A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

"I had like to have been mobbed to death by a parcel of Poltroon Officers, Blackguard
Continental Soldiers, & Negroes, Headed by Coll. Smith, and the damn'd rascally Magis-
trates of Baltimore would not give me any redress, and am now going to Annapolis to the
Governor if he does not give me some redress I will seek it to the farthest end of the world,
yes I will take up the Tomahawk and Scalping knife and will be worse than any Hessian or
Waldecker ....."

The issue of Goddard's appeal to the Governor is obscure. On July 17,
1779, the Council of Safety ordered the magistrates who had failed to give
him protection to appear before them at a hearing on the twenty-sixth of
the instant month, but the Council record for that day gives no indication
that the hearing was held, nor did the Maryland Journal thereafter refer
to this phase of the affair. It is evident, however, that whatever was its
legal conclusion, Goddard considered himself to have been vindicated a sec-
ond time, for on July 27th he published in his newspaper a retraction of
the apology which he had printed under duress only a week earlier, nor
does there seem to have been made by his enemies any protest against this
emphatic disavowal of what Calhoun had termed his "recantation." Again
the last word had been spoken by the publisher, and the "liberty of the
press" once more had been upheld against an outraged populace.

GODDARD'S LATER YEARS

During the fourteen years that Goddard remained in Baltimore after his
second defiance of public opinion in that town, he gave his enemies and
competitors many moments of uneasiness, touched them with his rapier
point or hammered them with his bludgeon many times, but on the whole
it was a well-ordered and fairly prosperous middle age that he entered into,
a life laborious and useful but entirely devoid of the unusual. The story of
his early career with its zealous exertion, its varied accomplishment, has
been related in some detail; a concise statement of his activities through-
out his later years must suffice for these pages.

It is probable that Goddard and Oswald had employment for some years
with Mary Katherine Goddard on the Maryland Journal^ for there is little
evidence that their own business was sufficient to maintain them. On April
10, 1781, the partners once more renounced all share in that good woman's
business,¹ and asked encouragement from the public in their designs for issu-
ing a series of the British classics, publications which, they emphasized,
were to be printed on American paper of their own manufacture. No traces
of these works exist, however, to indicate that they were published. For
how much longer the partnership between Goddard and Oswald continued

¹ Maryland Journal

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