On May 21, 1776, the Maryland Convention voted unanimously to forbid its delegates in Congress from supporting independence. Not reluctantly. Not narrowly. Unanimously.

On June 28, the same body voted unanimously to authorize independence, confederation, and foreign alliances.

That six-week reversal is one of the stranger and more revealing moments of the entire founding period, and it happened because three very different men were pulling Maryland in the same direction through completely different means.

Samuel Chase was the one pushing hardest. He was already known as a combative lawyer who had spent years fighting British policy and Maryland's proprietary establishment alongside William Paca. By spring 1776 he had run out of patience with a political position that resisted British authority while refusing to admit that the imperial relationship was already collapsing. When he came back from Congress's failed mission to Canada with Franklin, he turned his energy toward Maryland politics directly. He didn't just argue for independence in Philadelphia while his instructions prohibited him from voting for it. He went home and worked to change the instructions. He pressed county leaders, encouraged local communities that were already ahead of the provincial leadership, and pushed until the Convention moved.

William Paca was Chase's longtime partner and political opposite in temperament. Same city, same profession, same years fighting the Stamp Act together, completely different style. Chase was confrontational. Paca was methodical. His contribution wasn't the dramatic push of June 1776. It was the decade of committee work, political organizing, and institution building that created the revolutionary infrastructure capable of carrying Maryland into independence when the moment came. Without the network Paca helped build, Chase would have had nobody to push.

Thomas Stone is the most interesting of the three because he was the one who wasn't sure.

Stone wasn't a Loyalist, wasn't afraid of the British, and had already committed himself to the revolutionary cause. His hesitation was practical and not unreasonable. He worried that declaring independence too quickly, before the colonies had genuine unity or foreign support secured, might weaken the American position rather than strengthen it. What happens after you declare? What government replaces British authority? Will the colonies hold together through a long war? What if independence ends the possibility of negotiation before you're actually prepared for what comes next?

Those aren't coward's questions. They're the right questions. Stone just became convinced by late June that circumstances had already answered most of them. Britain was building toward a major military campaign, every attempt at reconciliation had produced nothing, and Maryland's proprietary government was dissolving on its own whether the Convention acknowledged it or not. The royal governor left the province on June 26. Two days later the Convention reversed its instructions.

The unanimity of that reversal is worth sitting with. This wasn't a narrow faction finally overpowering a resistant majority. Six weeks earlier the same body had unanimously said no. Now it unanimously said yes. That kind of shift only happens when political opinion across an entire province has genuinely moved, not when one side finally beats the other.

There's a fourth signer worth mentioning: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the wealthiest men in Maryland and a Catholic at a time when Catholics faced legal restrictions on participation in Maryland politics. His emergence as a leading Patriot figure and eventual signer is its own story about how the Revolution was already reshaping who counted as a political actor before independence was even declared.

And then there's Robert Alexander, who served in Maryland's revolutionary institutions and in Congress, and after independence became a Loyalist exile. He's a useful reminder that going along with resistance to British policy didn't mean every man had decided where he stood on the final question. Independence forced a clarity that earlier resistance had allowed people to avoid.

You can read the full story on the Virtual Wayback blog and watch the conversations with each of the Maryland signers on the YouTube channel. You can also talk directly with Chase, Paca, and Stone on Virtual Wayback. Links:

[https://virtualwayback.com/blog/maryland-changes-its-mind](https://virtualwayback.com/blog/maryland-changes-its-mind)

[https://youtube.com/shorts/GX7BA3j1Ess?feature=share](https://youtube.com/shorts/GX7BA3j1Ess?feature=share)

The thing I keep coming back to is Stone. Chase gets the credit for forcing the question and Paca gets credit for building the movement. But Stone represents something arguably more important to how the decision actually held: the cautious Patriots whose eventual yes gave independence a legitimacy it couldn't have had if only the firebrands supported it. Does a unanimous vote mean more when you know the skeptics came around on their own terms? And is there a version of this where Stone's slow conversion was actually the most important one?

Maryland unanimously banned its delegates from voting for independence. Five weeks later it unanimously told them to vote yes.