xxvi Introduction.

and strengthened to ensure undisputed possession of the Ohio, and declared
that it was the King's pleasure that the Governor use his utmost endeavors to
see that the Assembly provided workmen, materials, cattle, and carriages, to
support the King's forces employed in this work (pp. 148-149). Amherst in
his letter dated at New York, March 28, referred in some detail to Pitt's orders
and requested that every help be given General Stanwix "now in the command
to the southward" (pp. 149-150). Stanwix in his letter, dated at Philadelphia,
April 2, expressed the hope that Maryland would at once raise "four good com-
panies of rangers so necessary for carrying on the service; in which I am told
your Province abounds" (pp. 150-151).

Stephen Bordley, Attorney-General of the Province, who had just been ap-
pointed a member of the Governor's Council by the Lord Proprietary, took his
seat in the Upper House for the first time at this session. The Lower House,
after listening to the speech by the Governor and the reading of the letters
transmitted with it, adopted the same rules that had been in use at the previous
session, and again requested the Rev. Clement Brooke of St. Anne's to read
divine service twice daily. Parker Selby of Worcester, a newly elected delegate
with Proprietary leanings, was sworn in to fill the place of Benjamin Handy,
recently appointed sheriff of that county. Dr. George Steuart, who had been
evicted from his place as a delegate from Annapolis at the previous session
and had been again chosen at the recent special election, was also sworn in (p.
161), although the validity of his election was almost immediately challenged
by Nicholas Maccubbin, the brother-in-law of Charles Carroll, the Barrister,
against whom Steuart had run. The Lower House at once plunged into
this election contest, with the popular majority eager to rid the house of
this dyed-in-the-wool partisan of the Lord Proprietary (pp. 163-164). No
decision had been reached before the Assembly adjourned, nor was the contest
revived at later sessions. It also busied itself again with disciplining Samuel
Wilson, the delegate from Somerset and member of the Proprietary party, who
at the previous session had been committed to the custody of the sergeant-at-
arms for his refusal to apologize to Philip Hammond, another delegate. The
Steuart-Maccubbin contest and the Wilson-Hammond affair are both treated
at length elsewhere in this introduction (pp. liii-lv).

The Lower House went through the usual procedure it had followed in recent
sessions in the preparation of a Supply bill for His Majesty's Service. A series
of resolves were first adopted as to the scope of the bill, which was tn rnver back
pay due ro Maryland soldiers and advances made by General Forbes to them,
arrears due for winter quartering of troops, and back pay to the militia
for recent years, and for levying and paying a thousand soldiers and a hundred
rangers to be raised for the coming campaign. The amount to be appropriated
was fixed at £60,000, the money to be obtained by an assessment on estates
and a tax on incomes. Various changes were made in the bill as introduced by
the house sitting as a committee of the whole; it was passed on April 14 by a
vote of 28 to 19 and sent to the Upper House, where after one reading it was
promptly rejected—the fifth time the upper chamber had thrown out the Assess-
ment bill. An attempt in the Lower House to introduce a compromise bill, com-