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22
to the judgment of the public how much it may increase in a very few
years
~7
Ballendine was warmly received in England, especially by the
Walpole Associates who no doubt thought that they were finally going to
force the Ohio Company out of the potentially lucrative business of
speculation in the American west. Benjamin Franklin, in England at the
time, even wrote Ballendine a letter of introduction to the Lords Commis-
sioners of Trade extolling the many virtues of the Potomac. 38
While Ballendine was in Europe, Thomas Johnson turned his atten-
tions to trying to persuade the Maryland Assembly to agree to the Virginia
1772 Potomac improvement act. This was necessary since Maryland's
proprietary charter gave the Potomac River to that colony as far as the
Virginia shore. Although Governor Eden favored Ballendine's plan and
would have liked to have helped Johnson, he was reluctant to openly
support Johnson's efforts in the Maryland Assembly because he feared that
if Maryland passed a similar act to that of Virginia, it might jeopardize
Maryland's claim to the Potomac. Without Eden's support, the interests
of Baltimore merchants and millers, who did not want overland western
Maryland business to shift away from them to Georgetown, prevailed over
all attempts to have the bill passed. 39
37 Broadside of John Ballendine, Potomac Company Miscellaneous
Accounts, Records of the National Park Service, Item 179, National Archives,
Washington, D.C.; Arthur G. Burton and Richard W. Stephenson, "John
Ballendine's Eighteenth Century Map of Virginia," Quarterly Journal of the
Library of Congress 21(3) (1964): 172-178; U.S. Congress, House, Report of
e~omm1 ee on F~oads and Canals, House Rept. 90, 19th Congress, 2nd
session, , pp. -
38Bacon-Foster, Early Chapters, p. 25.
39Delaplaine, Life of Thomas Johnson, pp. 72-75. See chapter four
for more information on the Georgetown-Baltimore rivalry.
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