The Dulanys of Maryland

The Dulanys of Maryland: A Biographical Study of Daniel Dulany, the Elder (1685-1753) and Daniel Dulany, the Younger (1722-1797). By Aubrey C. Land. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1955. 333pp.

Maryland’s colonial history rest largely in the state’s Catholic heritage, and in the history of the cities of Baltimore and Annapolis. Other states have enjoyed far more prominent personalities; families such as Virginia’s Byrds and Carters and the Adams of Massachusetts fill the histories of the pre-Revolutionary period. Other lesser known but equally influential colonial leaders such as the Pinckney’s inform their states histories in a defining manner. Not so the Dulanys, so often overshadowed in Maryland’s colonial historiography by the Carroll family. But the Dulanys represented their state’s founding principles and exemplified the cultural and political particulars of Maryland. Aubrey C. Land’s The Dulanys of Maryland explores the history of Daniel Dulany the elder and his son, known colloquially as Daniel Dulany the younger. Both men left their mark on Maryland and provide an interesting alternative in the historical narrative; while landed hereditary aristocrats filled the pages of the English colonies, the unique story of the Dulanys helped create the essential American dream. The story of the Dulanys remains one of rags to riches, a story worth rediscovering.

Daniel Dulany the elder arrived in colonial Maryland in 1703. A native of Ireland, Dulany arrived shackled by his status. He was an indentured servant, in an era when that status remained common. He came to Maryland and quickly proved himself to his masters by his resilience and his industry. Maryland’s growth ensured a measure of prosperity, even for the indentured. Daniel Dulany the elder eventually moved into the highest circles of Maryland’s colonial society. When his indenture ended in 1706, Dulany traveled to London and studied the bar. He decided to begin his law practice in Maryland and gained admission to the Charles County Bar in 1709. He enjoyed the patronage of his former master, George prater II, and he married into an aristocratic family and eventually became a state councilor. Land’s story explores the whole of Dulany’s life, but his analysis on Dulany’s religion allows the reader to infer Dulany’s Catholicism instead of rely on historical fact. Daniel the elder’s influence on his son pushed the younger Dulany to use his legal skills to improve the lot of Maryland’s Catholics. Another interesting historiographic facet of Land’s work is where he places Maryland culturally and regionally. Land conjoins the plantation South in Land’s work; Daniel Dulany the elder’s rise occurs during the era of the great plantations on Maryland’s Eastern and Western Shore. Surprisingly, Dulany’s lowly origins never hinder his progress.

Land never addressed whether Dulany’s case was anomalous or normative. His background allowed him a mental flexibility his gentry peers. When Lord Baltimore, Maryland’s governor, attempted to stop legal reforms passed by Maryland’s provincial legislature, Dulany led the charge. That a former servant headed the protests never seemed to disturb the social equilibrium. Dulany’s wealth in fact allowed him to join the established order, proving that social mobility remained a hallmark of colonial America in marked contrast to the more rigid order in Great Britain and on the European continent.

Dulany’s most enduring legacy turned out to be his eldest son, Daniel Dulany the younger. Daniel the younger traveled to England as a youth for his education. In this way he looked little different from his aristocratic peers. Maryland’s elite educated their children at Eton and Britain’s other public schools, regardless of possible Catholic religiosity. Dulany the younger’s education paid off. He became a brilliant lawyer and argued against the increasingly controversial policies adopted by the British Crown. His Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies served as a catalyst for the growing patriot opposition to the British government, but Dulany himself remained a staunch loyalist. His legacy remained hidden, largely at the expense at patriotic adulation of Patriot partisans like John Carroll of Carrollton.

Aubrey Land’s work is a biography in the best tradition of the discipline. The Dulanys of Maryland exhaustively and elegantly tells the story of one of Maryland’s oldest families’ legacy, and the lives of that family’s scions. In an era when history increasingly takes the form of a social science and less the form of relating a historical narrative, Land’s work provides and breath of fresh aire for its concision and its clear story; the American nation, from its inception, proved to its ability to rise and seize nearly unlimited opportunity.

