USA > Maryland > Talbot County > History of Talbot county, Maryland, 1661-1861, Volume I > Part 10
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13 This subject has frequently been referred to in these contributions, to cor- rect impressions that excessive cruelty was practised upon negro slaves. The writer is no apologist of slavery, but also, he is no slanderer of slave holders. The real evils of that institution were sufficiently great for it to merit the con- demnation of all men, and to consign it to the perdition it has so justly found without resort to the exaggerations and inventions of inflamed minds.
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America when he was thirteen years of age, and to have spent some time at school in Talbot, before entering the counting room of Mr. Greenway in Philadelphia. After the war of the Revolution he was a partner in business of Col. Tench Tilghman, a native of this county, the aide and friend of General Washington. Mr. Morris of Oxford has descendants through Robert Morris, the signer and financier, yet living. The sec- ond son bore the name of Thomas, and died in 1777 without children.
The authorities consulted in the preparation of this memoir have been commonly mentioned in the text or the notes: but they may be summarized as follows: The Public Records of the County, the 'Mary- land Archives,' the Maryland Gazette, the Callister letters, the Banning Journal, the Easton Gazette, Boochee's Repository, and private letters of Henry Casey Hart, Esq., of Philadelphia.
HENRY CALLISTER (Pronounced Collister)
Among those persons who were arriving in the year 1742 by one of numerous ships trading between Liverpool, England, and Oxford, Maryland, was a young man, able, intelligent, ambitious and poor, who, without pretending to any such lofty and disinterested motives as were said to have actuated the early settlers in Maryland-such as a "laud- able zeal for extending the christian religion and also the territories of our empire" as our Charter hath stated-but with sole purpose of taking advantage of those opportunities for bettering his fortune which, denied in the old country, were offered to him and all others in the new, came to America, and became a resident of this county. This young man was Henry Callister. Without the distinction of high public office or the eclat of brilliant performance, by his many useful services, and equally by certain eccentricities of opinion and conduct, he drew such attention of the community or communities in which he lived as few men of his day, of superior prestige were able to win. For what he was and for what he did, he is not undeserving of such commemoration as can be given by some imperfect account of his life of failures and dis- appointments, drawn from materials furnished by his own hand. In the keeping of the librarian of the Protestant Episcopal diocese of Mary- land there is a large collection, probably as many as one hundred or more, of the letters of this Mr. Callister to his relatives and friends in the old country, or to the commercial houses of England and America of which he was either the factor or the independent customer. They
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are copies of his letters, made with much labor at a time when there were none of those ingenious devices for duplicating writings that are now employed. At one time this collection of letters was in the keeping of the Goldsboroughs of 'Myrtle Grove,' who were the kinsmen by marriage of Mr. Callister, and they came into the possession of this family through Mr. Callister's daughters, the frequent visitors to this home of wealth, refinement and intelligence, where probably some of them ended their days. These letters fell into the hands of certain annalists or putative historians who have left marks of their ravening in the many interruptions of continuity in what at one time was a con- nected series extending over many years. There are lacunae which can only be filled by the recovery of letters which have been very evi- dently abstracted. It is lamentably true that there is often little regard paid by persons engaged in historical research to the sacredness of origi- nal documents confided to their confidential examinations: and that there often exists a very obtuse sensibility to the criminality of sur- reptitiously carrying off portions of such documents that may be of use to the investigator, in order to save the labor or expense of transcription. It is probable that the many letters which have been removed from this collection of Henry Callister may yet be recovered, as some of them have been published and the remainder may be among the papers or in the hand of the person authorizing the printing of these few. What is known of Mr. Callister and most of that which shall be related of him has been drawn from this collection; but there are slight references to him in the records of Talbot and Queen Anne's counties, and a few traces of him discoverable in the old Maryland Gazette. Much that shall be conjectural or based upon purely circumstantial evidence, for no one of his blood has taken the pains to perpetuate any of the incidents of his life-not so much as the places and dates of his birth and death.
