Introduction. lv

be said in general, however, that on December 13 the Upper House sent a
message of some twenty-seven hundred words in reply to the resolutions
and messages of the Lower House of December 12, which had cut out as
improper, numerous charges made by the Clerk. In this message the Upper
House declared that it would not recede from its position that the Clerk of
the Council was entitled to an annual salary of 9,600 pounds of tobacco,
or £60 current money, for the period since he was last paid in 1756, and thus
sacrifice a servant of the public justly entitled to the continuation of the small
salary which he had previously been paid over a period of many years, although
the house deeply regretted the distress which the other public creditors would
suffer if the Journal was for this reason not approved (pp. 84-89). Three
days later on December 16, the Lower House came back in reply with an
even longer message of some sixty-seven hundred words. It would be interest-
ing to know what member of this special committee of the Lower House could
have produced a well worded political argument of this length in such a
brief time. Young Thomas Johnson, later to become the first Revolutionary
Governor of Maryland, the member of the committee who brought this
message into the lower House, where it was promptly approved, had the pen
of a capable and ready writer and may have been responsible for it. The
message, after questioning at length nearly every item for which the Upper
House insisted the Clerk was entitled to a fee, declared that many of these
items had only been brought forward in order to make the aggregate fees so
large that the Lower House would be tempted to compromise upon a higher
fixed salary basis than it might otherwise have done. The bulk of the message
dealt, however, with the more general demand of the Lower House that various
fees, fines, amerciaments, export duties, etc., which now went into the pockets
of the Lord Proprietary, should be used for such public purposes as the pay-
ment of a salary for the Clerk. The house then sought to meet the argument
of the upper chamber as to the reasons why, after acquiescing until 1756 in pay-
ing the Clerk a salary, it had changed its attitude. The question of the support
for a Provincial Agent in England to be appointed by the Lower House was
injected in the message on account of the offer of the Lower House to submit
the question of the salary for the Clerk of the Council to the Crown for its
decision, provided the Upper House would approve the Lower House bill for
the support of an Agent. A speedy reply was requested because the epidemic of
smallpox in Annapolis, of which one delegate was then dangerously ill, made
it impossible to keep the members in session any longer (pp. 235-249).

The Upper House was to have the last word. On the closing day of the
session it sent in reply a very lengthy message of some sixty-five hundred words.
This message was written in a sarcastic vein. It said that the general question
before the house was the payment of the annual salary of 9,600 pounds of
tobacco, or £60 current money, as back pay for nine years and for the current
session, a salary which had been paid continuously from 1736 to 1756; and
that the accounts submitted by the Clerk showed legitimate claims for work
actually done by him which amounted to much more than the salary now
sought. The various items enumerated in the account were then gone over