after revolution to 1805 67

Court of Appeals but not on the General Court
where the salary was higher but the business
larger, Robert Hanson Harrison, Chief Judge of
the General Court from 1781 to 1790, declined an
appointment to the office of Chancellor, the high-
est judicial position, because the duties of that
office would require immediate removal of his res-
idence to Annapolis, and that was prevented by
some previous indispensable arrangements in his
own affairs and the affairs of others in his hands
where he then resided, on the banks of the Potomac
River, in Charles County.³

Three of these gentlemen appointed to the new
Court of Appeals, Judges Mackall, Wright and
Murray, had been members of the Maryland con-
stitutional convention of 1776. Judge Rumsey had
been a member of two of the councils of safety
of that year, and had also been a member of the
Continental Congress. Judge Jones had been the
last Deputy Commissary of Baltimore County, for
probate of wills and administration of estates, and
when the Orphans Court system replaced the Pre-
rogative Court and the commissaries, in 1777, he
had become the first Register of Wills of Balti-
more County.

By a resolution of the Assembly in 1778, the
salary of the judges of the court was first fixed at
five hundred pounds, but this was reduced to two
hundred pounds; and from 1778 to 1785 the judges
of all courts were paid by annual appropriations. A
pound in Maryland at the time was worth $2.666,
and the first annual salary of a judge of the Court

3. Letter R. H. Harrison to Gov. John Eager Howard, October 3,
1789, MSS.