evere penalties for alleged
blasphemy. This limitation clearly made it possible for magistrates to
construe an honest expression of religious opinion as blasphemy, and to
inflict the cruel punishments provided for that offence. It should be
noticed that the Toleration Act of Maryland, passed in 1649, was the work
of a General Assembly composed of sixteen Protestants and eight Roman
Catholics, the governor (William Stone) himself being a Protestant. Some
years later the Puritans, being in a majority in the Maryland General
Assembly, passed an act disfranchising Roman Catholics and members of the
Church of England. Civil war followed, resulting in a defeat for the
Roman Catholics near Providence, now called Annapolis, April, 1655. Lord
Baltimore, whose authority was overthrown in the course of the conflict,
recovered his rights when the monarchy was restored in England. The
government of the Baltimores continued, with some interruptions, until
the Revolution, and it is but fair to state that the character which they
stamped upon the colony was not effaced even by that event.

* * *

The Puritans nearly succeeded in adding North Carolina to their chain of
colonies. The first settlers, after the ill-fated Raleigh expeditions of
the previous century, were Presbyterian refugees from persecution at
Jamestown, who, led by Roger Green, settled on the Chowan, near the site
of Edenton. These were joined by other dissenters who had found the
religious atmosphere of Virginia uncomfortable, and Puritans from New
England landed at the Cape Fear River in 1661, and bought lands from the
Indians. The soil and climate were admirably suited for successful
colonization, and North Carolina might have proved a southern New England
but for the hunger for vast American domains which just then possessed
the courtiers of Charles II. In view of the notorious depravity of that
merry monarch's surroundings it seems ludicrous to read that the grantees
obtained Carolina under the pretence of a "pious zeal for the propagation
of the gospel among the heathen." The list included the Earl of
Clarendon, General George Monk, to whom Charles owed, in a large degree,
his restoration to the throne; Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, afterward Earl
of Shaftesbury; Sir John Colleton, Lord Craven, Sir George Carteret and
Lord John Berkeley and his brother, then Governor of Virginia. It is
related that, "when the petitioners prese