There is but little doubt that he was a native of the Isle of Man and in early life a resident of the town of Douglas, where his family lived, and is still represented. Assuming, what is circumstantially probable, that upon his arrival in Maryland he had passed, by several years, the term of his minority, he must have been born somewhere about the year 1716 or 1717. He was one of seven sons (Anthony, Robin, Ewan, Hugh, Thomas and John) of a widowed mother who died in 1743. It is very evident that his education was intended to fit him for some other avoca- tion than that of a commercial agent or merchant. If he did not possess a knowledge of the Greek and Latin, he had read and appreciated the masterpieces of those languages as translated into his vernacular.
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He was acquainted with French, acquired probably during a short resi- dence in that kingdom for one of his extant letters is written in that tongue. Many references to books in his library which he brought to America, or which he imported after coming, indicated his familiarity with the English classics and contemporary literature. It is evident also that he was well informed in certain branches of natural science, zoology and botany, of which he seems to have been very fond, as will be hereafter noticed.
If the conjecture be true, and it is merely conjectural, that his early education was intended to prepare him for one of the liberal professions, discouraged either by a consciousness of a lack of a natural capacity, a deficiency of moral qualifications, or what is more probable, by the narrowness of his means, from persevering in a path which had been marked out for him by parental partiality or chosen by personal ambi- tion, he appears to have soon abandoned all hope of advancement through those professions in which long scholastic training is necessary, and of which the rewards were dilatory in coming. He therefore, according to one of those letters which were abstracted from the collection mentioned, entered into "a regular apprenticeship in a counting house shop and cellars at home, afterwards two years more in a compting house in Dub- lin and one year in France." After this, it appears, he went to Liver- pool, then growing to be the great emporium of American Commerce, largely through its participation in the slave trade, and later in priva- teering, so nearly akin to piracy, in both of which, as agent but not as principal, he became engaged. In this city he met with many country- men, Manx men, and through them he found employment in the com- mercial house of Foster Cunliffe & Sons, who were ship owners and mer- chants trading with the West Indies, Virginia and Maryland, having their 'factories' and 'factors,' as their warehouses and agents were called, at several points upon the Chesapeake, Oxford apparently being the principal depot and Robert Morris, at the time under consideration, the chief manager. How long he remained at Liverpool is not known, but evidently his stay was brief. Discovering that promotion was likely to be slow and the chances of advancing his fortunes but slender in a city to which the adventurers from all quarters of the Kingdom were flocking, he turned his eyes to those countries of which he was receiving glowing accounts from the Captains of the vessels belonging or consigned to the Messrs. Cunliffe. Finally he asked that he might be sent out to Maryland as an under-factor. Accordingly he entered into a contract with the firm that he should serve them in that capacity
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for five years, with an annual compensation of twenty pounds sterling, with "the privilege all this while of selling my own goods in the store" according to the letter already quoted.1 After such preparations as we may suppose one would make, who was leaving behind all those whom he held dear, and sundering associations that had afforded in the past and were promising in the future his greatest pleasures, he was dispatched "with good recommendations" by one of the ships owned by this com- mercial house to Oxford, with instructions to report to Mr. Robert Morris, their chief factor at that port.2 He seems to have arrived in Talbot about the middle of 1742, for his first letter addressed to the senior partner, Mr. Foster Cunliffe, of which a copy has been preserved, is dated August 1st of that year, and another letter addressed to Mr. Ellis Cunliffe of the 14th of September, 1743, speaks of his having been in the country just one year. Very soon after his debarcation he was sent to Cambridge, where the Cunliffes had a factory, and where he seems to have remained a considerable time-long enough at least to become interested in a young lady, whose favor he failed to secure on account of a scandal, the truth of which he denied in a letter of singular frank- ness to the object of his passion, and attempted, ineffectually it would seem, to shift the consequence of an illicit connection from his own door, where it had been laid, to that of his fellow clerk, Mr. Hanmer. He soon, however, returned to Oxford, and there remained during the five years of his indenture as under factor of his 'masters,' as he calls the
1 In another letter he states that his compensation, at first, was 30 pounds, and that afterwards it was increased to 35 pounds. In this letter he also states that he had certain undescribed privileges of shipping upon his own account. In a letter to Mr. Henderson, King's Officer at Ramsey, of Aug. 21st, 1746, he says: "You'll not be ill pleased to hear that I am now settled here on as good footing as I can wish. I have a good salary and a pretty extensive allowance in trade for my own acco's, with other privileges and perquisites with which I am quite satisfied and which I would not exchange for all the schools in the Isle of Man." It may here be noted that this same letter contains a story of a boy near Oxford, who had a marvelous vision; but this is not worth relating.
