Note 898 — Chapter XIII · (continued 2)

[Following Chalmers, it had been often stated that the Assembly of 1649 was Catholic by majority; but four or five years before this publication of Davis, Mr. Sebastian F. Streeter, in his Maryland Two Hundred Years Ago, had claimed that the Assembly which passed the Toleration Act was by majority Protestant, for which, so late as January, 1869, he was taken to task in the Southern Review by Richard McSherry, M.D., who reprinted his paper in his Essays and Lectures. The question of the relations of Protestant and Catholic to the spirit of toleration is discussed by E. D. Neill, in his “Lord Baltimore and Toleration in Maryland,” in the Contemporary Review, September, 1876; by B. F. Brown, in his Early Religious History of Maryland: Maryland not a Roman Catholic Colony, 1876; in “Early Catholic Legislation, 1634-49, on Religious Freedom,” in the New Englander, November, 1878. The Rev. Ethan Allen, in his Who were the Early Settlers of Maryland? published by the Historical Society in 1865, aimed to show that the vast majority were Protestant. Kennedy also had asserted that the Assembly of 1649 was Protestant.—Ed.]