Portal:Maryland/Selected biography/2

Image of William Claiborne from Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography.

William Claiborne (c. 1600 – c. 1677) (also spelled William Clayborne) was an English pioneer and surveyor who was an early settler of Virginia and Maryland. Claiborne became a wealthy planter, a pioneering trader, and a major figure in the politics of the colony. He was a central figure in disputes between colonists of Maryland and Virginia, which partially revolved around his trading post on Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Claiborne repeatedly attempted and failed to regain Kent Island, sometimes with force of arms, after it was included in the lands that were granted by a royal charter to the Calvert family, and thus became Maryland.

A puritan, Claiborne sided with Parliament during the English Civil War and was appointed to a commission charged with subduing and managing the Virginia and Maryland colonies. He played a role in the submission of Virginia to Parliamentary rule in this period. Following the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, he retired from involvement in the politics of the Virginia colony. He died around 1677 at his plantation, Romancoke, on Virginia's York River. According to historian Robert Brenner, "William Claiborne may have been the most consistently influential politician in Virginia throughout the whole of the pre-Restoration period".