Later, in 1689, the year following the Glorious Revolution in Great Britain, John Coode led a rebellion that removed Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, from power in Maryland.

After having visited the Americas and founded a colony in the future Canadian province of Newfoundland called "Avalon", he convinced the King to grant him a second territory in more southern, temperate climes.

On June 20, 1632, Charles granted the original charter for Maryland, a proprietary colony of about twelve million acres (49,000 km2), to the 2nd Baron Baltimore.

Some historians view this grant as a form of compensation for the 2nd Lord Baltimore's father's having been stripped of his title of Secretary of State upon announcing his Catholicism in 1625.

The colony of New Netherland begun by England's great imperial rival in this era, the United Provinces, specifically claimed the Delaware River valley and was vague about its border with Virginia.

The original charter granted the Calverts a province with a boundary line that started "from the promontory or headland, called Watkin's Point, situate upon the bay aforesaid near the river Wighco on the West, unto the main ocean on the east; and between that boundary on the south, unto that part of the bay of Delaware on the north, which lyeth under the 40th degree of north latitude from the aequinoctial, where New England is terminated."[9]p.

The 1st Lord Baltimore was himself a convert to Catholicism, a considerable political setback for a nobleman in 17th-century England, where Catholics could easily be considered enemies of the crown and potential traitors to their country.

The Calvert family recruited Catholic aristocrats and Protestant settlers for Maryland, luring them with generous land grants and a policy of religious toleration.

[11] On November 22, 1633, Lord Baltimore sent the first settlers to the new colony, and after a long voyage with a stopover to resupply in Barbados, the Ark and the Dove landed on March 25, 1634 (thereafter celebrated as "Maryland Day"), at Blackistone Island, thereafter known as St. Clement's Island, off the northern shore of the Potomac River, upstream from its confluence with the Chesapeake Bay and Point Lookout.

It remained so for sixty years until 1695 when the colony's capital was moved north to the more central, newly established "Anne Arundel's Town (also briefly known as "Providence") and later renamed as "Annapolis".

The establishment of the Province of Maryland disrupted the trade relationship between Virginia colonists and the Susquehannock, an Iroquoian-speaking tribe that lived in the lower Susquehanna River valley.

Governor Charles Calvert invited them to settle on the Potomac River above the Great Falls, however, the Susquehannock instead chose to occupy a site on Piscataway Creek where they erected a palisaded fort.

In September 1675, a thousand-man expedition against the Susquehannock was mounted by militia from Virginia and Maryland led by John Washington and Thomas Truman.

Nathaniel Bacon, unhappy with Governor Sir William Berkeley's response to the raids, organized a volunteer militia to hunt down the Susquehannock.

[19] In 1629, George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore, "driven by 'the sacred duty of finding a refuge for his Catholic brethren'",[20] applied to Charles I for a royal charter to establish a colony south of Virginia.

He also wanted a share of the fortunes being made in tobacco in Virginia, and hoped to recoup some of the financial losses he had sustained in his earlier colonial venture in Newfoundland.

Meanwhile, privateer Captain Richard Ingle (Claiborne's co-commander) seized control of St. Mary's City, the capital of the Maryland colony.

[25] "Multiple colonial charters, two negotiated settlements by the states in 1785 and 1958, an arbitrated agreement in 1877, and several Supreme Court decisions have defined how Maryland and Virginia would deal with the Potomac River as a boundary line, and shaped the boundary on the Eastern Shore (separating Accomack County, Virginia, from Worcester and Somerset counties in Maryland).

Hostilities erupted in 1730 with a series of violent incidents prompted by disputes over property rights and law enforcement, and escalated through the first half of the decade, culminating in the deployment of military forces by Maryland in 1736 and by Pennsylvania in 1737.

[28] In 1672, Lord Baltimore declared that Maryland included the settlement of Whorekills on the west shore of the Delaware Bay, an area under the jurisdiction of the Province of New York (as the British had renamed New Netherland after taking possession in 1664).

Lord Baltimore held all the land directly from the King for the payment of "two Indian arrowheads annually and one fifth of all gold and silver found in the colony.

"[1] Maryland's foundation charter was drafted in feudal terms and based on the practices of the ancient County Palatine of Durham, which existed until 1646.

The Proprietor had the right and power to establish courts and appoint judges and magistrates, to enforce all laws, to grant titles, to erect towns, to pardon all offenses, to found churches, to call out the fighting population and wage war, to impose martial law, to convey or lease the land, and to levy duties and tolls.

In 1639, noting that Parliament had not been summoned in England for a decade, the free men of Maryland passed an act to the effect that "assemblies were to be called once in every three years at the least," ensuring that their voices would be regularly heard.

[42] In 1689, Maryland Puritans, by now a substantial majority in the colony, revolted against the proprietary government, in part because of the apparent preferment of Catholics like Colonel Henry Darnall to official positions of power.

[43] Darnall later wrote: "Wee being in this condition and no hope left of quieting the people thus enraged, to prevent effusion of blood, capitulated and surrendered."

[citation needed] Early settlements and population centers tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into Chesapeake Bay.

While they raised a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and livestock, the main cash crop was tobacco, which soon dominated the province's economy.

Leo Lemay says his 1744 travel diary Gentleman's Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton is "the best single portrait of men and manners, of rural and urban life, of the wide range of society and scenery in colonial America.

[54][55][56] In the late colonial period, the southern and eastern portions of the Province continued in their tobacco economy, but as the American Revolution approached, northern and central Maryland increasingly became centers of wheat production.