Maryland

A colony founded as a refuge for Catholics that guaranteed toleration and then took it away. Charles I granted it in 1632 to Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, whose family were Catholic converts in a country where their faith was penalised, and the proprietary charter gave them powers close to a palatinate. Catholics were always a minority among the settlers, which is precisely why the 1649 Act Concerning Religion was passed - the first law in the colonies guaranteeing freedom of worship to trinitarian Christians, protecting Catholics from a Protestant majority rather than the reverse. It was repealed within five years when Puritans took control, restored, and abolished permanently after 1689, after which Catholics could not vote or worship publicly for most of a century. The economy was tobacco and therefore slavery, on the Chesapeake pattern shared with Virginia. The Mason-Dixon line, surveyed in the 1760s to settle a boundary dispute with Pennsylvania, later came to mean the division between free and slave states. Maryland stayed in the Union in 1861 under military pressure, with its legislature partly arrested. Baltimore's harbour and the 1814 bombardment produced the national anthem. Annapolis briefly served as the national capital. Annapolis is the capital and Baltimore the largest city. The state is named for Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I. It donated the land for the District of Columbia. The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the United States. Blue crab and the Naval Academy are both Annapolis institutions. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were both born enslaved on the Eastern Shore.

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