Background
Daniel Dulany was born on June 28, 1722, in Annapolis, Maryland, United States. He was the son of Daniel Dulany, an able lawyer and political leader, and his wife Rebecca, a daughter of Walter Smith of Calvert County, Maryland.
https://www.amazon.com/Considerations-propriety-imposing-British-colonies/dp/1554790158?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1554790158
Daniel Dulany was born on June 28, 1722, in Annapolis, Maryland, United States. He was the son of Daniel Dulany, an able lawyer and political leader, and his wife Rebecca, a daughter of Walter Smith of Calvert County, Maryland.
The younger Daniel was educated in England at Eton College and at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, studied law at the Middle Temple, and was admitted to the bar in Maryland in 1747.
In 1751 Frederick County elected Dulany one of its representatives in the popular branch of the Maryland Legislative Assembly. He served there for three years, defending the measures of the government and opposing the violence of the popular faction. In return for this service the governor urged his appointment to the Council. The proprietor preferred to have him continue in the House. He decided not to be a candidate for reelection in 1755, but was returned from Annapolis the following year.
In 1757 he was appointed to the Council, where, continuing to serve until the overthrow of the proprietary government, he became, with the exception of the governor, the most influential of the proprietor's officers, several of whom were related to him by the ties of kinship. He was also commissary general from 1759 to 1761 and secretary of the province from 1761 to 1774.
Dulany's opinions on points of law came to have much the same weight as court decisions. Though largely endowed, he suffered from ill health and haughtiness. His relations with the governor were not cordial. Within eight months of the passage by the British Parliament of the famous act imposing a stamp tax on the colonies, Dulany produced a pamphlet entitled, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament (1765). In this essay he contended that the colonies were not represented in Parliament, could not be effectually represented in that body, and that taxation without representation was a violation of the common law of England.
He maintained that the colonists by manufacturing for themselves would remove the danger of being oppressed and teach the mother country to regard her colonies as a part of herself and not merely as her possessions. His forceful arguments ranked foremost among the political writings of the period and were freely drawn upon by William Pitt when speaking for repeal.
A significant pamphlet from his pen, in the form of a letter dated December 30, 1765, was published under the title: The Right to the Tonnage, the Duty of Twelve Pence per Hogshead on all exported Tobacco, and the Fines and Forfeitures in the Province of Maryland (1766).
The popularity in Maryland which Dulany won by his Considerations was lost in 1773 in a controversy with Charles Carroll of Carrollton, conducted in the columns of the Maryland Gazette, Dulany, writing as "Antilon, " defending a proclamation by the governor fixing the amounts of officers' fees, and Carroll, as "First Citizen, " contending that as the fees were in effect the same as taxes their amounts should be fixed only by an act of the Legislative Assembly.
Dulany was one of the protesters against a resolution passed at a meeting in Annapolis to the effect that Maryland lawyers should bring no suit for the recovery of any debt due from an inhabitant of Maryland to an inhabitant of Great Britain until the Boston Port Bill had been repealed.
Having opposed radical factions from the beginning of his public career, he manifested no sympathy for the Revolution and at its outbreak retired to Hunting Ridge, near Baltimore. He resided there as a Loyalist, except during a brief visit to England, until 1781, when nearly all of his property was confiscated and he moved to Baltimore, where he died.
When urging Dulany's appointment to the Council, the governor wrote that Dulany was recognized as a gentleman of the best natural and acquired abilities of any in the province. A few years later Charles Carroll wrote his son that Dulany was a man of great parts and, though not overscrupulous, "indisputably the best lawyer on this continent. "
In 1749 Dulany married Rebecca Tasker, daughter of Benjamin Tasker, who was a member of the Governor's Council and the proprietor's agent and receiver general.
