ixxvi Introduction.

SOURCE MATERIAL FOR THIS VOLUME

At the suggestion of a number of students of Maryland history, a note
will be made here as to the source material from which this printed volume of
the Archives is derived. The proceedings or journals of the Upper House as
printed here are taken from one of the series of large official manuscript folio
libers, kept by the clerks of that house, covering the colonial period from 1660
to 1774. Prior to 1660 the proceedings of both houses of the Assembly are to
be found recorded together in the same liber. It was the business of the Clerk
of the house, or of some under-clerk designated by him, to make his entries
in these official libers from rough notes kept day by day of the proceedings of
this body. John Ross (1696-1766), who was Clerk of the Upper House from
1729 to 1764, and was at this time nearly seventy years old, if he personally
made these entries, which appears unlikely, had become a rather careless scribe
and one who ignored both punctuation and paragraph, and an indifferent
speller. In one instance the recorder failed to enter in the journal an Upper
House message (pp. 263, 382), and in another instance did not record the pro-
ceedings for parts of two days (p. 270). His handwriting is to be rated as fair
to poor. The contemporary volume from which this Upper House journal is
taken bears the designation U.H.J. No. 36. Messages from the Upper House to
the Lower House are also to be found recorded in the journals of the latter house,
both in the official manuscript libers of the Lower House and in Jonas Green's
printed Votes and Proceedings of the Lower House of Assembly. The Clerk
of the Lower House in transcribing these messages usually corrected the errors
in spelling, and filled in the letters or syllables which Ross, or an understudy,
had carelessly omitted, and not infrequently added punctuation marks. Green
even went further, correcting not only the spelling or other obvious errors,
but paragraphing and punctuating liberally. The editor has thought it wise,
however, to copy literatim and punctuatim the Upper House Journal so as to
reproduce it verbatim as it appears in its own original manuscript record, even
at the risk of some loss of clarity. In the case of messages, where occasionally
a word is left out or is undecipherable, it has been supplied from the Lower
House Journal when this is possible. It is to be noted that the Clerk has failed
to enter the proceedings for part of the afternoon session of November 23,
1763, and for the morning session of the day following (p. 270). The clerk
probably lost his rough notes and did not dare to supply them later from
memory. None of the rough notes of the clerk of the Upper House are known
to have been preserved.

In the case of the Lower House journals for the second and third quarters
of the eighteenth centuries there are two separate contemporary series of
records available, and in some cases also a third. These are the large official
manuscript quarto libers, known as the Journals of the Lower House, and the
printed "Votes and Proceedings of the Lower House", as they are designated
in Jonas Green's contemporary printed pamphlets for each session. As a
separate series the Lower House manuscript libers begin with the year 1666,
and run down through the colonial period to 1774. The liber used in com-