Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists by Antoinette Sutto

Author:Antoinette Sutto [Sutto, Antoinette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9780813937489
Google: s3d6CAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2015-11-30T02:56:39+00:00

9

NEWS, RUMOR, and REBELLION

Nicholas Spencer of Virginia complained in March of 1689 of common planters’ “ruinous imaginations.”1 But the rumor panic of 1689 was not the first time that tall tales threatened the security of the proprietary regime. Maryland nearly had a Bacon’s Rebellion of its own in the early 1680s. With some agitation from the former proprietary governor (and former rebel) Josias Fendall and a St. Mary’s gentleman named John Coode, long-familiar local grievances coalesced via the American version of the anti-popery narrative into a dangerously coherent critique of proprietary government that seemed for weeks to tremble on the brink of armed revolt.

Fendall and Coode did more talking than plotting, however. In 1680 neither one proved willing to go through with the “rising” against Baltimore’s government that their words suggested. Neither was the time quite right for rabid anti-popery as a political strategy. But the upwelling of confessionally colored political discontent between 1679 and 1681 revealed in stark terms how easily local tensions and fears could move into the familiar anti-Catholic narrative of conspiracy and cosmic disorder. Rumors about Catholics and Indians in Maryland were a discussion of the use and misuse of power, and allowed many people to voice criticism of the proprietary regime that might otherwise go unheard. The American version of the anti-popery narrative provided an explanation of events peculiar to Maryland, the Chesapeake, and the mid-Atlantic, and simultaneously placed these events in a framework that connected English colonists in the Chesapeake to their compatriots in the British Isles as well as the threat of war with the Five Nations and the “menacing shadow” Louis XIV had begun to cast in Europe.2

Yet the narrative had limits. Without indication from England that regime change in Maryland would be looked upon with favor, rumor could only go so far. As the royal governor of Jamaica noted a few years earlier in 1676 on hearing that some Marylanders had “revolted and declared for [Nathaniel] Bacon,” he could not “trace the grounds of this report, so I suppose it only to be rumor, and probably raised by those who wish it.”3 Rumors might articulate wishes and fears and suggest what ought to be done, but given the administrative realities of the late seventeenth-century empire, without hope of support from across the Atlantic, rumor could do only so much.

* * *

The first part of the story lay both within and outside the colony’s borders. The diplomatic reorientation of the middle 1670s in which the Susquehannocks went from allies to potential enemies and the English sought a treaty with the Five Nations, had not guaranteed peace. In the late 1670s, the Maryland council learned that the Susquehannocks had “submitted themselves to and put themselves under the protection of the Cinnigos or some other nations of Indians residing to the northward.” In April 1677, the governor and council commissioned councilor Henry Coursey to go to New York and make a “firm peace” with the Susquehannocks, if they still existed as a separate nation, or with the Five Nations or “any other Indians now unknown to us.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.