Daniel Dulany Jr. (102)

Daniel Dulany, Jr. (28 June 1722–17 March 1797) was a public officeholder, lawyer, businessman, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768. Born in Annapolis, Maryland to the colony’s Attorney General, Dulany grew up in a wealthy and well-connected family, alighting to England’s Eton College before passing through Cambridge University to the Middle Temple. Barred in 1746, he returned to practice law in Maryland in 1747. Quickly esteemed as a lawyer and constitutional thinker, he rose through Maryland’s Lower House of the Assembly (elect. 1749, 1751, 1754) to an appointment on the Council as Secretary of Maryland in 1757, serving until its dissolution in 1776. His support of Proprietary government enabled his contemporaneous enjoyment of other powerful and lucrative posts. But said support stopped short of absolute: while Dulany believed Parliament had the right to levy trade duties and fees, he rose to renown via his influential rebuttal of the Stamp Act (1765) and the proposition of colonials’ “virtual representation” in Parliament. His Considerations on the propriety of imposing taxes in the British colonies (1765) reasserted consent to taxation as a core principle of the English constitution, and argued British self-interest, not generosity, compelled defending the colonies in the Seven Years’ War (1754–63). Widely reprinted and even cited by William Pitt during Parliament’s repeal debates, it set Dulany’s star aloft, until his support of the extension of a tobacco tax by Gubernatorial fiat drew Charles Carroll of Carrollton into politics for the first time, not least because Dulany himself benefitted financially from the tax. The ensuing newspaper debate established Carroll’s patriot bone fides at Dulany’s expense. Dulany’s resist-not-rebel stance proved too conservative as the imperial crisis worsened. Through self-exile and confiscations he remained in Maryland until his death in Baltimore in 1797. (PI, ANB)