The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood

In order to defend against French Catholics and their Indian allies, the writers suggested that the king send “a Vice Roye or Governor Generallissimo” to preserve the colonies from external enemies.¹⁸

      In 1681 these fears of Catholics and Indians combined to create a crisis that foreshadowed later troubles in New England. The problems began in the summer, when some “heathen Rogues” attacked the borders of the colony, killing several settlers on the upper reaches of the Patuxent and Potomac Rivers. These Indian attacks, probably Iroquois or Susquehanna strikes against people they believed were harboring their enemies, caused massive panic in both Maryland and Virginia, where inhabitants became “greatly dissatisfied” that their governors could not protect them from the enemy. In this climate of fear, some eventually concluded “that it is the Senaco Indians” who had committed the depredations “by the Instigacon of the Jesuits in Canada and the Procuremt of the Lord Baltemore to cut of most off the Protestants of Maryland.” This identification reflected the tendency among colonists in the Chesapeake to describe all northern Indians as “Senecas,” in reference to the westernmost nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, and constituted the most elaborate theory to date of how Baltimore, French Catholics, and Indians had banded together. The proprietor blamed “some evile ill disposed spirits” for spreading these rumors, and he pointed to two men in particular: Josias Fendall and John Coode.¹⁹

      The two ringleaders of the opposition in 1681 were among the most interesting and enigmatic figures in early Maryland history. Fendall had been a governor under Cecil Calvert, but the proprietor removed him from office for his role in fomenting a previous rebellion in 1660; since that time he had stayed out of politics but remained an irritant to the proprietary interest. Coode was a younger man and a more recent arrival to the colony. An ordained Anglican minister, he served in the colony’s lower house as a representative of Calvert County, and had not yet acquired the reputation as a “perennial rebel.” While the two men’s motivations are not entirely clear, they tapped into a deep undercurrent of fear and resentment that had the potential to topple the government.²⁰

      Coode allegedly began his plotting in May 1681 at the house of Nehemiah Blackiston, when he said in the company of many people that within four months no Catholic would own “a foote of land” in the province, and that Coode could “make it high water” whenever he pleased: meaning that he had the power to cause a popular insurrection. (Coode objected to that assertion, claiming he was only “alludeing to a bowle of Punch wch they were then drinking wch he could make ebb or flow at pleasure.”) He apparently put his plan into operation in July after the murder of one Thomas Potter and some other English people near Point Lookout. When a neighbor observed that Indians killed the colonists, Coode responded that they “were not murdered by Indians, but were Murdered by Christians,” a clear implication of Catholic authorities.²¹

      Fendall harbored the same suspicions. One of his employees reported that around the time of the murders Fendall “did severall times say that he beleived in his Conscience the Papists and Indians joined together, and that … my Lord [Baltimore] did uphold them in what they did, and he beleived my Lord and they together had a mind to destroy all the Protestants.” The rumor may have originated with Daniel Mathena, a neighbor in Charles County who had received an Indian visitor en route to deliver a packet of letters to the “Senecas” several years earlier, containing, Mathena claimed, orders from Lord Baltimore “to come and cutt off the Protestants.” His evidence was not compelling, and showed the intellectual leaps that English people made when they feared a conspiracy was afoot. The Indian visitor mentioned that he carried letters from Baltimore to the Senecas, and when Mathena’s wife asked how the Indians could read the letters, “the Indian answered that the French were hard by and that they could read them.” After the murders, this rather obtuse report of French presence in the backcountry became solid evidence of a massive popish plot.²²

      Fendall and Coode decided to take action. They visited Nicholas Spencer, the secretary of Virginia, notifying him “that the Papists and Indians were joined together.” Spencer, for his part, discounted the rumors and advised them to “be quiett at home,” advice that prompted Coode to swear “God Damn all the Catholick Papist Doggs” and resolve to “be revenged of them, and spend the best blood in his body.” The two men’s motivations cannot be known for certain. Fendall in particular seems to have been attempting a return to political power, and understood that the Indian troubles provided an opportunity to undermine his old rival; one man reported that Fendall “hath been soliciting the people to choose him Delegate in the Assembly and hath told them that were he Commandr of the County Troope he would Destroy all the Indians.” Additionally, witnesses implied that both men hoped to increase their property holdings by confiscating land from Catholics. At the same time, Coode’s actions remain somewhat more difficult to interpret. He already possessed both a seat in the lower house and a militia commission. While most historians have branded him a self-interested demagogue, his anti-Catholicism appears to have been heartfelt, if not always internally consistent.²³

      Baltimore responded to these threats by throwing Fendall and Coode in prison. Motivated by memories of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia and the numerous insurrections his father had faced, the proprietor believed that only decisive action would demonstrate the consequences of rebellion. His approach backfired, however, because he underestimated the degree of popular support for the two men’s actions. For one thing, the lower house refused to remove Coode from its ranks or even discipline him. More ominously, a Charles County justice of the peace named George Godfrey hatched a plot to break Fendall out of prison, receiving commitments from forty men at church one Sunday. The design failed, and Godfrey joined the two other malcontents in jail. In November colonial authorities put the men on trial and convicted Fendall, who was banished from the colony, and Godfrey, whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The jury acquitted Coode, leaving him free to get his revenge another day.²⁴

      The denouement of the episode represented only a partial victory for Baltimore. He remained in control of the colony, but did little to regain the trust of his people. According to authorities in Virginia, Maryland remained dangerously unstable throughout the 1680s. A letter from the end of 1681 suggested that the proprietor only retained control by “keeping forces in Armes” and imprisoning anyone who questioned his authority, leaving “the Common people in great dread and feare.” A report by Virginia governor Thomas Culpeper about the same time noted that “Maryland is now in Ferment, and not onely troubled with our disease, pouverty, but in very great danger of falling into peeces whether it be that the Old Lord Baltimores politick Maximes are not pursued and followed by the Sonne or that they will not doe in this Age.” In recognition of the precarious nature of imperial politics, Culpeper implored the Lords of Trade to take steps to stabilize Maryland, lest the disease spread to its neighbors.²⁵

      The governor’s warning proved to be prescient. While Baltimore’s political difficulties appeared to be peculiar to his own situation as a Catholic ruler in a Protestant colony, the same political language could apply throughout the English colonies. In essence, ordinary Marylanders were attempting to explain the inexplicable: why a distant, mysterious Indian nation had decided to attack them, seemingly without provocation. With reports of popish plots traveling around the English world at this time, many colonists easily molded the familiar language of antipopery to this unfamiliar situation, implicating both the French and local Catholic leaders whose loyalty seemed to be suspect. In a sense, however, Baltimore’s Catholicism was not the main issue. As future events would show, the same tactics could be used against Protestants as well.

      • • •

      If rumors of a Catholic-Indian conspiracy proved particularly potent in Maryland, by the 1670s they had begun to appear all over the colonies. The ubiquity of these fears came out clearly in the travel journal of two members of an obscure Dutch Calvinist sect, the Labadists, who ranged from Maryland to Boston in 1679 and 1680 looking for land for their communitarian settlement. The two men, Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, heard talk of popish plots almost everywhere they went. In Maryland they learned that Jesuit priests “hold correspondence” with all the Indians between the English and French colonies, and related that “some people in Virginia and Maryland as well as in New Netherland, have been apprehensive lest there might be an outbreak, hearing