Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/72

Rh offender accused of stealing and selling cattle only to retort indignantly that the cattle were her own, and to demand a trial by jury. In all of these cases and many others she seems to have had her own way. The General Assembly never denied her anything but the right to vote. She had only to express a wish in her clear persuasive fashion and it was granted. In point of view Margaret Brent ruled the colony.

When she came for the last time before the General Assembly her hair must have been gray, but her speech no less eloquent, and her manner no less charming, than in the days of Leonard Calvert. We can imagine her in the presence of the court stating with dignity and frankness that she was the heir to Thomas White, a Maryland gentleman, who, dying, left her his whole estate as a proof of "his love and affection and of his constant wish to marry her." One would like to know more about this Thomas, but he appears only in the one role, that of Margaret Brent's lover. It has been suggested that possibly if Mr. White had lived, Mistress Margaret might have been induced at last to resign her independent state; that she had grown weary of her land operations and her duties as executrix and attorney and was willing to settle down to a life of domestic calm. But it is almost impossible to think of Margaret Brent as changing her business-like, self-reliant nature and meditating matrimony. It is more likely that this interesting and unusual Colonial dame died as she had lived, loving nothing but the public good and the management of her own and other people's affairs.

No pen picture has been left of Molly Brandt, and yet her influence had much to do with the colonists' success in subduing the most savage of the Indian tribes. She was the sister of