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It is well known to the students of our history that, though Maryland was fully represented in the Continental Congress and took an active part in all the deliberations of that body and answered every requisition which was made upon her for money and troops, sending more than 20,000 of her best sons to the army under Washington, whose courage and conduct on every battle-field of the Revolution elicited the warm commendation of their great commander, she did not sign, and for years resolutely refused to sign, the Articles of Confederation, and did not sign those articles until March 1, 1781, about eight months before the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, which marked the close of our revolutionary struggle.

In a vague and general way the reason of that refusal was also known. Intimations of it crop out occasionally in the pages of some of our annalists. But the full meaning and the subsequent and most important effect of that refusal and of that reason were not fully understood and realized until they were explained and unfolded by the investigations of two of the most accomplished scholars of our time. The late Herbert B. Adams, professor of history, Johns Hopkins University, in a paper read before the Maryland Historical Society April 9, 1877, entitled “Maryland’s Influence upon the Land Cessions to the United States,” and also published in the Johns Hopkins University studies, third series, No. 1, in January, 1885, and the late Professor John Fiske, of Harvard University, in his work entitled “The Critical Period of American History,” published in 1888, for the first time fully investigated and discussed this question of the public lands and the profound significance of the action of Maryland in the Continental Congress in regard to it.

Of the vastly important, but to his time little understood, effect of this action on the part of Maryland, Professor Adams says, page 67 of his paper: “The acquisition of a territorial commonwealth by these States was the foundation of a permanent union; it was the first solid arch upon which the framers of our Constitution could build. When we now consider the practical results arising from Maryland’s prudence in laying the keystone to the old confederation only after the land claims of the larger States had been placed through her influence upon a national basis, we may say with truth that it was a national commonwealth which Maryland founded.” And again, on page 30 of the same paper, Professor Adams observes: “The credit of suggesting and successfully urging in Congress that policy which has made this country a great national commonwealth, composed of free, convenient, and independent governments, bound together by ties of permanent territorial interests, the credit of originating this policy belongs to Maryland, and to her alone. Absolutely nothing had been effected by Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware, before they ratified the articles, toward breaking down the selfish claims of the larger States and placing the confederation upon a national basis.... Maryland was left to fight out the battle alone, and with what success we shall shortly see.”

The history of the struggle which Maryland made, single-handed and alone in the Congress of the States, to compel the surrender of the Western lands to the United States by the States which claimed them, namely Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Georgia, is graphically told in this interesting paper, and reflects the highest credit on the courage, resolution, statesmanship, and patriotism of the General Assembly of Maryland and her representatives in the Congress. The struggle was a long and arduous one, but in the end Maryland won. Her position was that, without regard to the titles more or less doubtful and defective on which these claims were founded or pretended to be founded, and which, by the way, she utterly denied, the fact remained that when these lands were acquired from Great Britain, as one of the results of the war we were waging, they would be won by the common expenditure of the blood and treasure of the people of all the States, and that therefore they should become the common property and the inheritance of all the States, as a national domain to be governed and controlled by the national sovereignty, and to be parcelled out ultimately into “free, convenient, and independent States,” and to become members of the federal Union, on an equality with the other States, whenever their population and circumstances should justify. Maryland thus formulated the elemental idea of territorial acquisition and the purposes of that acquisition, namely, the creation out of such territory, the common property of all the States, of new and independent Commonwealths and coequal members of the federal Union, for that purpose, and that purpose only, and the idea of a national sovereignty as a logical consequence of such acquisition for that purpose.

The struggle was begun by Maryland by the passage, in her General Assembly, of instructions to her delegates in Congress on December 15, 1778,—instructions which were read and submitted to that Congress on May 21, 1779. A declaration of the same tenor and effect as the instructions had been previously adopted and transmitted to Congress by Maryland and laid before that body without debate on January 6, 1779. Virginia answered these instructions and declaration by a remonstrance from her House of Burgesses, in which she alluded, with something of arrogance, to these papers and protested against any attempt or design by the Congress to diminish any of her territory, and reasserted all her exorbitant and unfounded claims to the Western lands and her purpose to relinquish none of them. She had even gone so far as to organize Illinois and Kentucky into counties of Virginia.

The fight was now on. In the beginning Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware had supported Maryland, and with her had protested against these pretensions of the larger States; but under influences which it is now difficult to account for they soon fell from her side and left her to make that fight alone. She encountered vehement opposition from the landed States, as they grew to be denominated.

“But of these protesting States,” says Professor John Fiske, in the work referred to, page 191, “it was only Maryland that fairly rose to the occasion and suggested an idea, which seemed startling at first, but from which mighty and unforeseen consequences were soon to follow.” A motion had been made in the Congress to the effect that the United States, in Congress assembled, shall have the sole and exclusive right and power to ascertain and fix the western boundary of the States making claim to the Mississippi, and lay out the land beyond the boundary so ascertained into separate and independent States, from time to time, as the numbers and circumstances of the people may require. This motion was submitted by Maryland, and no State but Maryland voted for it.

Professor Fiske subsequently observes: “This acquisition of a common territory speedily led to results not at all contemplated in the theory of union upon which the Articles of Confederation were based. It led to ‘the exercise of national sovereignty in the sense of eminent domain,’ as shown in the ordinances of 1784 and 1787, and prepared men’s minds for the work of the Federal Convention. Great credit is due to Maryland for her resolute course in setting in motion this train of events. It aroused fierce indignation at the time, as to many people it looked unfriendly to the Union. Some hotheads were even heard to say that, if Maryland should persist any longer in her refusal to join the Confederation, she ought to be summarily divided up between the neighboring States and her name erased from the map. (Maryland had heard such threats before in her colonial period and had been unjustly stripped of large parts of her territory, as laid down in her charter, by both Virginia and Pennsylvania.) But the brave little State had earned a better fate than Poland. When we have come to trace out the result of her action we shall see that just as it was Massachusetts that took the decisive step in bringing on the Revolutionary War, when she threw the tea into the Boston harbor, so it was Maryland that, by leading the way toward the creation of a national domain, laid the corner-stone of our federal Union.”

Maryland, unawed by these threats, resolutely adhered to her determination, as announced by her repeatedly in the General Assembly of the State and through her representatives in the Congress, not to sign the Articles of Confederation until this great wrong should be righted, until these Western lands should be ceded to the United States for the common benefit of all the States. Her resolution was rewarded. Maryland finally won. The great States yielded, some cheerfully, some with reluctance, and surrendered their Western lands to the United States, New York leading the way, followed by Massachusetts, and finally by Virginia and the other States. Maryland, having accomplished her great purpose, instructed her two distinguished sons, then representatives in the Congress, John Hanson and Daniel Carroll, to sign the Articles of Confederation on her behalf, which they did on March 1, 1781, and thus the Articles of Confederation were completed. The satisfaction which this action of Maryland gave was very general, and Madison gives expression to it in a letter to Thomas Jefferson when subsequently the negotiations were begun between Maryland and Virginia which culminated ultimately in the Federal Convention, the formation of our Constitution, and the establishment of the government of the United States.