The American Dream

by Anna Belfrage

I have something of a fascination with those intrepid ancestors of ours who decided to uproot themselves from everything they knew and start over, in lands they had never seen. Okay, so I must admit to these not being my ancestors – my ancestors remained very rooted to their few acres of land, complementing that income with long shifts in the nearby mines. Clearly not intrepid, one must assume, while hoping this is not to my detriment genetically.

People left for various reasons: some needed to re-invent themselves, some had to escape from baying creditors, others had no choice, many went because of religious persecution, and quite a few set off to become rich. These were often young men, with their heads filled with dreams of finding gold, or silver, or at least some copper. They hoped for rivers filled with sturgeon, for welcoming lands in which crops grew more or less by themselves. Boy, were they disappointed.

Virginia - land of bounty

One of the reasons behind this belief in a land of riches was due to propaganda. People were needed to populate the colonies, and selling a permanent trip to the other side of the Atlantic as being “harsh and difficult, with years of toil before you, and possibly you’ll die” would not exactly have volunteers lining up. The Spanish explorers, needing to justify the costs of sending repeated expeditions over the seas, promised their financial backers (ergo Their Most Catholic Majesties, Fernando and Isabel) gold and silver. Ultimately, as we know, the Spanish Conquistadores found gold aplenty in Peru, silver in Potosí, and a very much impenetrable jungle elsewhere.

Anyway; young men (it’s always the young men who bounce about on their toes, eager for adventure and pots of gold) who wanted to rise above their original standing in life listened to these rather imprecise descriptions and salivated. Go out, make a fortune, return home and marry well – seemed like an excellent plan, like an early version of the American Dream, although at the time it would have been labelled the Colonial Dream.

Most of them failed dismally. But some made good – good enough to be toted as examples of just how true the dream of riches was. One such man was William Claiborne, who would carve himself quite the excellent life in Virginia. Along the way he would also instigate the first naval battle in North America and cause quite some tension between the colonies of Virginia and Maryland. One of the movers and shakers of this world was William Claiborne – and definitely not afraid of taking on new challenges and unknown coasts.

Claiborne - at a somewhat more advanced age

Claiborne was born in Kent, England, in 1600. As his family did not have the means to offer him a promising career back home, William set off for Virginia in 1621, where he was appointed land surveyor. He was granted 200 acres, and through a combination of astute business sense and perfect timing, his original grant quickly expanded to well over 1 000 acres. Already here, William had more than realised his dreams of future wealth, but this was an ambitious young man, with his eyes set not only on gold but also on achieving a standing in society.

Life in Virginia was not exactly a walk in the park. In William’s second year there, the Powhatan rose in anger against the white settlers, and over one very bloody night more than a third of the settlers were killed. William was (obviously) not among the dead – and I suppose all those deaths increased the opportunities for an intrepid young man to further his own position. Our young hero capitalised on the situation, and at the age of 26 was appointed Secretary of State for the Colony of Virginia.

Being a landowner was not sufficient for our restless protagonist, and after some pondering, William decided to try his hand at trade. Off he went to develop the fur trade, sailing up and down the coasts of the Chesapeake to trade with the local Indians. I guess it was very much glass beads for furs, although now and then William probably offered a musket or two as well.

During his travels round the bay, William came upon the perfect place for a trading post, a small island just off the eastern shore of the bay. In a burst of nostalgia, he named it Kent Island and appropriated it in his own name. His Virginian financial backers cheered William on. Others did not, foremost among them Lord Calvert, who was looking for land in which to establish his very own colony, one of his options being future Maryland, to which territory Kent Island belonged. Calvert’s first attempt at founding a colony, in Newfoundland, had failed dismally. (And let us not here spend time wondering why on earth Calvert chose Newfoundland in the first place)

Lord Calvert Sr - the Newfoundland dude

Lord Calvert came to Virginia in 1629. At the time, he was more interested in colonising south of Virginia (the Carolinas) than north of it (Maryland). As far as the Virginians were concerned, Lord Calvert had no business being in their neck of the woods at all. Not only did Lord Calvert’s desire for his own colony pose a threat to Virginia’s territorial expansion, but to add insult to injury, Lord Calvert was a Catholic, and to make matters worse, the demented man actually argued for religious toleration, making the staunch Virginia Protestants squirm in their boots.

