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A Predictable Pattern

Maryland’s last proprietary governor, Robert Eden, was nothing if not predictable.

Early in his administration, he established a pattern of proroguing the General Assembly (suspending the legislature without officially dissolving it) whenever he was unsure about how the Lower House delegates might act, or upset about something they had just done. He used the tactic within weeks of his June 1769 arrival in Annapolis and again that December. When the May 1770 date he’d set to call the government back into session approached, he pushed the reopening back to August, then September. Kicking the can down the road was Gov. Eden’s favorite go-to response to political uncertainty and unpleasantness.


In November 1770, the delegates’ refusal to renew the recently expired 1763 tobacco inspection law was the latest strike against them on the governor’s scorecard. Besides setting up the inspection system which ensured the high quality (and price) of exported Maryland tobacco, the law established the table of fees and taxes, payable in either tobacco or paper currency, collected to pay the salaries of the colony’s Anglican clergymen and for certain services performed by some government appointees. Everyone agreed that the inspection system was a good thing that should be continued, but the Lower House wanted to reduce the fees and taxes. The delegates ordered the arrest of one official, William Steuart, who collected his usual fees after the law had lapsed, and they asserted their “sole Right … to impose and establish Taxes, or Fees.”

Frustrated by the legislators’ stance and their arrest of Steuart, Robert Eden fell into his usual pattern. He prorogued the General Assembly over the first weekend of November in order to set Steuart free, then called it right back into session. When the delegates again refused to give Eden what he wanted, he dissolved the legislature and issued the Fee Proclamation, an executive order which decreed that his appointed officeholders and church rectors could continue to collect their fees and taxes at the old expired rates. Governor Eden put off calling a new legislative session again and again for the next ten months, and the resulting Fee Controversy would drag through 1771 and into ’72 and ’73. It hamstrung Eden’s administration and gave Maryland patriots such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, William Paca, and Samuel Chase an opportunity to sharpen their rhetorical and organizational skills for bigger battles ahead.


The text of Governor Eden’s November 26, 1770 Fee Proclamation was printed in the December 13th issue of the Maryland Gazette: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001281/html/m1281-1188.html


Glenn E. Campbell

HA Senior Historian


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