100 court of appeals of maryland

of seniority.² Jeremiah Townley Chase, of Anne
Arundel County, who had been Chief Judge of
the General Court since 1799, was named Chief
Judge of the third judicial district and Chief
Judge of the Court of Appeals; and he accepted
the appointment. He was a man who had partici-
pated to the full in the public affairs of his time;
had been one of the first of the young men to take
prominent part in the revolutionary movement in
1775, enlisted as a private in the first military com-
pany raised in Maryland, and had been a member
of the first Committee of Observation in Baltimore
where he then lived, had been a member of the
Maryland constitutional convention of 1776, when
twenty-eight years old, a member of the Conti-
nental Congress in 1783, and at the same time
Mayor of Annapolis, and as such he had made the
welcoming address to General Washington when
General Washington came to resign his commis-
sion. From 1780 to 1784, and again from 1786
to 1788, he had been a member of the Executive
Council of the state, which means that he had
been eight times elected by the General Assembly
to be one of the five to make up the Council, four
times during the war period. He had also been
a member of the Maryland convention which rat-
ified the constitution of the United States in 1788,
he, along with Luther Martin, William Paca,
Samuel Chase, William Pinkney and a few others,
having constituted an Anti-Federalist minority
which voted against ratification. He became an
associate judge of the General Court the next year,

2. In the announcement of the appointments in the Maryland Gazette
of January 23, 1806, the names are numbered 1 to 6,