A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

be put in an Appendix thereto" as a law in use but not in force.¹ After sev-
eral adventures, it was returned from the Upper to the Lower House on
May 6, 1761, with the endorsement "Read the Second Time, and, with the
Amendments, will Pass," but it is certain that Sharpe had no intention of
signing a bill so at variance with the Proprietary's interests as this one had
been shown to be. He permitted it to be endorsed affirmatively in the se-
curity of his knowledge that he intended to allow no bills of that session to
pass the seal. He prorogued the Assembly almost immediately without af-
fixing his mandate to the several bills which had been passed, and writing
to Secretary Calvert several months later,² he asserted that he was urged
to this course by the gentlemen of the Council who alleged that the Assem-
bly "had been sitting near a month without doing the Business for which
alone they had been convened & had shown by the Bill they had framed
entituled 'An Act for Encouraging a Collection & publication of the Laws
of this Province' ..... that those Members of the Lower House who were
left (for all the moderate men were gone off) had nothing in view but by
offering such Laws as they knew would not pass to lay a foundation for
popularity against the ensuing election."

After this occurrence Bacon's proposed book no longer was to serve as
the shuttlecock of Provincial politics.³ Sharpe's peculiar personal interest
in its publication was to give a turn to events which should remove it from
the consideration of future Assemblies.

THE PUBLICATION OF BISSETT'S "ABRIDGEMENT" IN 1759

In the year 1759, when the contest over Bacon's publication was just be-
ginning, a lawyer of Baltimore, one James Bissett, took advantage of the
situation so far as to prepare a hasty abridgement of the Provincial laws,
from which, as one of the "Patriot" party, he omitted the acts which were
offensive to the opponents of the Proprietary. His Abridgement of the
Laws of Maryland was printed in Philadelphia by William Bradford, the
nephew of Andrew, and having been sold widely throughout the Province,

¹ Alarmed by this attempt of the Lower House to curtail his privileges, the Proprietary instructed Sharpe in
October 1761 that his subscription to Bacon's publication was to be paid only on the condition that "his Book
or Books of our said Laws do strictly contain all acts of Assembly and all matter and things that has been at any
time Enacted belonging to and for my Private Emolument and now stands Enacted." Proceeding, he ordered
Sharpe as Governor to withhold his consent from any act of Assembly which provided for the publication of the
book with these acts omitted or entered only in an appendix. (Calvert Papers, No. 654).

² Sharpe Correspondence, Archives of Maryland, 14: 24.

³ Schlesinger, A. M., Maryland's Share in the Last Intercolonial War, in Maryland Historical Magazine, vol. 7,
and the work of Mereness before cited, treat the larger aspects of the bickering between the Proprietary and the
Lower House, of which the fate of Bacon's proposals in the Assembly presents in a concrete issue a plainly defined
case. See note to No. 206 of the bibliographical appendix.

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