Maryland is one of the original thirteen States of America. Maryland was founded by Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, in 1634. His father, George Calvert, was a member of the London Company and Secretary of State under James I from 1618 to 1635. He had made an unsuccessful attempt to found a colony on Newfoundland in 1621 and in 1629 he had landed in Virginia with forty Catholic colonists, but they were not welcomed by the Protestants of Virginia and soon returned home.
Charles I then gave to Baltimore a charter for the land north of the Potomac River as far as the forty-first degree of latitude and to the source of the Potomac River on the west. This territory lay within the grant to Virginia. The name Maryland was given in honor of the queen, Henrietta Maria. The government of the colony was to be in the hands of the proprietor. St Mary's, the first settlement, was founded in 1634 by two hundred colonists, many of whom were Protestants. Baltimore maintained toleration for all. But from 1691 until the American War of Independence the Protestants were strong enough to disfranchise the Catholics.
In 1635 Clayborne, a Virginian who had a trading post on Kent Island, within the grant to Maryland, and who had been ejected by George Calvert, invaded Maryland at the head of a party of rangers and obtained temporary control of the colony
Maryland refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation which bad been adopted by Congress in 1777 until March the 1st, 1781. The State had no western territory herself and demanded that Virginia, New York and other States should surrender their claims to lands beyond the Alleghanies to the General Government. When their intention to do this was signified by those States, Maryland ratified the articles and they became at once binding on all the States. The Constitution was adopted on April the 28th, 1788, by a vote of sixty-three to eleven.
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