Lord Calvert was not a man to give up. He returned to England to urge the king to give him a charter for his own colony. The Virginians had no intention of giving Lord Calvert as much as a square inch on their precious shore, so they sent their Secretary of State to London to argue against any grant to Calvert. William was more than willing to go.

The Privy Council listened to Calvert. It listened to William. In between, the Privy Council yawned and thought of other things – after all, what happened in Virginia stayed in Virginia, and few Englishmen other than the merchants cared all that much about the colonies. The merchants, however, saw huge opportunities – this was the age when sugar and tobacco were becoming popular crops – and one such rich merchant took a liking to William Claiborne and his plans for Kent Island. Suddenly, William had the means to recruit indentured servants for his future trading post, and in May of 1631 William left London and sailed back home, quite convinced Calvert would never get the grant of land he so wanted.

Lord Calvert Jr - owner of Maryland

It must have been somewhat of a shock to William – and his fellow Virginians – when the Privy Council awarded Lord Calvert junior (the elder Calvert died just before) a charter for the colony of Maryland. The charter included Kent Island, but William made it very clear to Calvert that he answered only to Virginia and the king, not to some upstart Catholic. The upstart Catholic in question had received Maryland as a personal grant, so the colony was in effect Lord Calvert’s property, and Lord Calvert intended to enjoy all his lands – including Kent Island.

Kent Island became a symbol. William refused to hand it over to Calvert, calling for Virginia to come to his aid. The Virginia Governor, one John Harvey, was loath to do so: Lord Calvert came with an impressive Royal Charter, and Harvey was not about to pick a fight with the king. William was livid and probably expressed this. The Governor retaliated by having him dismissed as Secretary of State. The Virginia Assembly did not like that one bit, most of them being firm friends of Claiborne, and so Harvey was ousted from office.

Not that it helped William all that much - at least not in regard to Kent Island. A Maryland commissioner captured one of William’s ships, and in 1635 the first two naval battles on North American waters took place, both of them in Chesapeake, both of them involving William and his (unfairly according to William) impounded ship. Three Virginians died, things simmered down a bit, and still William hung on to Kent Island, but all this turmoil was not good for business. William’s intended profitable trading post was doing less than well, and in 1637 a London attorney popped up on Kent Island, representing William’s disgruntled London financiers. William was sent back to London to attend court proceedings against him, and while he was gone the attorney invited Maryland to take over Kent Island. Rather back-stabbing, and we must suppose William fumed and protested, but to no avail.

For some years, William was occupied elsewhere – in Honduras, to be precise – but he was soon back in Virginia, excelling at the political maneuvering that characterised the years leading up to the English Civil War. As unrest became open war between Parliament and king, William saw an opportunity to reclaim Kent Island once and for all. One wonders just what it was about this little island that had William so determined to control it. Was it simply a matter of pique? Was there a place on the island that reminded him of home? Hmm. William doesn’t strike me as the nostalgic type.

Whatever his reasons, William joined forces with Richard Ingle, a Parliamentarian Puritan merchant whose ships had been seized by the Maryland authorities in response to a royal order to do so. With England being torn asunder by civil war and religious tensions riding sky high, William and Ingle used Calvert’s Catholic faith as a pretext and attacked in 1644. William reclaimed Kent Island, Ingle took over St Mary’s City. I imagine William did a little happy dance, complete with hand-clapping and stamping, but already by 1646 Kent Island was back under Calvert control.

One cannot fault William with lack of perseverance. In 1648, as the newly appointed Parliamentary Commissioner and Secretary of Virginia – William declared for Parliament and the Puritan faith – he  was made responsible for bringing Maryland to heel. Yet again, up popped the question of Calvert’s Catholicism and how far a papist could be trusted. (I know; this becomes very repetitive, but blame it on the times, not on me). Calvert’s Governor was outnumbered by the vocal anti-papists and submitted to Claiborne’s authority – for a while.

In 1653, to William’s outraged surprise, Cromwell confirmed Lord Calvert as owner of Maryland. In 1654, Calvert’s man in Maryland, Governor Stone, declared that William Claiborne’s property – and life – could be taken at the Governor’s pleasure. The purpose was to scare William into leaving Maryland alone, but instead William and his co-commissioner, Bennet, overthrew the hapless Stone and ousted all Catholics from Maryland’s Assembly. This did not please Lord Calvert. Stone was told to get his act together and regain authority ASAP. Stone tried and failed. By 1655, the colony of Maryland was in the hands of Puritan colonists who went on quite the burning spree, destroying any Catholic institution they could find.

