Annapolis, Maryland

When did Annapolis become the capital of Maryland?

In 1649 Puritan settlers from Virginia made a home on the Severn River and called it Providence. Later a town was surveyed there, in 1683–84, when it became an official port where ships could enter and clear customs.

The capital of Maryland was then St Mary’s City, far to the south, the town founded by the Catholic Calvert family. In 1689 Protestant colonists overthrew Lord Baltimore’s officials, and from 1692 Maryland was run as a royal colony, with governors sent by the king and the Church of England as the official church.

In February 1695 the assembly moved the capital north to the more central town on the Severn, then called Anne Arundel Town. In May that year it was renamed Annapolis. Records dated by the old calendar, when the new year began in March, give the move as February 1694/5.

Why are Annapolis streets laid out in circles?

The royal governor Francis Nicholson drew up a plan for the new capital in 1695–96. Instead of a simple grid, he used a Baroque design, the grand style used in European cities of the time. Two circles sit on two hills: State Circle, for the state house, and Church Circle, for St Anne’s Church. Streets run out from them like the spokes of a wheel. Historians think Nicholson knew the plans drawn by Christopher Wren’s circle for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666.

Archaeologists from the University of Maryland have shown that Nicholson did not start from nothing. He kept streets from the earlier 1683–84 survey and fitted his design to the hills and the waterfront. The plan put government and church on the high ground, where everyone could see them.

Building followed quickly. King William’s School, the ancestor of St John’s College, was founded in 1696. The first state house was finished in 1698 but burned in October 1704, and a second was ready in 1709. St Anne’s was finished in 1704, and Annapolis became a city by charter in November 1708.

Who ruled Annapolis in 1715?

Maryland was a proprietary colony: it belonged to one family, the Calverts, Lords Baltimore, who chose its governor, under the British Crown. The family had lost control after 1689, partly because they were Catholic. Benedict Leonard Calvert, who became the 4th Lord Baltimore early in 1715, had joined the Church of England, and in February 1715 the Crown gave Maryland back to him. He died within weeks, and by April his son Charles, aged about 15, was the 5th Lord Baltimore.

The governor on the spot was John Hart, who lived in Annapolis from 1714 to 1720. Catholics, the family’s old faith, did not win back their rights: in 1718 the assembly took away their vote. Later in the game’s era the young Lord Baltimore sent members of his own family to govern: a cousin, Charles Calvert, from 1720 to 1727, and his younger brother, also called Benedict Leonard Calvert, from 1727 to 1731.

What did Annapolis trade in 1715?

Maryland lived on tobacco. In 1729 the governor, Lord Baltimore’s brother Benedict Leonard Calvert, wrote that tobacco, as the colony’s staple, was “our all”. English law said it must be shipped to Britain first.

Most tobacco was loaded onto ships at landings along the many rivers that run into the bay, not at one big harbour. Annapolis was the customs port for the upper western shore of the bay, where ship captains reported to the local officer and paid fees.

Trade ran on credit. Some planters sent their tobacco to a merchant in England, who sold it, took a fee and kept an account for them. More often, planters sold their crops to ship captains or to factors, agents who bought for English firms. Against that tobacco, planters ordered cloth and tools and other goods Maryland did not make, and many slid into debt. In the late 1690s about 90 to 115 ships a year traded in the colony.

A few Annapolis merchants grew rich on this. By 1725 four of them, including Charles Carroll, known as the Settler, owned more than half the land in the city.

Was there slavery in colonial Annapolis?

Yes. Maryland made slavery for life the law in 1663–64. At first most tobacco workers were indentured servants from England and Ireland, who worked for a set number of years. After 1698, when the Royal African Company lost its monopoly on the English slave trade, many more enslaved Africans were brought in. After 1700 hundreds arrived each year, and in some years thousands. Most came from the Windward Coast and the Gold Coast of West Africa, and they worked mostly in the tobacco fields.

Annapolis was one of the places where they were sold. In August 1718 the slave ship Margaret arrived there carrying more than 100 captive Africans, and their sale is written in the day book of a Marylander named James Carroll. By the 1720s more and more enslaved people in Maryland had been born there, to enslaved parents. By 1755 about a third of the colony’s people were of African descent.

Did pirates come to Annapolis?

Not in any way the records show. Around 1700 pirates, Captain Kidd among them, were reported off the coast, but a history published by the Maryland State Archives names Philadelphia as their favourite haunt. One of Kidd’s former crew, Theophilus Turner, hid in the Chesapeake country and was caught by the governor’s agent on the Severn River, then sent to England.

In the autumn of 1717 Blackbeard and Benjamin Hornigold took a sloop off Cape Charles, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. The next year Blackbeard settled for a time near Bath, in North Carolina, before Virginia’s governor sent men after him.

What happened to Annapolis after 1730?

In September 1727 William Parks began printing the Maryland Gazette in Annapolis, the first newspaper in the Chesapeake. In 1729 Baltimore Town was founded on the Patapsco River; its deeper harbour would later overtake Annapolis as Maryland’s main port.

Annapolis grew into a real centre of government and trade only in the mid-1700s. In 1767 the slave ship Lord Ligonier arrived from the Gambia. The writer Alex Haley traced his ancestor Kunta Kinte to that ship, a link that rests partly on family stories, and a memorial to them stands today at the City Dock.