Episode Details

In 1638, the colony of Maryland had no laws at all. Lord Baltimore had sent a code across the ocean; the assembly of freemen voted it down. The freemen wrote their own; the proprietor rejected those. The whole standoff turned on a single phrase buried in the colony's charter — that laws were to be made "with the advice, assent, and approbation of the freemen." Did the proprietor write the law, and the freemen merely approve it, or the other way around?

This is the story of the fight over who actually governed Maryland — and the answer the colonists forced. The first assembly in 1635, the deadlock of 1638, and the moment Cecil Calvert, three thousand miles away, blinked. It is also the story of the violence the founding is usually remembered without: William Claiborne, the Virginian whose Kent Island settlement sat inside Maryland's grant, and the armed clash on the bay that was the colony's first real battle — Englishman against Englishman, over the founding ground itself.

The colonists won a hand on the pen. But it was a concession, not a right — granted by a family holding a door open and lasting only as long as their grip held. And across the ocean, England was about to catch fire.