At last it seemed to William he was in a position to permanently claim Kent Island back. Together with Bennet, he sailed for England with the intention of convincing Cromwell to once and for all tear up that irritating Royal Charter which granted Maryland to Lord Calvert.  Didn’t work. Instead, Lord Calvert was granted total control over Maryland for the rest of the Protectorate, and William Claiborne had to kiss Kent Island away for ever.

Once Charles II was restored, William Claiborne’s political career was dead. A former Parliamentarian and Puritan had no future in the royalist and Anglican Virginia, and so William retired from public life, living out the rest of his years on his huge estate, Romancoke. He may not have acquired everything he desired, but when William Claiborne was laid to rest in 1677 (or thereabouts; we know for a fact he was alive in march of 1677 and dead in April 1679)  he left behind a substantial fortune.  The young penniless man who set sail from England in 1621 had indeed realised the American dream. He wasn’t the first to do so, nor was he the last – but he was definitely one of the few.

Anna Belfrage is the author of five published books, all of them part of The Graham Saga. Set in 17th century Scotland, Virginia and Maryland, The Graham Saga is the story of Matthew Graham and his wife, Alex Lind - two people who should never have met, not when she was born three centuries after him

In A Newfound Land Matthew Graham immigrates to Maryland to start a new life for him and his family. In difference to William Claiborne, Matthew goes because he has to, having no illusions as to what fate awaits him, obdurate Presbyterian that he is, should he choose to stay in late 17th century Scotland.

The next instalment in the series, Revenge and Retribution, is due for release in June/July 2014

For more information about Anna and her books, please visit her website! If not on her website, Anna can mostly be found on her blog or on FB (Or with her hand in a cookie-jar somewhere)

Buy Anna's books on Amazon US, Amazon UK & through a number of other vendors (B&N, Kobo, Smashwords)

In the name of God - Implementing Religious Tolerance

by Anna Belfrage

In 1963, my parents decided to brave the unknown. They said farewell to family and friends, waved goodbye to Sweden, and set off for exotic South America. In the sixties, this was a relatively drastic thing to do – but compared to the emigrants of the previous centuries, my parents had something of a walk in the park, with the added benefit of knowing that, should they want to, they could always go back home and it wouldn’t take them more than a couple of days by plane.

In the 17th century, airplanes were not even on the drawing board. The ships that crossed the Atlantic were small and fragile, and the probability of dying in a shipwreck was relatively high. Add to this the risk of being attacked by pirates, or being blown off course, and one wonders that anyone actually dared to set off for new lands. Maybe they were braver than I am –or maybe they didn’t feel they had a choice.

Many of the early settlers in the American Colonies emigrated due to religious issues. Interestingly enough, while the English government had little tolerance for Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Presbyterians and what have you back home, they seemed not to have minded overmuch when these people settled in the faraway colonies – still English dominions, but at a sufficient distance to allow the heart to grow (somewhat) fonder. Maybe this tolerance rather reflected the government’s interest in increasing their fiscal income. Or maybe it was as simple as “out of sight, out of mind”, because seriously, who in Bristol or York would be all that bothered by what happened on the other side of the world?

The young colonies were no more tolerant than England – but with different religious preferences. Virginia quickly became an Anglican stronghold, further reinforced during Sir William Berkley’s long tenure as governor. Massachusetts was firmly in Puritan hands – strong, capable and somewhat sombre hands – and then there was Maryland, where for the first time in history an Act of Toleration was implemented in 1649. (The fledging Rhode Island passed a series of laws in the 1630’s that protected religious freedoms, but nothing as explicit as Maryland’s Act)

Let us take a step back, and consider just how turbulent the 17th century was from a religious perspective. The Reformation movements of the 16th century spilled over into the new century, and with the Protestant view that man was fully capable of reading the Bible and understanding it all on his own, the door was opened wide on multiple interpretations, resulting in a plethora of Protestant orientations, all of them with their own distinctive set of beliefs. At one end of the spectrum was Calvin and the Presbyterian school of thought, at the other the far more moderate (lax in the eyes of the more rabid reformers) Church of England.

Gustavus Adolphus victorious during the Thirty Years' War

Ultimately, the unrest of the 17th century was never about faith as such; it was about power. The Thirty Years’ War was clad in the guise of defending the faith, but was about expanding the power base and wealth of certain states (such as Sweden and France) while curtailing that of others, notably the Hapsburg Empire. How else to explain the interesting fact that Catholic France bankrolled a substantial part of Protestant Sweden’s war efforts?

