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8. "Many to Attend, and Few to Attend Them": The Modes of Being an Outcast Community
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173 chapter 8 “MANY TO ATTEND, AND FEW TO ATTEND THEM” The Modes of Being an Outcast Community St. Mary’s Catholics Turn Inward In the first four decades of the eighteenth century the Catholic population in Maryland more than tripled, reaching nearly 8,000 by the 1740s. Immigration was a major cause of this growth, just as it accounted for a sharp diversification in the ethnic composition of the Catholic community—in particular Irish, Africans, and Germans. Although there were more priests on the Maryland mission as the century progressed (an average of just over twelve by the 1740s, about fourteen two decades later), their numbers did not keep pace with those of Catholics as a whole. Throughout the colonial period, despite increasing numbers, there was a chronic shortage of priests. As the first half of the century drew to a close, there was one priest for approximately 650 Catholics; four decades earlier the ratio had been one-half of that. Ten years later the ratio had swelled to 174 Many to Attend 1,100 to 1. This was a growing population that was expanding toward the eastern and northern borders of the state and beyond. More than ever the Maryland Catholic community was a dispersed one that could only be reached by a mobile ministry, now primarily by horse rather than by boat, on a regular circuit of chapels and Mass houses. St. Mary’s, the oldest county and the heart of Catholic Maryland, was by the middle of the eighteenth century the backwater of the province, as well—its poorest and least developed region. It did not share in the “golden age” of the province: in the diversification of the economy from a single-staple agriculture to one that included multiple staple crops, mills, ironworks, and shipbuilding and in urbanization and the flowering of a Creole culture in close imitation of English genteel society. In contrast to the architectural flowering that was part of an urban renaissance making life in Annapolis one“much to be envyd by Courts and Cities,” as an English visitor judged it in 1746, the Jesuit missionary Joseph Mosley caught the uniform poverty that characterized housing in St. Mary’s countryside : The buildings in this country are very poor and insignificant, all only one storey, commonly all the building made of wood plastered within,—a brick chimney in the better houses.... The poorer people have nothing but a few boards nailed together, without plastering, or any brick about it. Very few houses have glass windows.1 The bleak housing for the poor epitomized the economy they were trapped in: an economy in which the consolidation of landownership by the wealthy was reducing the options for the poor to becoming tenant farmers or vagabonds. Mosley found conditions for his parishioners on the Eastern Shore to be even worse: families mired in grinding poverty, abandoned by desperate fathers who were without land or work. Maryland , he concluded, the province that once boasted of being the poor man’s best country, was now a shell of its former self, with too many people : “the lands... all secured, and the harvest for [the poor] now over.” Slaves occupied the fields once worked by freemen. The consequence: 1.“‘Itinerant Observations’ of Edwared Kimber,” London Magazine (1746), 323, quoted in Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 70; Joseph Mosley to sister [Helen Dunn], Newtown, September 1, 1759. [44.204.65.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:56 GMT) Many to Attend 175 “white servants, after their bondage is out, are strolling about the country without bread.”2 Nowhere did the disfranchisement of Catholics have a more dire impact than in St. Mary’s County, where, as a majority of the population (60 percent), they had wielded the greatest political influence. As Tricia T. Pyne notes,“Once resigned to the loss of their political rights, members of this community turned their attention to their families and farms.”3 The physical concentration of more than 70 percent of the county ’s Catholics in the northwestern corridor, which embraced the Newtown , Lower Resurrection, and St. Clement’s Hundreds, facilitated the development of this ghetto mentality. The steady exodus of gentry from the Catholic community in the early eighteenth century due to worsening economic conditions aggravated the homogenization of the community , which became more and more a place of small to middling planters. The circumstances abetted the self-imposed isolation from the larger...