How Margaret Brent saved Maryland
The time! 1600s. The place! Maryland. The woman! Margaret Brent.
Brent and three of her twelve siblings (it’s just too many) came to America from England when they were all adults. Just an easy, Atlantic voyage on boats that were made 200 years before steel was invented. Brent was 37. This is what we call “a baller move” because I am not yet 37, but I’m pretty damn close, and the prospect of uprooting absolutely everything to go to a place famous for a bunch of white people dying because they refused to learn how to farm – not my first option.
In 1639, Brent became the first woman in Maryland to own land. She and her sister Mary (hey. 17th c. England. Invent some new names) created a “Sisters’ Freehold,” which is cute as hell.
Okay, Margaret Brent has a lot of money, fast forward to the English Civil War (1642-51) and, long story short, the dying governor of Maryland told Brent, his sister-in-law, to take all his stuff and pay the soldiers who protected Maryland from a rampaging Protestant sea captain (…the story might be biased). So, Brent liquidated his estate, managed property, worked things out, MAYBE also sold Lord Baltimore’s cattle to pay the troops (I hope that is true) and got herself exiled from Maryland by Baltimore for her trouble. But she moved to Virginia, which is better anyway, so all’s well.
“I’ve come to seek a voice in this assembly. And yet because I am a woman, forsooth I must stand idly by and not even have a voice in the framing of your laws.” -Margaret Brent to a bunch of bozos at the Maryland General Assembly
To learn more about Margaret Brent, check out Adventurous Lady: Margaret Brent of Maryland by Dorothy Grant.