suggest that the justification for the Maryland palatinate had much more to do with a sense in Charles’s court that some sort of proto-absolutism, or personal rule, would be needed on England’s far periphery. For the earlier consensus perspective, David W. Jordan, Foundations of Representative Government in Maryland, 1632–1715 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 3–4. On the Durham councils, Lapsley, The County Palatine of Durham, ch. 4.
16. 16.  “Charter of Maryland . . . ” in FCA, Vol. II, Part I, 756–57.
17. 17.  Sutto, Loyal Protestants & Dangerous Papists, 33–37.
18. 18.  Although the Massachusetts Bay Company charter of 1629 does establish a colony “lyeing and being in Bredth, from Forty Degrees of Northerly Latitude from the Equinoctiall Lyne, to forty eight Degrees Of the saide Northerly Latitude inclusively.” But these stipulations, granting rights between parallels of latitude, though more explicit as a guide for colony building (e.g., assuming control and occupation of lands within these bounds), bear a closer relation to the spatial limits of the original London and Plymouth companies than they do to the clearly and fully bounded entity of Maryland. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass03.asp. The consort colonies of Massachusetts—Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut—came into being under Massachusetts Bay Company auspices, so lacked royal charters. Perhaps the most emblematic of all charters in the period of Maryland’s founding were those for England’s island colonies, Bermuda (Somers Island) and Providence Island. Islands, granted to joint-stock trading companies, avoided the sort of territorial conflict that would be chronic for England’s mainland grants. See MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World, 93–94.
19. 19.  FCA, Vol. III, Part 1, 1698–99; 1716.
20. 20.  Ibid., 1698.
21. 21.  Although the palatinate’s origins were geopolitical, as a basis for colonial rule, it had clear economic significance. As the control of English colonies shifted from trading companies to individual proprietors, the palatinate model facilitated enfeoffment, the creation of rent-generating manors. See MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World, 96–97; and Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1685 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 166–83.
22. 22.  FCA, Vol. II, Part I, 757.
23. 23.  “William Claiborne (1600–1679),” Encyclopedia Virginia. https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Claiborne_William_1600-1679#start_entry.
24. 24.  Francis Jennings, “Glory, Death, and Transfiguration: The Susquehannock Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society vol. 112:1 (Feb. 15, 1968), 15–53; Jean R. Soderlund, Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 49–53; and James Rice, Nature & History in Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2009), ch. 5.
25. 25.  Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, & Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (UNC Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2010), 77; Rice, Nature & History in Potomac Country, 94.
26. 26.  Sutto, Loyal Protestants & Dangerous Papists, 42–45; Rice, Nature & History in the Potomac Country, 100–101.
27. 27.  Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 164.