I’ve written before about William Eddis (see “Our Little Capital” from January 28, 2021), an Englishman who arrived in Annapolis in September 1769, three months after his patron, Governor Robert Eden, who appointed him to various government posts through the new few years. Eddis was a keen observer of colonial life, and his published letters allow us to see Annapolis, Maryland, and America as he saw them 250 years ago.
William Eddis began his February 17, 1772 letter with thoughts on agriculture and commerce. Yes, the colonial population was booming, he wrote, but the North American continent was so vast that it must remain “very thinly inhabited for many generations.” As long as workers (some of whom were enslaved, he neglected to mention) could be “profitably employed, as they are now, in clearing and cultivating land,” agriculture would be “the grand object of colonial attention, to a very distant period.” Notwithstanding an occasional boycott of taxed English goods, Eddis was confident that Americans would continue importing “the various manufactures of the mother country, it being evident that every species of goods may be obtained much cheaper, and of a superior quality, through the medium of commercial intercourse, than by any patriotic exertions amongst themselves.”
Unlike England, America boasted “immense tracts of unappropriated lands,” and each colonial government had established offices to facilitate “granting the same to adventurers on stipulated terms.” Eddis devoted several paragraphs to an explanation of land grant procedures, but it’s enough for us to know that Maryland’s Land Office was located here in Annapolis. In 1772, its two appointed Judges were Benedict Calvert (illegitimate son of the 5th Lord Baltimore and half-brother of the recently deceased 6th Lord Baltimore) and Dr. George Steuart, but much of the office’s day-to-day work was conducted by its clerk, who just happened to be Steuart’s brother William. David Steuart, George’s son, got the job when his Uncle William died in 1774. Convenient, huh?
Even after “deducting all the various charges of government,” land sales and quitrent revenues annually netted the proprietary administration an average of £12,500. The proprietor and his hand-picked governor sat atop a network of patronage, bestowing official favors on family members, friends, and followers, and throwing “great weight and influence into the scale of government.” This struck many as “inimical to the essential interests of the people; a spirit of party is consequently excited; and every idea of encroachment is resisted, by the popular faction, with all the warmth of patriotic enthusiasm.”
William Eddis wrote that Maryland elections were held every three years, but he forgot to add that Governor Eden routinely prorogued the legislature whenever he didn’t want to deal with problematic politicians who wouldn’t bend to his will. Eddis noted that the elected delegates “are generally persons of the greatest consequence in their different counties; and many of them are perfectly acquainted with the political and commercial interests of their constituents.” He was impressed with the “great powers of eloquence, and force of reason” they brought to bear in legislative debates, and he marked “the utmost regularity and propriety” of their sessions…when the governor allowed them to meet, that is.
This might come as a shock to us today (sarcasm intended), but even as early as 1772, Eddis detected a “litigious spirit” in American society. He found the number of causes brought before the twice-yearly courts in Annapolis to be “really incredible.” Not all of the gentlemen who practiced law could be considered formally qualified to do so, meaning that “those who are possessed of superior abilities, have full employment for the exertion of their talents, and are paid in due proportion by their respective clients.” It should come as no surprise that many of Maryland’s most successful lawyers were also among the influential men elected to the General Assembly. Of the six delegates who represented Annapolis (William Paca and John Hall) and Anne Arundel County (Brice T.B. Worthington, Thomas Johnson, Samuel Chase, and John Hammond) in the autumn 1771 session, all but one (Worthington) were prominent lawyers.
William Eddis noted another quality in the American character, “a shrewdness and penetration, not generally observable in the mother country.” The colonists, he wrote, were “inquisitive, even beyond the bounds of propriety; they discriminate characters with the greatest accuracy; and there are few who do not seem perfectly conversant with the general, and particular interests of the community.” Those on the lower rungs of society’s ladder “pay but little external respect to those who occupy superior stations,” a practice Eddis attributed to the “idea of equality” which “seems generally to prevail.”
There was just no knowing what these striving, contentious, questioning, patriotic people who were convinced of their equal worth and protective of their rights might do some day.
You can read or download the original 1792 edition of William Eddis’s Letters from America through Google Books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/gPBeAAAAcAAJ?hl=en
Glenn E. Campbell
HA Senior Historian