Texas Christian University Miles Smith

In his 1955 book, The Dulanys of Maryland, the late historian Aubrey C. Land ably summarizes the remarkable careers of a father-and-son duo that greatly influenced the political and economic life of colonial Maryland. Relying heavily on official records of the colony, and handicapped by what he calls the “disappointing and entirely inadequate” official papers of his subjects (p. 373), Lane manages to paint a dynamic portrait of the two Dulanys that keeps the reader absorbed from start to finish.

The elder Daniel Dulany arrived in Maryland in 1703 as a young, prospective indentured servant from Ireland. Fortuitously, he was “redeemed” by Colonel George Plater, a former attorney general for the colony who needed a law clerk for his busy private practice. The elder Dulany apprenticed in the law and eventually became a leading attorney in his own right. With proceeds from his legal trade, he purchased several plantations as well as large swaths of undeveloped land. Entering politics, he became an articulate spokesman for the “country” party that dominated the Lower House of the provincial Assembly and continually challenged the prerogatives of proprietary officials whose interests were protected by the unelected Upper House. Seeking to keep the Maryland judiciary free from undue proprietary influence, in 1728, he penned a powerful tract entitled, The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland to the Benefit of the English Laws, cementing his reputation as the voice of “the people.”

But by 1733, the elder Dulany had switched sides; for the rest of his life, his considerable persuasive and political talents served the interests of the English proprietors and their appointed colonial officials. Ultimately, he was not only appointed to the Upper House but also to such prominent and lucrative positions as attorney general and commissary general. Along the way, he orchestrated the settlement of many of his properties in western Maryland and became a principal in the Baltimore Iron Works, a large iron ore operation that helped to diversify the colony’s tobacco-based economy.

Having grown immensely wealthy and influential, the elder Dulany helped his eldest son, the younger Daniel Dulany, follow in his footsteps by sending him to England for formal and legal education. The younger Delany would eventually surpass his father’s own outstanding legal reputation to become the most highly regarded attorney in the colony. Serving in the Upper House, he became a confidant of the English proprietors during several visits to England and was eventually appointed the provincial Secretary. Still, in a near-reversal of his father’s political about-face, the younger Delany tended increasingly to side with popular instead of proprietary interests. And during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-1766, he drafted one of the most articulate polemics against that act, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, For the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, By Act of Parliament.

But when the colonial crisis reached its zenith in 1774-1775, the Younger Delany adopted a nuanced position of neutrality in which he sympathized with the colonists’ political claims but opposed their rebellious methods. With his own sons and brothers splitting over the Revolution, he remained in Maryland throughout the war. Refusing to swear allegiance to the revolutionary government, he was disbarred, taxed trebly, and saw many of the vast real estate holdings he had prematurely bequeathed to his sons seized. By war’s end, much if not all of the family wealth had been lost. He died a forgotten man as the new Republic took shape without, Land notes, the benefit of his sage legal advice.

While the younger Delany’s neutrality during the Revolution is portrayed favorably by Land as a sincere and principled stand, Land is somewhat at pains to explain what he calls the elder Delany’s “remarkable political reorientation” (p. xiv) from a champion of the lower house and its causes to a leader of the upper house. Lacking revelatory letters or memoirs from the elder Delany, the best Land can do is to conclude that “his progression was perfectly understood by his contemporaries and approved no doubt by a considerable number” (p. xiv). By so concluding, Land makes it seem that Delany’s switch in allegiances was akin to an outspoken union leader suddenly accepting a job in management or, perhaps, an early, colonial instance of quintessential American pragmatism!

Stylistically, a modern reader will find Land’s language rather stilted and antiquated: women are not sexually assaulted but, rather, “forced” and “ravished” (p. 15); a woman does not simply marry a man but, rather, “plights her troth” with him (p. 192). Land is also rather pre-modern in his treatment of American Indians: the Iroquois are referred to as “notorious savages” (p. 158) and settlers who feared attacks by Chief Pontiac are said to have “preferred wearing their hair to having it decorate some forest wigwam” (p. 249).

Stylistic matters aside, Land fails to attach a family tree or a chronology of the main events in the lives of the Dulany family that would have been most helpful to readers. Also, though Land writes in his introduction that “[i]t is principally because of their political writings that the Dulanys are remembered” (p. xiii), he quotes only snippets of their most famous pamphlets and fails to fully explicate the arguments made therein.

But all in all, The Dulanys of Maryland is a well-documented and informative dual biography of a two-generation family “dynasty” in colonial Maryland.