Annapolis became a place of fashion and of court, with horse-races,
stage-playing, a press, a club, fox-hunting clergymen, a grand
state-house, the town residences of planters, the belles of Maryland,
and the seat of war against the French, the British crown, and the
slaveholders' insurrection.
It was now in a state of comfortable decline, having yielded to
Baltimore and to Washington its once superior influence and society; but
a lobby, the first in magnitude ever seen in this province, had
assembled in the name of canals and railroads to compete for the bonded
aid of the Legislature, and Judge Custis was leading the forlorn hope of
the Eastern Shore for some of the subsidy so liberally showered upon the
cormorant, Baltimore.
Judge Custis was instructed to lobby at Annapolis for one million
dollars, or only one-eighth part of the grants made by the state, and he
was to draw on Meshach Milburn for funds, who, meantime, continued out
of his private resources to grade and buy right of way for one hundred
and thirty miles of railroad.
The adventure was gigantic for the private capital of that day, and the
unpopularity of the adventurer at home was soon testified at the state
capital.
Vesta, whose carriage had been brought over, looked with a gentle
patriotism--being herself of divided Maryland and Virginia
sympathies--upon the little peninsulated capital, with its old roomy
houses of colonial brick, its circles and triangles in the public ways,
and the unchanged names of such streets as King George, Prince George,
and the Duke of Gloucester; but Rhoda was excited to the height of state
pride in everything she saw, and, with strong faculty, seized on the
historical and political relations of Annapolis, till Judge Custis said:
"Vesta, that girl is of the old rebel Milburn stock, I know.
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