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5 Am. Pol. Thought 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/ampolth5 and id is 1 raw text is: Political Fragmentation in Early Maryland and the Imperial Origins of North American Liberalism KEVIN S. VANZANT ABSTRACT This essay locates the origins of American liberalism in the local politics of the early English empire. Maryland and its political discord in the seventeenth century provide a compelling case study of how imperial matters could affect politics on the local level. Settlers and colonial leaders in Maryland argued over how aristocratic or democratic the colony should be and placed those political preferences within the larger context of imperial success. This allowed English colonists to think about political power as a rightful benefit of their voluntary migration, which ushered into American politics a newly ambiguous and, at times, liberal treatment of self-interest. This article challenges the idea that the political thought in the colonies during this period was largely mimetic and reveals a distinct and polarized political discourse in North America as settlers mobilized the circumstances of colonization to challenge English norms. In a promotional tract for Maryland, published in 1666 and entitled A Char- acter of the Province of Mary-land, the colony was declared to be the Miracle of the Age. The author of the text, George Alsop, defended such high praise by pointing out that, in a world full of so much religious and political tumult, Maryland provided an exemplar of societal stability. He followed this pronouncement by outlining the presence of two divisive political cultures that made Maryland's politics, in actuality, the setting for some of the sharpest political discord in all of the English empire (Alsop 1666, 16). But it was in Kevin S. Vanzant is the Mellon Partners for Humanities Education Postdoctoral Fellow at Tennessee State University, 3500 John A. Merritt Boulevard, Nashville, TN 37209 (kvanzant@tnstate.edu) and a visiting scholar in the History Department at Vanderbilt University. The author would like to thank Daniel H. Usner Jr. and Catherine Molineux for their encouragement and insightful criticism, as well as the anonymous reviewers of APT for their many helpful comments. American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, vol. 5 (Winter 2016). 2161-1580/2016/0501-0001$10.00. © 2016 by The Jack Miller Center. All rights reserved.

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