The Eye of Envy on the Chesapeake: Emotion, Improvement, and the Making of Catholic Maryland
- J.D. Barnes
- Jun 20
- 11 min read
The founding of Maryland has often been explained through a familiar question: did the Calverts seek to build a Catholic refuge, or did they pursue land, status, and profit? The question is useful, but it is also too narrow. It assumes that religion and economy belonged to separate worlds of motivation, and that political calculation can be separated from feeling. A history of emotions asks a different question. What emotional habits, languages, and expectations made such a project imaginable in the first place? The Maryland venture was not simply a scheme of religious toleration or colonial investment. It was also an emotional project shaped by Catholic vulnerability, dynastic ambition, gentry aspiration, and a Chesapeake landscape that promised both sanctuary and mastery.
The argument here is deliberately cautious. We cannot recover the private interior life of George Calvert, Cecil Calvert, or the first settlers with certainty. But we can examine the emotional vocabularies available to them and the social worlds that disciplined feeling. In that light, Maryland appears less as a contradiction between piety and profit than as a colonial expression of “honest envy,” emulation, and improvement. These emotions did not merely decorate the founding of the colony. They helped organize its aspirations, its language of land, its religious policies, and its claims upon the Chesapeake world.
Emotion as Historical Evidence
To write the history of emotions is not to project modern feelings backward onto the past. It is to ask how past societies taught people what to fear, desire, resent, honor, conceal, or display. Emotions are not timeless substances lodged unchanged in the human heart. They are shaped by institutions, rituals, law, theology, economy, household life, and landscape. They are expressed through language, gesture, material culture, and social action. They are also unevenly distributed. The feelings permitted to a Catholic proprietor, a Protestant tenant, an indentured servant, an enslaved African, a Piscataway leader, or a free woman such as Margaret Brent were not the same.
This matters for Maryland because the colony was born from a world of intense emotional regulation. Early modern England was saturated with confessional anxiety, anti-Catholic suspicion, courtly honor, household discipline, and new forms of market aspiration. The Calverts moved within this world. Their choices were political and economic, but those choices were also structured by shame, caution, rivalry, hope, fear, and the desire for durable belonging. Maryland was imagined as a place where a stigmatized Catholic family might convert vulnerability into authority.
The Chesapeake, however, was not an empty stage for English feeling. Rivers, forests, marshes, tobacco fields, burial grounds, churches, manors, and courthouses became sites where emotional life was made and contested. The landscape promised refuge to some and dispossession to others. It created intimacy through kinship, neighborhood, and parish life, while also producing fear, discipline, coerced labor, and racial hierarchy. The emotional history of Maryland must therefore hold together two truths: the colony may have offered a form of sanctuary for English Catholics, but it also became part of a broader Atlantic world of extraction, servitude, slavery, and Indigenous displacement.
Envy, Emulation, and the Early Modern Moral Imagination
Modern readers tend to hear “envy” as a purely negative feeling: resentment at another’s good fortune. Early modern English writers often understood it that way too. Envy could be associated with malice, hatred, and spiritual corruption. Bradley Irish has shown, however, that seventeenth-century discussions of envy were more complex. Envy could describe not only destructive resentment but also a morally licensed form of looking upward, a desire to imitate virtue, prosperity, favor, or godliness. Some writers distinguished malignant envy from emulation, a desire to rise by following worthy examples rather than destroying them.
This distinction is crucial for thinking about Maryland. The Calvert project emerged from a culture in which aspiration required moral management. To seek land, honor, or advancement could look like dangerous ambition. Yet to emulate the virtuous, prosperous, or godly could be framed as disciplined striving. “Improvement” likewise carried both material and moral force. It meant making land productive, households orderly, labor useful, and status visible. In the English countryside, wealthier yeomen and lesser gentry increasingly shaped their identities through land, consumption, refinement, and reputation. The eye that looked upward did not always condemn what it saw. It sometimes learned from it.
George Calvert’s life fits this world of disciplined aspiration. He was not born into the highest aristocracy. His rise through education, court service, officeholding, title, and colonial ambition belonged to a culture in which status had to be performed, defended, and transmitted. His Catholicism complicated that ascent. In Protestant England, Catholic identity could mark a family as suspect even when it possessed loyalty, refinement, and public service. The emotional problem was not simply persecution. It was the humiliation of partial belonging: proximity to power without full trust, gentility shadowed by suspicion.
Maryland can therefore be read as a colonial answer to that problem. It allowed the Calverts to emulate Protestant imperial and landed success while adapting it to Catholic survival. The colony did not reject English hierarchies. It reproduced and modified them. Proprietary power, manorial language, land grants, quit rents, and legal authority translated older forms of honor into a new Atlantic setting. The result was not a utopia, but an emotional and political experiment in which a Catholic family sought security through the very structures that had made English power recognizable.
