The Catholic Refuge - Assent

American Political History · Jun 26, 2021 · 13m

In 1638, the colony of Maryland had no laws at all. Lord Baltimore had sent a code across the ocean; the assembly of freemen voted it down. The freemen wrote their own; the proprietor rejected those. The whole standoff turned on a single phrase buried in the colony's charter — that laws were to be made "with the advice, assent, and approbation of the freemen." Did the proprietor write the law, and the freemen merely approve it, or the other way around?

This is the story of the fight over who actually governed Maryland — and the answer the colonists forced. The first assembly in 1635, the…