Margaret Brent

Activist

  • Born: c. 1600
  • Birthplace: Gloucestershire, England
  • Died: c. 1671
  • Place of death: Westmoreland County, Virginia

English-born colonial American lawyer and activist

A powerful Maryland landholder, Brent saved the Catholic colony from a mutinous military uprising and Protestant revolt. As the first colonial female lawyer, she represented the second Lord Baltimore and appeared at the Maryland Assembly as the first woman to demand the right to vote.

Areas of achievement: Government and politics, law

Early Life

Margaret Brent was born about 1600 in Gloucestershire, England, into an important Catholic family. Like many ladies, she received a basic education and learned from her father the business of running an estate, a skill that was to serve her well throughout her life. In this era, England was a Protestant country, and to be a member of the Catholic Church was politically dangerous and financially perilous. Since the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I had succeeded to the throne after the death of Catholic Queen Mary I in 1557, English Catholics had continually experienced religious persecution. In addition, the advance of the Puritans during the 1630’s increased political pressure on Catholic families and increasingly limited their rights.

This persecution caused the Brent family’s wealth to decline, and the birth of twelve siblings ensured the eventual failure of the family fortune. As a child, Margaret Brent’s future looked bleak. Immigration to Maryland—a colony created by George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore, specifically as a refuge for Catholics—seemed to provide a reasonable, albeit risky, method of survival. In short, Margaret Brent would have experienced a very different, and indeed easier, life had she not been born a Catholic.

Seeking out religious freedom and economic opportunity, Brent, her sister Mary, and their brothers Giles and Fulke left England in 1638 and arrived in Maryland in November of that year. Calvert’s son Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore, was a distant cousin of the Brents and was known at the time as the proprietor of Maryland. He had written a letter to the Maryland colonists on the Brents’ behalf, asking that they be allowed to purchase land for the same reduced price he had offered to the first settlers in 1634.

Margaret Brent blossomed in Maryland. She and her sister Mary struck out on their own for the Maryland wilderness and settled on what came to be known as the Sisters Freehold, a 70-acre (28-hectare) parcel of land in Saint Marys, the capital of the colony. A short while later, she obtained another 1,000 acres (405 hectares) of land from her brother Giles. She also gained the friendship of her distant cousin, Maryland governor Leonard Calvert (the first Baron Baltimore’s second son), and shared with him the guardianship of Mary Kittamaquund, the daughter of a Piscataway chief, who lived in the colony.

Life’s Work

Both the first and second barons Baltimore had envisioned the Maryland colony as a place of religious toleration and political participation for all settlers, and they had attempted to design the colony’s royal charter to ensure that it would remain so. This proved to be an extremely difficult task, however. In 1644, the colony’s Protestants, led by Richard Ingle, revolted against its Catholic government in what became known as Ingle’s Rebellion. The Protestants seized control of the Maryland colony, driving Governor Calvert into Virginia. Calvert managed to hire mercenary soldiers in Virginia, however, and in 1646, he regained control of Maryland. Brent aided Calvert in his campaign, raising a troop of volunteers to help fight the Protestants.

In the aftermath of Ingle’s Rebellion, a new problem developed: Although Governor Calvert had plenty of land, he didn’t have the actual currency to pay the Virginia mercenaries the money he owed them. He pledged his family’s estates as security. Then, in the very midst of this crisis, Calvert died suddenly, leaving the government without a leader and with a troop of mutinous mercenaries on its hands. Before he died, however, Calvert had the wherewithal to declare Thomas Green his successor and to name Brent to take charge of the rising military unrest: “I make you my sole Exequtrix. Take all, pay all.”