Catholic Refuge and Colonial Enterprise Were Not Opposites
The older historiographical contrast between religious and economic motives is understandable but misleading. Maryland was both a refuge and a business. More precisely, its religious and economic purposes strengthened one another. A Catholic sanctuary could not survive without settlers, land revenue, trade, labor, and political stability. A profitable colony, in turn, could not survive if sectarian conflict made it ungovernable. The Calverts’ religious toleration was therefore not merely a modern liberal principle appearing ahead of its time. It was also an emotional regime: a disciplined attempt to restrain religious fear, prevent open hostility, and make coexistence useful.
The Act Concerning Religion of 1649, often called the Maryland Toleration Act, belongs in this frame. It protected Trinitarian Christians from certain forms of religious persecution while also punishing blasphemy and limiting the boundaries of acceptable belief. Its toleration was real, but conditional. It did not create equality in a modern sense. It sought peace among Christians in a fragile colony where Catholics were vulnerable and Protestants were increasingly numerous. Toleration functioned as governance of emotion: it attempted to regulate insult, contempt, provocation, and fear before those feelings became rebellion.
This emotional discipline also shaped the Calverts’ instructions to colonial leadership. Religious conflict was not only a theological danger. It was a threat to credit, migration, labor, and authority. A colony that became known for confessional disorder could fail economically and politically. The Chesapeake landscape intensified this problem. Settlers lived in dispersed plantations along waterways rather than in dense English villages. Rivers connected households to trade but also spread rumor, conflict, and legal disputes across distance. In such a setting, emotional order depended on courts, assemblies, household authority, parish networks, and the careful performance of public restraint.
Maryland’s Catholic character, then, should not be imagined only in chapels and sacraments. It also appeared in caution, accommodation, and the management of vulnerability. Catholic Maryland was not simply a place where Catholics could feel safe. It was a place where safety required constant negotiation with Protestant neighbors, imperial suspicion, labor demands, Indigenous diplomacy, and the volatile politics of the English Atlantic.
The Chesapeake as an Emotional Landscape of Improvement
The language of “planting” and “improving” land made the Chesapeake emotionally legible to English colonizers. It allowed forests, rivers, marshes, and fields to be seen not merely as environments but as opportunities for moralized transformation. To improve land was to impose order, extract value, and make claims of legitimacy. This was not only an economic act. It was an affective one. Improvement generated pride, attachment, hope, and entitlement. It also produced anxiety: fear of failure, fear of disorder, fear of dependency, fear that land would not yield the future imagined for it.
Southern Maryland’s landscape gave this emotional economy its particular shape. The rivers and creeks of St. Mary’s County and the lower Potomac made settlement possible through waterborne movement. Tobacco fields tied households to Atlantic markets. Courthouses and assemblies turned disputes into records. Churches and chapels organized memory, burial, and spiritual belonging. Domestic spaces became places where kinship, labor, hierarchy, and intimacy were rehearsed daily. The Chesapeake was not merely where Maryland happened. It was one of the forces that made Maryland’s emotional world.
The headright system and land patenting transformed migration into acreage. Those who financed passage could claim land, and the movement of servants and dependents became convertible into property. This system encouraged aspiration, speculation, and hierarchy. Margaret Brent’s career makes visible the possibilities and limits of this world. She acquired land, engaged in business, appeared in court, managed property, and famously demanded votes in the Maryland Assembly as both a landholder and Lord Baltimore’s attorney. Her actions reveal a society in which law, property, gender, and reputation were deeply entangled. They also show that emotional authority was not confined to men. Brent’s public claims required confidence, legal knowledge, and a willingness to inhabit a role that many contemporaries may have found unsettling.
Yet improvement had a darker emotional underside. The same system that produced hope and gentility for some rested on coerced and dependent labor. Indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and dispossessed Indigenous communities experienced the Chesapeake not as a landscape of opportunity in the same sense, but as a place of constraint, vulnerability, violence, and loss. The emotional economy of Maryland therefore cannot be reduced to Calvert aspiration. It must also include fear in the quarter, grief in the burial ground, resentment in the field, anxiety in the courthouse, and the disciplined silences of people whose feelings were rarely recorded on their own terms.
Houses, Churches, Courts, and the Performance of Belonging
Material spaces gave emotional life durable form. A timber house, a brick chapel, a courthouse, or a plantation landing could all announce claims about order and belonging. In a colony where many buildings were modest and scattered, brick construction carried symbolic force. Philip Calvert’s late seventeenth-century mansion at St. Peter’s, built near St. Mary’s City, was more than a residence. It was a statement of permanence, refinement, and authority in a world where those qualities could not be assumed.
Such buildings helped transform aspiration into memory. A great house made hierarchy visible. A chapel marked sacred ground. A courthouse converted conflict into procedure. A burial ground tied families to place across generations. These were emotional technologies as much as physical structures. They taught people where to stand, whom to honor, what to fear, and how to remember.
Catholic Maryland’s emotional landscape was especially dependent on this material language. Catholic worship in England had been constrained by law and suspicion. In Maryland, chapels and Catholic households could become spaces of spiritual feeling, sacramental continuity, and communal reassurance. But they also existed within a Protestant imperial world. Their visibility had to be managed. The same chapel that offered consolation could also attract suspicion. The same manor that signaled success could provoke resentment. The same court that promised order could expose inequality.
