Annapolis

Annapolis and the American Revolution: Where a Nation Found Its Footing

Long before the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord, Annapolis, Maryland, had established itself as one of the most refined and politically sophisticated cities in British North America. By 1763, at the close of the French and Indian War, the town had reached what historians often describe as its colonial peak—a compact but elegant capital perched on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, home to wealthy planters, ambitious lawyers, and a vibrant culture of political debate. Its streets were lined with Georgian mansions, its harbor bustled with tobacco trade, and its State House—whose construction began in 1772 on the site of two earlier capitol buildings and which remains today the oldest state capitol in continuous legislative use in the United States—served as the seat of one of the oldest representative legislatures in the colonies. The capitol has the distinction of being topped by the largest wooden dome in the United States constructed without nails — built of cypress beams held together by wooden pegs instead of nails —and a lightning rod designed by Benjamin Franklin was installed at its completion , a fitting symbol of the Enlightenment ideals that animated the city's political life. It was precisely this combination of wealth, political maturity, and civic pride that made Annapolis not merely a witness to the American Revolution but one of its most consequential stages. Between 1774 and 1786, events that took place in this small city helped ignite the independence movement, gave shape to the new nation's government, and set the precedent for civilian authority over the military—a principle that remains the bedrock of American democracy.

Annapolis's defiance of imperial authority, however, began well before the dramatic events of 1774. As early as 1765, the city became the scene of what has been called one of the first acts of forcible resistance to British taxation in the colonies. When Zachariah Hood, an Annapolis merchant who had accepted the post of stamp collector for the Province of Maryland, returned from England that August, he was met at the Annapolis docks by an angry crowd. The future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase organized the burning of Hood's effigy, and days later a mob of some three hundred citizens burned down Hood's warehouse, forcing him to flee to New York for his life. Chase and his close friend William Paca—both young Annapolis lawyers—co-founded the local chapter of the Sons of Liberty and mobilized opposition to the Stamp Act, establishing themselves as leading figures in Maryland's emerging resistance movement. These early acts of defiance planted seeds that would bear far more dramatic fruit a decade later.

The political ferment of Annapolis deepened in 1773, when another of the city's leading figures entered the public arena in spectacular fashion. Charles Carroll of Carrollton was known contemporaneously as the "First Citizen" of the American colonies, a consequence of signing articles in the Maryland Gazette with that pen name.

He wrote a series of public letters under the pseudonym "First Citizen" opposing the royal governor's imposition of fees for office holding and warning that this was a step toward tyranny.

Opposing Carroll in these written debates, using the name "Antillon," was Daniel Dulany the Younger, a noted lawyer and Loyalist politician. Carroll, the wealthiest man in the colonies and barred from political office because of his Catholic faith, used the debate to articulate principles of self-governance and legislative consent that electrified Maryland. Paca and Chase had already forged their friendship in the Forensic Club, a debating society that Paca helped found, which debated the issues of the time, including whether democracy was a better form of government than monarchy. Together, these Annapolis patriots—Chase, Paca, and Carroll—were preparing the intellectual and organizational ground for revolution.

The revolutionary temper of Annapolis announced itself with fire on a grander scale on October 19, 1774, when a crowd of local patriots confronted Anthony Stewart, a merchant and owner of the brigantine Peggy Stewart, which had arrived in the harbor carrying over two thousand pounds of tea on which Stewart had paid the despised parliamentary tax. Stewart had named the ship for his seven-year-old daughter, Peggy Stewart, as well as the large brick Georgian mansion he owned near the Annapolis docks. Stewart had guaranteed payment of the duty himself in order to get fifty-three indentured servants—many of them sick from the late-season Atlantic crossing—safely ashore, since customs officials would not allow any cargo to land until the tax was paid. The tea had been loaded in London by Thomas Charles Williams, who placed 2,320 pounds of tea in seventeen packages aboard the brig without the full knowledge of the ship's captain. On October 19, a public meeting of "a great number of very respectable gentlemen from Anne-Arundel, Baltimore, and Prince George's counties" assembled to examine the affair; Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, both future signers of the Declaration of Independence, met with Stewart.

Charles Warfield stood before the house and offered Stewart two options: "You must either go with me and apply the torch to your own vessel, or hang before your own door."

The thirty-six-year-old Stewart rowed to where the Peggy Stewart was anchored "with her sails and colours flying," ran his ship aground at Windmill Point, and set fire to the tea; within a few hours, "the whole, together with the vessel, was consumed in the presence of a great number of spectators." The event became known as the "Annapolis Tea Party," and its repercussions extended far beyond the harbor. Thomas Stone—another future Maryland signer of the Declaration of Independence—subsequently purchased the Peggy Stewart House , where he lived until his death in 1787. Anthony Stewart and his family spent most of the Revolutionary War years living in New York, where he served on the board of directors of the Associated Loyalists; he later attempted to found a community called New Edinburgh in Nova Scotia. Despite the significant financial loss he sustained, Stewart remained wealthy, although his 1,200 acres of land in Maryland were forfeited at war's end. Ironically, he died on a business visit to Annapolis in 1791.

All four of Maryland's signers of the Declaration of Independence—Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton—had deep roots in Annapolis. Each of these men lived in Annapolis at one time or another, and Annapolis is the only city in the nation that still has surviving houses of all of its state's signers.

Carroll, born in Annapolis, inherited such wealth in the form of slave-holding estates that he was the wealthiest man in the American colonies when the Revolution began in 1775.

He was the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration as well as the last surviving and longest-lived, dying fifty-six years after its signing at the age of ninety-five. Paca, who had built his five-part Georgian mansion on Prince George Street, went on to serve as governor of Maryland and later as a federal judge. Chase, whose unfinished Annapolis home was sold to Eastern Shore planter Edward Lloyd in 1771, served as an Associate Justice of