Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/69

46 she collected all of Governor Calvert's property and took it under her care and management.

This would have been enough for most women but Mistress Margaret was not so easily satisfied. She was determined to have all that was implied in the phrase, "Take all and pay all," so we soon find her making claim that since she had been appointed "Executrix" of Leonard Calvert, she had the right to succeed Leonard Calvert as Lord Baltimore's attorney and in that character to receive all the profits and to pay all the debts of his lordship's estate and to attend to the state's reservation.

Her next step was more daring than all those that had gone before, being no less than a demand for vote and representation. This demand was made two centuries and a half ago, when talk of Woman's Rights was as unheard of as the steam engine or electricity. Certainly Margaret Brent was far in advance of her times. She might be known to history as the Original Suffragette! Her audacity carried her even further. She was Leonard Calvert's executrix, she told herself, and was entitled to vote in that capacity and so she concluded she had the right to two votes in the general assembly. No one but Margaret Brent would have meditated those two votes, one for a foreign Lord, who had never authorized her to act for him, and the other for a dead man whose only instruction to her had been, "Take all and pay all." We can only wonder at her ingenious reasoning, as did that biographer of hers who was moved to exclaim in admiration of her daring, "What woman would ever have dreamed of such a thing!"

Her astonishing stand for woman's rights was made on the 21st of January, 1648. At the first beat of the drum, that was used to call the assemblymen together in the early days of the Maryland colony, Mistress Margaret started on her way for Fort Saint John's, where the general assembly was to meet.