Volume 54, Preface 29 View pdf image (33K) |
Somerset County. xxix as representing Virginia had made a demand for quit rents upon John Elzey, one of the residents of Manokin (Arch. Md. iii, 473-475), and it was un- questionably as the result of this anticipated demand that Scarburgh and Revell had been dropped from the Maryland commission for granting lands. On October 12, 1663, apparently without orders from Gov. Berkeley and without waiting for a meeting of representatives from the two colonies to mark the boundary lines, Scarburgh at the head of some forty-five armed men from Virginia marched into Annemessex and Manokin and demanded that the in- habitants recognize the authority of Virginia. This the Quakers at Anne- messex, headed by Stephen Horsey, a dissenter although possibly not a Quaker, refused to do, although the resistance of the Anglicans at Manokin was less vigorous than that of their Quaker neighbors. Scarburgh himself wrote a lengthy report to the November, 1663, Accomac County Court on this filibuster- ing expedition which he had headed. His unrestrained language and especially the contemptuous epithets which he hurled at his Quaker opponents are most amusing (Va. Mag. Hist. xix, 173-180; Torrence's Old Somerset, 388-392). Gov. Charles Calvert, the son of Cecilius, Lord Baltimore, at once proceeded to Virginia and registered a vigorous protest against Scarburgh, whose actions Gov. Berkeley promptly disavowed. In May, 1664, a joint commission headed respectively by Philip Calvert, the Chancellor of Maryland, and Scarburgh rep- resenting Virginia, met to determine the boundary line, but owing to the lat- ter's truculent behavior nothing was then accomplished. Again on June 2, 1664, Calvert visited Berkeley, and it was formally agreed “that persons living near the land [in dispute] shall live peaceably together until the differences be settled between the two colonies “. The actual boundary line was not finally marked out and agreed upon, however, until 1668. In April, and again in May, 1668, the meetings of the Somerset County Court were postponed so that the justices might “give their attendance on the honble Chancellr for the Laying out of the bounds of the Province” (pp. 708, 709). Why it should have required four years to establish this dividing line is difficult to understand, but it was not until June 25, 1668, that what may be termed a territorial treaty of peace was finally signed. This settlement sustained at every point Maryland's contentions, and recognized the thirty-mile-wide strip of land in dispute to be part of the Calvert domain. That this delayed settlement and recognition of the justice of the Maryland claim was a foregone conclusion seems certain, for otherwise it is not likely that the Lord Proprietary in 1666 would have added fuel to the flame and have further complicated matters by creating the new county of Somerset embracing the disputed territory. Pending the settlement of the dispute, and a year before the erection of Somerset in August 1666, the Governor and Council of Maryland, August 28, 1665, issued a commission “of the Peace on the Eastern Shore” to Stephen Horsey, William Thorne, George Johnson, William Stevens, John White, John Winder, James Jones, and Henry Boston, Horsey and Thorne being of the quorum (Arch. Md. iii, 533); and again on February 23, 1665/6, recom- missioned these same justices (Arch. Md. iii, 537); and in a proclamation issued August 22, 1666, creating Somerset, these same men were reappointed |
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Volume 54, Preface 29 View pdf image (33K) |
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