How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [7]
Fendall and Calvert did not buy this argument. Twenty-three years later, however, Charles II bought it, invoking it to refute a later effort by Maryland to claim Delaware. Herman thus pointed the way for future generations to defend Delaware’s independence from Maryland.
Though Calvert did not cotton to the claim, he did cotton to the man who made it. His good feelings toward Herman were sufficient to defuse the preparations Maryland had been making for an invasion of Delaware. In this respect, Herman and Waldron’s mission succeeded, which in itself was a considerable accomplishment.
In addition, Calvert’s good feelings gave the canny Herman an opportunity to further ingratiate himself with the government of Maryland. He offered his services as a cartographer to make a detailed map of the colony and the adjoining regions for Lord Baltimore in return for a grant of land in Maryland on which he and his family could live (and thereby put some distance between himself and his frequent nemesis, Peter Stuyvesant).
Herman’s offer was accepted, and the grant of land was made shortly thereafter. But not just any land. Lord Baltimore, himself quite canny, saw an opportunity presented by Herman’s offer to acquire more than just a map. He issued Herman a grant for land in which the eastern portion lay in the disputed area but the western portion was indisputably within Maryland. Lord Baltimore was thus undermining Herman’s loyalty to the Dutch. Herman, for his part, named the tract of land Little Bohemia—which is exactly what it was.
It took ten years for Herman to complete the map he had promised—but they were a particularly eventful ten years, not conducive to concentration. During that period he relocated his family to the land he had been granted. England and Holland went to war, resulting in the ouster of all Dutch authorities in the New Netherlands. Charles II deeded most of Holland’s former claims to his brother, the Duke of York—but, aiming to avoid conflict with his Maryland colony, the king did not include Delaware in the land deeded to his brother. Delaware was not, however, subsumed under the government of Maryland, since Catholic and Anglican tensions were so hair-trigger tense in England at that time. Consequently, the Duke of York became the de facto proprietor of Delaware, extending the “Duke of York’s Laws” to the region and overseeing the appointment of its British officials. With this ascendancy of British rule, Herman opted to become a citizen of Maryland.
The map Herman ultimately delivered in 1670 was a masterpiece of its era. So appreciative was Lord Baltimore that he granted additional land to Herman, who now possessed some 30,000 acres.
Meanwhile, rapid political change continued. In 1672 England and Holland went to war again. This time the Dutch initially ousted the British from Delaware and other settlements. But in 1674 control once again reverted to England. A year later, Lord Baltimore died and his title passed to his son Charles Calvert, who repressed the rights of the colony’s Protestants, among whom was Herman.
It was in this era that aging Augustine Herman passed the “Bohemian” baton to his eldest son, Ephraim. One year after Calvert became proprietor of Maryland and commenced repressing the rights of Protestants, Ephraim Herman became a court official in Delaware. Five years later, he was at the helm, navigating Delaware’s status in the wake of the region’s next major political shift—the 1681 British charter creating Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s charter caused immediate conflict with Maryland regarding the location of their mutual border. This conflict raised William Penn’s concerns regarding Pennsylvania’s access to the sea. His colony’s only waterway to the ocean was the Delaware River (Pennsylvania’s eastern boundary) down into the Delaware Bay (dividing Delaware and New Jersey), then out to the Atlantic. If Maryland should prevail