MARYLAND, FLAG OF

U.S. state flag consisting of a quartered design of alternating red-white and black-yellow panels. Alone of the 13 original states, Maryland has a state flag based on a flag flown under British rule. According to the laws of heraldry, the personal banner of the Lords Baltimore, who were the proprietary owners of Maryland, was by extension that of the territory they ruled. In 1638 Leonard Calvert, son of Sir George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, wrote to his brother Cecilius that he had flown the Calvert banner in battle, and through the 17th and 18th centuries the flag continued in use. The Calvert coat of arms consisted of six vertical stripes, alternately yellow and black, with a diagonal stripe (from the upper hoist to lower fly) of counterchanged coloursthat is, black where the diagonal crossed a yellow stripe and vice versa. As is the case with most early heraldic arms, there is no known symbolism in the yellow-and-black design; it was simply distinctive. In contrast, the Crossland family (maternal family of Sir George Calvert) had a coat of arms with clearer symbolic origins. It made a pun on the family name by showing a quartered white-and-red shield bearing a counterchanged cross botone (a cross whose arms end in three balls). Although traditional heraldry fell into disuse in the 13 British colonies during the War of Independence (177583), the arms of the Lords Baltimore were never forgotten. Various designs, including badges worn by Maryland troops during the Civil War (186165), incorporated these symbols. On March 9, 1904, an armorial banner combining the arms of the Calverts and Crosslands was officially adopted as the state flag. A cross botone frequently serves as the finial for the pole on which the flag is displayed. Whitney Smith History The area's earliest human occupation is accepted as having been by roving hunters in about 10,000 BC, as the ice sheet made its final retreat. The records of this pre-Archaic, fluted-blade culture, which left only the points of its weapons, remain imprecise. Later, the numerous Eastern Archaic and then Woodland Indian populations practiced agriculture and feasted on seafood; by AD 1000, permanent villages were established. During the early European settlement the tribes were Algonquian in language and politics, but they were under pressure from the Iroquois to the north. The English promise of support in these wars greatly smoothed relations in the early colonial years. The colony Leonard Calvert, the younger brother of Lord Baltimore, landed the founding expedition on St. Clement's (now Blakistone) Island in the lower Potomac in March 1634. The first settlement and capital was St. Mary's City. Aware of the mistakes made by Virginia's first colonists, Maryland's settlers, rather than hunt for gold, made peace with the local Indians and established farms and trading posts, at first on the shores and islands of the lower Chesapeake. The field hands included indentured labourers working off the terms of their passage and, after about 1639, African slaves. The most important crop was tobacco. Roads and towns were few, and contact with the English-model manor houses was largely by water. The religious latitude stipulated by the Calvert family was formalized by the General Assembly in 1649 in an Act Concerning Religion, later famous as the Act of Religious Toleration. It granted freedom of worship, though only within the bounds of Trinitarian Christianity. Commercial disputes with Anglican Virginia and boundary quarrels with Quaker Pennsylvania and Delaware did not affect this tolerance. Puritan ascendancy in England (164860) caused only brief turmoil, and during an interval of crown rule in Maryland (16921715) the Church of England was formally established. Maryland nonetheless remained a haven for dissidents from sectarian rigidity in other colonies. As the population centre shifted to the north and west, the capital was moved to Annapolis, and in 1729 Baltimore was founded. Maryland's dominant country party early resisted British efforts to make the colonies bear more of the costs of government. Frederick county repudiated the Stamp Act in 1765, and in 1774, the year after the Boston Tea Party, a ship loaded with tea was burned at an Annapolis dock. Marylanders took an active part in the American Revolution. The Continental Congress, often on the move to avoid British troops, spent a winter in Baltimore. At the close of the war it convened in Annapolis, where it accepted George Washington's resignation from the army and ratified the Treaty of Paris (1783), which acknowledged the independence of the colonies. Postwar problems included the disposition of confiscated loyalist property, the struggle for paper money, and debtor relief. Maryland's controversy with Virginia over the use of the Potomac and lower Chesapeake Bay, resulting in the Compact of 1785, led toward the Constitutional Convention, as did the Annapolis Convention of 1786, at which Maryland was not represented. Luther Martin distinguished himself as a representative of Maryland at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Maryland ratified the Constitution on April 28, 1788, the seventh state to do so. It also ceded territory and advanced money for public buildings to help form the District of Columbia (1791).