604/Maryland Manual

Colonel William Burgess, Major Nicholas
Sewall, and John Darnall. Most of them served
the entire period indicated, but there were a
few changes.

1688-1689. William Joseph. Named president of
the Council of Deputies in a commission from
the Lord Proprietary.

1689-1690. John Coode. Leader of the Protestant
Associators who seized the government on Au-
gust 1, 1689.

1690-1692. Nehemiah Blackiston. Appointed
president of the Committee for the Govern-
ment of Maryland when Coode went to En-
gland.

1692-1693. Sir Lionel Copley.

1693. Sir Thomas Lawrence. Elected governor af-
ter the death of Copley, but had served only a
week or two when Sir Edmund Andros arrived
in Maryland to assume control of the govern-
ment.

1693. Sir Edmund Andros. Remained in Mary-
land about ten days before returning to Virgin-
ia.

1693-1694. Colonel Nicholas Greenberry.
Appointed president of the Council by Andros.

1694. Sir Edmund Andros. Remained in Mary-
land about a week.

1694. Sir Thomas Lawrence. Appointed president
of the Council by Andros.

1694-1698/9. Sir Francis Nicholson.
1698/9-1702. Colonel Nathaniel Blackiston.

1702-1704. Thomas Tench. Appointed president
of the Council by Blackiston.

1704-1709. Colonel John Seymour.

1709-1714. Major General Edward Lloyd.
Elected president of the Council when Colonel
Francis Jenkins, who was senior member of the
Council and thus entitled to succeed Seymour,
failed to assert his right promptly.

1714-1715. John Hart.

1715-1720. John Hart. Continued to serve as gov-
ernor after control of the province was re-
turned to Charles, fifth Lord Baltimore, a pro-
fessed Protestant.

1720. Thomas Brooke. Became president of the
Council by virtue of his seniority when Hart
returned to England.

1720-1727. Charles Calvert.
1727-1731. Benedict Leonard Calvert.

Principal Officers of Maryland

1731-1732. Samuel Ogle.
1732-1733. Charles Calvert, Lord Proprietary.
1733-1742. Samuel Ogle.
1742-1746/7. Thomas Bladen.
1746/7-1752. Samuel Ogle.

1752-1753. Benjamin Tasker. Became president of
the Council upon the death of Governor Ogle.

1753-1769. Horatio Sharpe.

1769-1776. Robert Eden. Eden was in England
from May to November 1774, during which
time Richard Lee, president of the Council,
governed the province. Lee also governed the
province briefly in 1776 during the interval be-
tween the departure of Eden and the assump-
tion of the government by the Convention.

REVOLUTIONARY INTERREGNUM

During the years 1774-1776, the powers of gov-
ernment increasingly came to be exercised by
extra legal assemblies. In all there were nine
meetings of six appointed or duly elected provin-
cial conventions. Apparently neither contempo-
raries nor subsequent publishers of the extant
proceedings were certain how to differentiate sep-
arately elected and self-contained conventions
from those sessions that were merely a continua-
tion of an adjourned meeting. This confusion
partly results from the ambiguity of the surviving
journals. On July 3, 1776, the penultimate Con-
vention decreed that its own dissolution date
would be August 1, 1776. The last entry on July
6, however, recorded that "the convention ad-
journs till Thursday the first day of August
next. . . ." For convenience each session is listed
below as a distinct convention, although there
were elections only to the second, fourth, fifth,
sixth, and ninth.
It was inconvenient for so large a group (at one
meeting there were 141 delegates) to remain in
continuous session; therefore. Councils of Safety
were elected by the Conventions to exercise exec-
utive power during the intervals between Conven-
tion meetings. With some exceptions, the Coun-
cils of Safety were composed of nine members,
five from the Western Shore and four from the
Eastern Shore. The Convention, which met from
August 14, 1776, about six weeks after the Decla-
ration of Independence, through November 11,
1776, framed the Constitution that governed
Maryland until 1851. The General Assembly
established by the Constitution began meeting on
February 5, 1777, but the Council of Safety con-
tinued to function as the executive body of the