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x Letter of Transmittal.
peace was established Samuel Chase was sent to England to secure the trans
fer to the State of the stock of the Bank of England which stood in the name
of the old provincial government. It may be added that he not only succeeded
in doing this but also secured for himself a second wife while on this visit to
England. In 1783 a resident of Harford County brought sweeping charges
against eight justices of that county, including malversation in office, perjury,
drunkenness, and incompetency. The charges were not substantiated, however,
and were dismissed by the Council. The late proprietary Governor, Sir Robert
Eden, returned to Maryland after peace was established as the legal representa
tive of Henry Harford, the last proprietary, with a view to securing from the
State either recognition of the rights in Maryland lands which Harford still
claimed, or compensation for his losses through their confiscation. Eden, who
had always been personally popular and was the last of the British governors in
the colonies to leave his post after the outbreak of the Revolution, presumed too
much upon his former popularity, however, when soon after his arrival in
Maryland he actually began in January, 1784, to issue and sign patents in the
name of the former proprietary to vacant lands to which the latter still made
claim. At once the State was in a turmoil, and February 21, we find the Gover
nor and Council instructing Luther Martin, the attorney-general, to take im
mediate steps to determine whether Eden should not be prosecuted for fraud
and treason in this offence against the sovereignty and dignity of the State.
These activities apparently ceased as we find no further reference to him in this
connection, and he died in Maryland, September 3, 1784, while on this mission
for Harford.
At least two instances of disputes between Maryland and other states are
recorded in these records. Under date of March 19, 1783, Governor Paca
sent a stinging letter to the Governor of Rhode Island protesting against the
capturc and confiscation by a Rhode Island schooner of a small Maryland
sloop, which under a flag of truce was on the way to New York with food
shipped by the Council for the relief of the one hundred and fifty or more
wretched Marylanders confined there in British prison ships, and demanded
redress and immediate release of the schooner. Another instance of interstate
friction involved the extradition to Pennsylvania of a certain Captain Henry
Carberry, a citizen of Maryland but lately a captain in the Pennsylvania Line,
charged with “dangerous insurrection” in Philadelphia in June 1784, doubt
less a disbanded soldier clamoring too vigorously for back pay. An inter
minable correspondence arose involving at first the jurisdiction of the states
of Maryland and Pennsylvania in what was deemed to be a case of treason,
as well as the question of State or Confederation jurisdiction. The affair ends,
however, in a lengthy and acrimonious dispute between Governor Paca and the
General Court of Maryland as to the respective authority of the Governor and
the Court in the matter, in which the governor insists in a long and heated
letter that the authority to deliver up to another jurisdiction a person so charged
is vested not in the judiciary but in the executive alone, and announces his
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Journal and Correspondence of the Council of Maryland, 1781-1784
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