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224
ESSAYS IN COLONIAL HISTORY
The Economic Causes of the
Rise of Baltimore
BY CLARENCE P. GOULD
TO the mercantilist, commercial activity meant wealth,
and city life was the economic ideal. The exclusively
agricultural character of Maryland during the early eight-
eenth century was a keen disappointment, and envy of
the trade of Philadelphia dripped from many a Mary-
land quill. The idea seemed often to be that a town would
create trade rather than that trade must precede the
town, and no effort was spared that gave promise of
causing a town to spring up. Bacon's Laws of Maryland
records twenty-nine acts for the founding of about a
hundred towns, most of which remained open fields. Even
Annapolis, though a legal and official center, developed
but a small commercial population.1
The reasons for the persistent refusal of town life to
take root in the soil of Maryland are not far to seek. The
geographical contour of the region and the channels of its
early trade combine to produce this result. Great estua-
ries of the Chesapeake cut tide-water Maryland—the
only part inhabited before 1720—into narrow peninsulas,
or "necks," so that scarcely any point is over ten miles
from navigable water. In such a country no town could
1 In 1762 Annapolis contained only about two hundred houses (British
Museum, King's MSS., no. 205, p. 248).
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