The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 141

limi ts The State House at St Marys City, above, was rebuilt for the Maryland Tercentenary. Below at left Margaret Brent's autograph. Cross Mcmor. below at right was built in her day reputedly in 1643 by Thomas Cornwallis. and is called the state's oldest brick house.

It Is near St Marys City. v-. v. a I i I ifhitn' privileges, including the holding of court-baron and court-leet, which were civil and criminal courts of private jurisdiction. No description of Margaret Brent is known.

She is a shadowy figure who lives only in the archives of the early colony. But she must have been a woman whose strong character and determination showed readily in her face and bearing and prevented the men in that essentially masculine world from relegating her to her hearthside. She was not a person to whom the trappings of romance were easily attached, although efforts have been made to link her name with that of Leonard. Calvert. Margaret Brent reached Maryland at a time when the affairs of the young colony were approaching a peak of storminess.

Before Lord Baltimore was granted the Maryland province, William Claiborne, a' Virginian, had established a trading post- on Kent Island. When the Calverts claimed the island as part of their colony and named Giles Brent governor of Kent Island Claiborne resisted. The issue was referred to the King, and he decided it in favor of the Calverts. Claiborne, however, sat tight. Giles Brent lacked the force of his sister and, finding Kent Island in the hands of the Virginia squatters, deeded his holdings there to her.

Claiborne and his associate Ingle, nevertheless continued to harass the colony, and to put down their depredations Leonard Calvert brought the soldiers up from Virginia. MaRGARET was with Calvert at the'time of his death, and as his last act he named her his executrix "to take all and pay all." Mistress Brent was quick to realize that as Calvert's executrix she was doing a man's work in the colony yet she had no right of vote In the Assembly. And when the troop crisis led to her being empowered to act for the new Lord Baltimore also, and so increased her responsibilities, she decided to demand that right. It is doubtful that she ever ney by an order of the court or else all must go to ruin again, and then the second mischief had been doubtless far greater than the "We conceive that she rather deserved favor and thanks from your Honor for her so much concurring to the public safety than to be justly liable to all those bitter invectives you have been pleased to express. Some 200 years later the historian John Leeds Bozman more than backed- up the Assembly's opinion.

The dying Calvert would have done better for both himself and his province, Bozman wrote, if he had named Greene his executor and 'Margaret his deputy governor. Margaret Brent was born in 1601 in Gloucestershire, England. The family was an old one, and she was reared at the family home at Lark Stoke. Her education must have been more than that usually given young women, for she was acquainted with the processes of law and the intricacies of property settlement. The establishment of the col-only of Maryland by her kinsmen the Calverts apparently awakened ambitions.

She emigrated to Maryland in 1638 with her sister Mary and her brother Giles. Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, gave the Brents this letter to his brother, Leonard "I would have you pass to Mrs. Margaret Brent and her sister Mistress Mary Brent for and in respect of four maidservants besides themselves which they transport this year In the Province of Maryland a grant of as much land in and about the town of St. Maries and elsewhere in that Province in as ample manner and with as large privileges as any of the first settlers and in respect of the transportation, hither of five men in the first year of that plantation." In October, 1639, Margaret and Mary Brent recorded the patent to an estate they named Sisters' Freehold. To the east of this lay the home of their brother, and to the west were the holdings of Thomas Greene, who was destined eventually to succeed Leonard Calvert as governor.

At Sisters' Freehold, Mistress Brent exercised all her manorial t1 1 I 1 i thought of getting the franchise all women; more than likely, she was prompted to act only by that realization of the inequality of her own position. But however that may be, flouting the traditions of the age, in 1648 she appeared before the Assembly after it had been summoned by the rolling drum, and requested to havevoyce in howse of her selfe and voyce allso for thatt att the last court 3rd January it was ordered that the said Margaret Brent was to be looked upon and received as his Lordship's attorney." The Assembly's reaction was depressingly negative, but Margaret Brent had become America's first suffragette. Although, under the terms of her emigration to the colony, Margaret Was entitled to vast estates, she never received all the property due her and, in disappointment and anger with Lord Baltimore, in 1650 she moved to Virginia. She maintained an interest In her Maryland estates, but she returned only once in 1661 to help William Calvert regain some of the estate of his father, Leonard. Then she retired again to her home in Aquia, Va where she died about 1670.

Her will, admitted to probate in 1671, divided among her brother and her nieces and nephews all her possessions, including "my silver spoons which are I 'L a The scene when Margaret Brent demanded voting rights was imagined like this by Edwin Tunis, the Baltimore artist 11.