William and Mary Goddard, Printers and Public Servants

sensibility," and that he had been commanded by them "with the most
ridiculous apery of a legal meeting or Congress," under pain of earning the
resentment of "A Legion," "to depart the town and county within a short
limited term......."^l Three days later the Committee of Grievances of the
Lower House presented a report on his memorial in which the action of the
Whig Club was condemned as being "a manifest violation of the Consti-
tution" and "directly contrary to the Declaration of Rights."²

Feeling that its position had been misunderstood, the Whig Club now
issued a brief statement³ in which one may read a willingness to let the
matter rest. Goddard, however, had tasted blood. In the latter part of
March he brought out his pamphlet, The Prowess of the Whig Club,⁴ a pub-
lication in which he dusted the salt and pepper of derisive irony over the
wounds of his opponents. Their exasperation was extreme. Goddard was
roughly haled before the Whig Club and when his sentence of banishment
had been reimposed by that body, he went once more to Annapolis and the
Legislature. Taken in hand by Samuel Chase, his cause was so conducted
that the Whig Club, summonsed from Baltimore, was forced to apologize
to the Sovereign People at the bar of the House,⁵ and resolutions were passed
in which the offending organization was castigated and the Governor was
requested to afford Goddard protection against "all violence or injury to
his person or property."⁶

Rendered secure in his person and justified in his actions by the highest
authority in the state, Goddard returned to Baltimore where he lived un-
molested until his next and more serious offense against a sensitive public,
when once again he vindicated the right of the press to a free expression of
opinion.

GODDARD AND THE "QUERIES" OF GENERAL CHARLES LEE

On June 8, 1779, there was published in the Maryland Journal an an-
nouncement to the effect that William Goddard and Colonel Eleazer Oswald⁷
had formed a partnership for the prosecution of a printing, bookselling and

¹ V. & P., Lower House, March 7, 1777.
² V. & P., Lower House, March lo, 1777.

³ Reprinted by Goddard in The Prowess of the Whig Club.

⁴ The Prowess of the Whig Club, and t he Manoeuvres of Legion. Baltimore: Printed for the Author, 1777, 24 pp.

⁵ Letter of Benj. Galloway, Red Book, 3: 45. (The Red Books are a series of volumes of ms. in the Maryland His-
torical Society which, with unclassified contents, have received this designation from the color of their bindings.).

⁶ V. & P., Lower House, April 11, 1777. For other details of this affair, see letters and papers Nos. 38 to 45 in
Red Book No. 3, ms. in Maryland Historical Society; Goddard's Memorial to Continental Congress in Papers of
the Continental Congress, 41: III, 385, dated May 6, 1777, Ms. Division Library of Congress; Goddard's The
Prowess of the Whig Club and his broadside dated March 25, 1777, addressed to David Rusk, Ms. Division Li-
brary of Congress; Scharf's Chronicles of Baltimore.

⁷ Eleazer Oswald born in 1755, had come to America in 1770, gone into business with John Holt, married

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