Of subsequent assemblies the record is copious enough.  Lord Baltimore had the right under his charter to summon “all the freemen, or the greater part of them, or their representatives,” and thus for a long time there was a curious jumble of anomalies, which rendered the assembly peculiarly sensitive to governmental influence.  The second assembly met at St. Mary’s, January 25, 1638, and consisted of the governor and council, freemen specially summoned, freemen present of their own volition, and proxies.[16] Governor Calvert submitted a code of laws sent from Lord Baltimore, and it was rejected by a vote of thirty-seven to fourteen; but twelve of the minority votes were in two hands, the governor and Secretary Lewger, an illustration of the danger of the proxy system.

Not long after, in a letter August 21, 1638, the proprietor yielded by authorizing Leonard in the future to consent to laws enacted by the freemen, which assent should temporarily make them valid until his own confirmation or rejection should be received.  To the next assembly, held February 25, 1639, Leonard Calvert, instead of summoning all the freemen, issued writs to different hundreds for the election of representatives.

Among the laws which they enacted was one limiting seats in the assembly to councillors, persons specially summoned by the proprietor’s writ, and burgesses elected by the people of the different hundreds.  This law controlled the make-up of the next four assemblies (October, 1640, August, 1641, March and July, 1642).  Nevertheless, in September, 1642, Baltimore reverted to the old practice.

In 1649 Baltimore made another and last attempt for his initiative.  He sent over a learned and complicated code of sixteen laws which he asked the assembly to adopt; but they rejected his work and sent him a code of their own, begging him in their letter not to send them any more such “bodies of laws, which served to little end than to fill our heads with jealousies and suspicions of that which we verily understand not.”  The next year, 1650, a constitutional system was perfected not very different from the plan adopted in the mother-country and Virginia.  The assembly was divided into two chambers, the lower consisting exclusively of burgesses representing the different hundreds, and the upper of the councillors and those specially summoned by the governor.[17]

[Footnote 1:  Brown, Genesis of the United States, II., 841.]

[Footnote 2:  Cal. of State Pap., Col., 1574-1660, pp. 83, 93, 100.]

[Footnote 3:  Cal. of State Pap., Col., 1574-1660, p. 104; Md.  Archives, III., 17.]

[Footnote 4:  Md.  Archives, III., 19.]

[Footnote 5:  Heath’s grant, in Cal. of State Pap., Col., 1574-1674, p. 70.]

[Footnote 6:  Neill, Founders of Maryland, 46, 47.]

[Footnote 7:  Neill, Terra Mariae, 53; Ogilby, America, 183.]