This is why envy remains a useful lens. Maryland’s colonial elite did not merely desire wealth. They desired recognition: to be seen as legitimate, honorable, useful, and enduring. But recognition is relational. It depends on the eyes of others. The Calverts and their allies looked upward toward English aristocratic and imperial models, outward toward Protestant rivals, inward toward Catholic identity, and across the Chesapeake toward a landscape they hoped to make productive and loyal. Their emotional world was therefore not private. It was public, architectural, legal, and environmental.
Memory, Landscape, and the Afterlife of Colonial Feeling
The emotional history of Maryland did not end with the founding generation. Later Marylanders inherited landscapes already thick with feeling. St. Mary’s City, Catholic manors, tobacco fields, family burial grounds, old roads, river landings, and courthouse records became repositories of memory. Some memories were celebrated: religious toleration, Catholic endurance, family perseverance, and the romance of early settlement. Others were muted or denied: slavery, Indigenous dispossession, servitude, gendered constraint, and the violence required to make land profitable.
Memory itself is an emotional practice. It selects, arranges, and disciplines the past. In southern Maryland, attachment to land has often carried the weight of kinship and continuity. Families remember places not only as property but as scenes of belonging, loss, shame, pride, and obligation. The Chesapeake landscape encourages this kind of memory because it is intimate and repetitive: rivers followed over generations, fields replanted, churches rebuilt, graves visited, names repeated in land records and family stories.
But such memory can also conceal. A plantation may be remembered as ancestral ground while the labor that sustained it is pushed to the margins. A chapel may be remembered as refuge while the exclusions around that refuge remain less visible.
A history of emotions helps recover these tensions without reducing the past to accusation or nostalgia. It asks how people made meaning under conditions they did not fully choose. It recognizes that Catholic fear and Protestant suspicion, elite aspiration and servant resentment, spiritual consolation and racial terror, attachment to land and dispossession from land, all belonged to the same Chesapeake world.
Conclusion: Maryland as an Emotional Project
Maryland’s founding cannot be adequately understood if we separate feeling from calculation. The Calverts’ colonial project was religious, economic, political, and emotional at once. It emerged from a world in which envy could be condemned as malice but also reshaped as emulation; in which improvement could signify both profit and providence; in which Catholic vulnerability could become a motive for colonial authority; and in which the Chesapeake landscape could be imagined as refuge, estate, marketplace, and memory.
This does not mean that envy “caused” Maryland in any simple sense. Rather, envy and emulation help explain how religion and economy could belong to a single moral imagination. Maryland was built by people who looked upward, outward, and across the water. They sought security, honor, land, profit, salvation, and remembrance. Some found opportunity. Others endured coercion, exclusion, and loss. The emotional history of Maryland lies in that uneven field of desire.
To study Maryland this way is to see the Chesapeake not as a passive backdrop but as an archive of feeling. Its rivers carried tobacco, rumor, migrants, priests, servants, and enslaved people. Its fields organized labor and hierarchy. Its chapels and courthouses disciplined conflict and belonging. Its burial grounds held grief that rarely entered official records. The past did not simply happen in this landscape. It was felt through it, remembered through it, and, in many ways, still inherited through it.
Endnotes
Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Doing Emotions History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). See especially the volume’s methodological framing of emotions as historically variable and socially embedded. [Citation needed: exact page for the quoted language in the original draft about “mapping and analyzing” relationships between emotions and the social.]
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). These works provide useful theoretical vocabulary for “emotional communities,” “emotional regimes,” and the relationship between feeling and social power.
Bradley J. Irish, “ENVY in EARLY MODERN England,” ELH 88, no. 4 (2021): 845–878, doi:10.1353/ELH.2021.0034.
Irish, “ENVY in EARLY MODERN England,” 846.
Irish, “ENVY in EARLY MODERN England,” 849.
Irish, “ENVY in EARLY MODERN England,” 865–867.
Wrightson 2021
Johnson 1612
“The Charter of Maryland, June 20, 1632,” Maryland State Archives. The charter and its archival framing are essential for grounding claims about proprietary power, colonial authority, and the legal imagination of Maryland’s founding.
“The Charter of Maryland: 1632,” Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Use in conjunction with the Maryland State Archives version when citing specific charter language.
“Religious Toleration in Maryland: Introduction,” Maryland State Archives. This source summarizes the founding of the province as a haven for persecuted Catholics while noting the Calverts’ welcome and recruitment of Protestant settlers.
“Margaret Brent Biography,” Maryland State Archives. The source notes Brent’s arrival in St. Mary’s City in 1638, her land claims, business ventures, court activity, and role in colonial affairs.
“Margaret Brent,” Maryland State Archives, Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame. This source discusses Brent’s 1648 request for two votes in the Maryland Assembly.
“St. Peter’s (18ST1-31),” Colonial Encounters. This source identifies St. Peter’s as Philip Calvert’s late seventeenth-century brick dwelling near St. Mary’s City, built on St. Peter’s Freehold.
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