Echoes Forward

As I hope you’re well-aware, our nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this July 4th. The British wouldn’t surrender at Yorktown until five years, three months, and fifteen days later on October 19th, 1781. The official peace treaty - and an end to the small skirmishes which erupted when soldiers on both sides passed each other on the street - didn’t come until almost two years later in September of 1783.

But Revolutions have to start somewhere, and rarely start without warning. While we use July 4th, 1776 as our anniversary date, there is no agreed-upon “start” date for the American Revolution. Many say that the first shots of the Revolution were fired in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord. Others point to the Boston Tea Party in December of 1773, and we can’t forget the Boston Massacre which occurred March 5, 1770. All of these dates are obviously important, but the funny thing about history is that something has to happen in the in-between. These somethings are sometimes even more important than the event itself.

The same thing is true of place as it is time. News of the Boston Tea Party, for example, rippled through the colonies and into small communities like ours. Caroline County, while somewhat disconnected due to the physical landscape of the Delmarva peninsula, had just as much a part to play in the Revolutionary build-up and in-between.

Caroline County was founded in 1774, just two years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. It was a community of planters who were drawn to the Choptank River for both accessible irrigation and easy transportation of goods. Before he was the famed Revolutionary War Colonel William Richardson, Richardson was a member of the Maryland General Assembly, where he was the main proponent of a bill to establish a new county carved out of Queen Anne’s and Dorchester in 1773. The colonial government obliged the next year, but decided to name the county after Caroline Eden, the wife of the then-royally-appointed Governor of Maryland. The Edens were run out of Maryland a short time later for their British affiliations, and Caroline Countians actually refused to call the county and Edenton (now Denton) by its original names because of the bad taste it put in their mouth.

Because of the agricultural background of the new Caroline County, early infrastructure included many riverside warehouses and public buildings, such as Melvill’s Warehouse located at Pig Point in Denton, now the property at the end of Smith Landing Road. There were established trade roots to larger communities and big cities through the Chesapeake Bay – which was the largest trade hub in the colonies. The information and ideals of the patriot cause spread so quickly on the Shore probably because of this fact: if it weren’t for the Chesapeake Bay’s interconnectedness to the wider world via trade, Caroline Countians may not have heard about the Boston Tea Party and its aftermath. But they did.

In retaliation against the protestors that participated in the Tea Party, the British government ordered that the port of Boston be closed. That means no trade boats in or out, which was economically devastating for the colony of Massachusetts and its people. Even though the local community was sparse, men from Caroline County gathered in 1774 at Pig Point to sign the Caroline Resolutions in response. These Resolutions were essentially a very light suggestion to Parliament that the port should be opened. After declaring their questionably sincere loyalty to the King, the two following clauses in the document read as follows: “2nd: That it is the unanimous opinion of this meeting, that the Boston Port Act is principally grounded on the opposition made by the inhabitants of that town to the Tea Duty; that the said town of Boston is now suffering in the common cause of British America, and that it is the duty of every Colony thereof, to unite in the most effectual means to obtain a repeal of the late Act of Parliament for shutting up the port of Boston. 3rd: That it is the unanimous opinion of this meeting, that if the Colonies come into a joint resolution to forbear all importations whatsoever from Great Britain, (except such articles as are absolutely necessary,) until the Acts of Parliament for shutting up the port of Boston, and for levying a duty on America, for the express purpose of raising a revenue, shall be repealed, it will be the means of preserving the liberties of North America.”

This is where I should mention that the American was not the obvious good-guy versus bad-guy narrative that has been painted over the decades since. There were lots more loyalists than anyone would like to admit – but they usually had good reasons. Caroline County’s widespread position as patriots had to do with many contextual factors: the history of Maryland’s colonial government, social class divides, proximity to cities, and also the differences between new counties like Caroline and long-established communities like New York City, Charleston, or even Frederick, Maryland.

The Calvert family, which held the Lord Baltimore title, was wildly unpopular since the beginning of Maryland’s founding, meaning that Marylanders were not unfamiliar with criticising their government. Pre-revolutionary Caroline County also seems to have been relatively poor, as we are one of the only counties in the state to not currently have lasting buildings or other infrastructure from before the Revolution. It was not until after the war was won that durable structures and dwellings were built. But this is where that longevity piece comes in. Poor did not always equal patriot, but it usually did if you were in a place like Caroline County. As we just discussed, Caroline was mostly made up of a very small population of young farmers who didn’t have much to their name to begin with. So in a very casual way of thinking about it, they heard the idea of a revolution and thought, ‘why not?’. But poor people in bigger or older counties had families to provide for and generational businesses to run. The threat of war and its personal, physical, and economical consequences was a terrifying prospect to the poor with everything to lose and very little to gain.

One more note about Caroline’s founding roots shaping its identity during the Revolution: unlike the majority of the places in colonial America, by the time revolutionary preparations were swirling, the Caroline County and the Eastern Shore as a whole had largely moved on from tobacco farming in favor of foodstuffs. This was due to the unsustainability of rotating the soil-depleting crop on limited amounts of land (aka, a peninsula). This became incredibly important to the Revolutionary soldiers, as the Eastern Shore was the only mass-producer of edible produce for soldiers to sustain themselves. In a way, the Shore saved the cause from certain starvation, and the region was coined “the Breadbasket of the Revolution.”

If you needed any more proof that America’s fight for independence started way earlier than the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Caroline County was grouped with Dorchester, Somerset, and Worcester counties to form the 5th and final military district in the colony of Maryland, as established by the Maryland Convention during the organization of a state militia in January of 1776 – months before July 4, 1776.

This broad, contextual view of the lead up to the American Revolution may not be as sexy as the war hero stories you’re used to. But I hope it gives some insight into how the landscape of Caroline County shaped and was shaped by the Revolution, after being born into a nation divided. Pick up a copy of next month’s Caroline Review for Part Two on Caroline during the war.