Brent quickly realized the enormity of the situation. The Catholic rule of Maryland depended upon the Calverts, as the governing family. She realized that in order to avoid further Protestant uprisings and preserve Catholic freedom, she would have to save the colony from the angry soldiers. Such huge responsibility was almost unheard of for a woman in this era, but Brent, who had never married, had been forced from an early age into making considerable decisions as a responsible landowner. Indeed, Brent’s business acumen prompted her to make loans to new arrivals in the colonies, and if they failed to pay her, she prosecuted them herself. She claimed “The Courtroom—It’s my life.” As the first colonial woman lawyer, she appeared in court at least 134 times to file suits against debtors, and she pleaded cases in the Provincial Court for her brother and for otherwise unrepresented women.

Brent swiftly took control of the explosive situation. Since food was scare, she arranged for corn to be imported from Virginia to feed the hungry soldiers camped throughout Saint Marys. Then, she used her power of attorney over Governor Calvert’s estate to sell his cattle and pay the troops. Her quick, skilled decision making diffused the tense military situation, and the soldiers either left quietly or stayed behind as settlers.

In an era when women were denied the vote, Brent claimed not one but two votes in the 1648 Maryland Assembly, asserting that she was entitled to a personal vote as an independent landowner, as well as a vote as Lord Baltimore’s attorney. However, the court opposed her claim, denying her any vote at all because she was a woman. Although it declined to grant her a vote, however, the Assembly defended Brent’s rights as Lord Baltimore’s steward and publicly recognized her heroic actions in ensuring the safety of the colony. However, she fell out of favor with Lord Baltimore the following year.

In 1649, although the colony was becoming increasingly Protestant, Lord Baltimore preserved Maryland as a refuge for Catholics by establishing the Toleration Act, which allowed for the free exercise of religion for all Christians. Despite her contributions to the political, financial, and military stability that made the Toleration Act possible, however, Brent’s decisions caused her ongoing problems. Baltimore was furious that she had sold his family’s cattle to pay the mercenary soldiers. Moreover, he was a renowned defender of Catholics in a nation that had just established a Puritan Commonwealth. In an attempt to gain favor with the new Puritan government of England, Baltimore publicly denounced Brent and accused her of mishandling his finances.

Ironically, by defending his land, Brent became Lord Baltimore’s enemy, and as a result, she was forced to move to the Northern Neck region of Virginia in 1651, where she established an estate named Peace. She died in 1671, leaving a large amount of property in Virginia and Maryland to her brother and his children.

Significance

Brent is often recognized as an early feminist, the first colonial female lawyer and the first colonial woman to demand the right to vote. Beyond these firsts, however, Brent saw in the American colonies a way not only to ensure her freedom of religion but also to gain a foothold in a land that offered unprecedented opportunity. In America, she could design a life where she could own a large plantation of her own, something absolutely impossible in England. In America, she could, as it were, live up to her potential.

Throughout her life, Brent was determined not to fall socially. She found a way to remain in the highly regarded gentry class by becoming a woman of wealth and property without the aid of a man. In a land filled with men in need of wives, she and her sister withstood the social pressure to marry and in this way guaranteed their freedom to live independent lives. If Brent had married, she would have had to transfer ownership of her land to her husband. She never could have appeared in court, since women could not conduct business affairs. Moreover, by not marrying, she was able to take an active role in the defense of her land, her town, and her colony against mutinous soldiers and a religious revolt, and also to protect her rights as a lawyer in one of America’s first courts of law.

Bibliography

Collins, Gail. America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. New York: William Morrow, 2003. Discusses Brent’s role as a landowner, lawyer, and manager in the seventeenth century Maryland colony.

Henretta, James, et al. America’s History. New York: Worth, 1997. Contains a comprehensive essay on Margaret Brent and her contributions to the Maryland colony and her role as the first woman lawyer in the American colonies.

Leon, Vicki. Uppity Women of the New World. New York: Conari Press, 2001. In the chapter titled “The Courtroom—It’s My Life,” Brent is one of this book’s two hundred women in North and South America and Australia who took their destinies into their own hands.

December 6, 1648-May 19, 1649: Establishment of the English Commonwealth; April 21, 1649: Maryland Act of Toleration.