Antiques

Magazine Antiques, April, 2003

ANTIQUES.


Trafique is Earth's great Atlas, that supports
The pay of Armies, and the height of Courts,
And makes Mechanicks live, that else would die
Meer starving Martyrs to their penury:
None but the Merchant of this thing can boast,
He, like the Bee, comes loaden from each Coast,
And to all Kingdoms, as within a Hive,
Stows up those Riches that doth make them thrive.
Be thrifty, Mary-Land, keep what thou hast in store,
And each years Trafique to thy self get more.

George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Maryland, 1966

George Alsop, who spent four years as an indentured servant in the household of Thomas Stockett in Baltimore County, was Maryland's first propagandist, trying to lure settlers from England with his pamphlet. The colony had only been settled since 1634, two years after George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, gained proprietary control of the Chesapeake region. From the town of Saint Mary's the colonists spread north along the Potomac River and settled around the many inlets that form the convoluted region of the upper Chesapeake Bay. Marshy tongues of land determined property lines more than geometric principles of land settlement.

Maryland's early economy was based on tobacco, which became the colony's medium of exchange for clothing and other manufactures and to pay taxes, tithes, and fines. Tobacco was also the chief export to England and a very profitable one. It was shipped from the wharves on the property of the planters, since roads were primarily muddy paths and nearly all plantations were near the water. However, the exorbitant import duties levied on tobacco in England and the charges exacted by the importers for credits on manufactured goods had diminished growers' profits by the time of the American Revolution.

Nineteenth-century urban and industrial development of the eastern seaboard bypassed tidewater Maryland and left its few towns, Chestertown among them, distinctive for their isolation. Chesapeake Bay itself separated southern Maryland from the Eastern Shore. The former consisted of tidewater flats laced by streams and inhabited by a rural society of former slaveholders that dwindled with the gradual loss of tobacco revenue and attracted few outsiders to replace them.

The Eastern Shore was also something of a backwater, although a distinctive one. Cut off by the Delaware River on the northeast and the bay on the west, the people developed a spirit of separateness and self-conscious identity. Between 1776 and 1851 they tried five times to secede or establish their right to do so under the Maryland Constitution. In 1809 the assembly created what came to be called the Eastern Shore Compact by the terms of which one of the two United States senators from Maryland had to be from the Eastern Shore. To this day in Maryland the term waterman refers to the Eastern Shore native who follows any one of the livings provided by the abundant marine life--and there is hardly a native who does not live near the water.

Wendell Garrett