Inconsistency was rife: on one hand, France allied itself with Sweden, on the other it viciously oppressed the Huguenots, this culminating in the Huguenot revolts and the Anglo-French War. England had to retreat from the war due to Charles I’s increasing problems at home (he had his own vociferous religious protesters), leaving France’s Protestants to their fate.

In England, the Church of England – and the government – was distrustful of all religious faiths outside the Anglican Church. Catholics were hounded, would continue to be hounded for decades. Puritans were seen as dangerous dissenters and were forced to flee in large numbers, first to the welcoming Dutch States, eventually to Massachusetts. When the situation for Catholics (or ‘recusants’) became intolerable, many of them opted to go overseas as well, and fortunately for these papists there was a small colony in America that welcomed them with open arms, namely Maryland.

Cecilius Calvert

Maryland at the time was a private possession. It was owned by Cecilius Calvert, a Catholic peer, and as such it welcomed Catholic immigrants with open arms. Actually, the colony welcomed immigrants of any Christian denomination with open arms, and as a consequence the colony’s population very quickly came to be dominated by Puritans.

Calvert was set on creating some sort of safe haven for his co-religionists, and he quickly concluded that persecution of non-Catholics was not the right way to go about it – after all, Maryland was the colony of a Protestant country. Besides, Calvert seems to have been a wise man, who urged all his colonists to set their religious rivalries aside and concentrate on building a prosperous new country – which of course benefited Calvert financially.

Maybe those early colonists were tired of strife. Perhaps Calvert’s urgings had them rubbing along equably. Already in 1639, the colony passed an ordinance that had a generally worded comment as to the rights of man, but when the English Civil War broke out, the underlying religious differences surged to the surface, and for a couple of years Maryland was under Protestant dominion before the Calvert family regained  control. Worried by the violence that had erupted in his colony, Lord Calvert drafted an Act of Toleration, not only to protect the minority Catholics, but also to assure the recent Puritan colonists in Providence (Annapolis) that they would have freedom of worship.

The Act of Toleration is in many ways a precursor to the First Amendment in the American Constitution. In a world full of religious strife, it was an innovative attempt to heal rather than breach. In many ways it was imperfect, granting freedom of worship only to Trinitarian Christians. To deny the divinity of Jesus Christ could lead to execution, thereby closing the gate in the face of Unitarians and Jews. The colony’s Puritans chafed under some of the wordings, made uncomfortable by accepting a law drafted by a Catholic. (To them, swearing fealty to Calvert was to indirectly swear fealty to the Pope, who according to Puritan tenets was anti-Christ. Interestingly enough, those early Puritans found a way of accommodating this conundrum within their conscience)

What is of particular interest in Calvert’s Act is that it contains the first attempts to curtail hate speech. As per the Act of Toleration, the word “heretic” and religious insults in general were forbidden. Well before the rest of the world woke up to the need to reinstate civility in religious discourse, Calvert attempted to draw up a framework of rules that would force people of different convictions to treat each other with respect.

In 1654, the Act of Toleration was repealed. Two years earlier, Calvert’s government had been overthrown, the colony seized by Protestant forces loyal to the new Parliamentarian Government in England and led by William Claiborne. The Puritans went on a spree once the Act was repealed. Catholic churches were burnt, Catholics were persecuted and forbidden to practise their religion. All in all, not at all a godly behaviour...

Fortunately, Calvert regained control, and in 1658 the Act was once again passed by the colonial assembly. This time, it would survive until 1692, when the Maryland Puritan Protestants overthrew Calvert’s rule yet again. And this time, the Act was permanently abolished, Catholicism was banned and the Church of England became the colony’s official church in 1702 – something that can’t have pleased the Maryland Puritans all that much.

Not until the American Revolution would freedom of worship be reinstated in Maryland, but when the Founding Fathers of the United States drew up their documents, they clearly found some inspiration Maryland’s Toleration Act. I think Lord Calvert would have been pleased.

Anna Belfrage is the author of three published books, A Rip in the Veil , Like Chaff in the Wind and The Prodigal Son. The fourth book in The Graham Saga, A Newfound Land, will be published in November of 2013. Set in seventeenth century Scotland and Virginia/Maryland, the books tell the story of Matthew and Alex, two people who should never have met – not when she was born three hundred years after him. For more information about Anna and her books, please visit her website, www.annabelfrage.com