The Good Intent episode is forgotten today, but it was a really big deal in Annapolis 250 years ago. When the ship arrived, members of three county Committees charged with enforcing Maryland’s boycott of taxed imports met to determine the fate of the goods it carried. Even though James Dick, Anthony Stewart, and other merchants awaiting delivery had paperwork proving they had ordered many of the items before the boycott started, the combined Committee decided to bar the Good Intent from landing any of its cargo and told the captain to take everything back to England. The incident dominated local news coverage in the Maryland Gazette through the month of February 1770.
"What is it, we would ask, that at this Time binds America together?..."
In early April of 1770, printer Anne Catharine Green published a 40-page pamphlet by two members of the Committee, William Paca and Stephen West.
The authors admitted that their account went over a lot of nitpicky details, so they reminded their readers why the issue was so important: if the boycott agreement (the Association) fell apart in Maryland, wouldn’t the same happen in Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and across America?
America, they wrote, was bound together by “one common Cause and mutual Confidence,” so colonial unity must be unbroken. Paca and West knew the Committee’s decision on the Good Intent wasn’t popular with everyone, but they only valued the approval of those who wished “to save America from Desolation and Ruin.”
Maintaining a united front against a common threat—as relevant in 2020 as it was in 1770!
Glenn E. Campbell HA Senior Historian
Read the full pamphlet starting here: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/003207/html/m3207-1105.html