2 The firm of Foster Cunliffe & Sons, of Liverpool, consisted of Mr. Foster Cunliffe, the father, and Mr. Ellis Cunliffe and Mr. Robert Cunliffe, the sons. They were the owners, or they had interest in the cargoes of these ships trading between Liverpool and Oxford from 1742 to 1746: Ship Robert and John, Capt. Johnson; Ship Antelope, Capt. Goulding; Ship Prince of Orange, Capt. Smith; Ship Cunliffe (built at Skillington's Point, near Oxford), Capt. Prichard; Ship Ellis and Anne, Capt. Ashburner; Ship Liverpool Merchant, Capt. Gardiner; Ship Planter, Capt. Fowkes; Ship Middlesex, Capt. Welsh. All these and others are mentioned in the Callister letters.
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Messrs. Cunliffe, the chief factor as before mentioned being Mr. Robert Morris.3
The collection of Mr. Callister's letters contains much that is of little permanent interest, but there are many passages which merit the atten- tion not of the biographer only, who would trace the character and career of this worthy, but also of the historian of the county and state, as illus- trating, perhaps as illuminating subjects and events of prime import- ance. Omitting, for the present, those references to incidents of a strictly personal nature which these letters contain, those relating to subjects of a more general significance may first receive some brief notice. For many years the "town and port of Oxford" had been growing in importance as a place of trade. The flood tide of its prosperity may be said to have marked its highest point during the time of his residence there, and the ebb of its decline to have set in soon after he abandoned its once busy streets and frequented harbor. In a letter of Jan. 10th, 1743, he speaks of there being "twice as many buyers in the county this year, as heretofore." In the year following he notices the decline in the quantity of peltries offered for sale at the factory. In 1750, soon after the death of Mr. Morris, he says of the factory at Oxford, "its present state and circumstances cannot be equalled by any in Maryland, owing to the good management of your late factor there." He mentions the fact of Alderman Gildart having a factory at the same port in 1744 and of Mr. Anthony Bacon, the brother of the Rev. Thomas Bacon, having once "kept a store on this river, and is now a merchant of London." This Mr. Bacon formed a copartnership in 1748 with Mr. James Dickinson, and had "a great store at Dover on Choptank," and others elsewhere. When Callister became an in- dependent merchant, the London House of Mr. Bacon furnished him with goods as long as his credit was unimpaired, and that it did not continue to do so, gave him much offence, which he plainly expressed in some of his letters. He refers incidentally to other persons having stores either in Talbot or Queen Anne's counties: thus after his re- moval from Oxford to the Head of Wye, he mentions a Mr. Banks as being a merchant of his neighborhood. In a letter of Aug. 5, 1747, he gives the names of several persons apparently having stores-Bennett, Brown, Nicols, R. Goldsborough, J. Goldsborough. He says "Bennett will have a store at Wye-town, another at home. R. Lloyd and E. Lloyd have only goods for their own families. Mrs. R. Lloyd says
3 Of this gentleman some account, such as very meagre memoranda will allow, is given in another contribution.
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they are cursed dear; so are P. Emerson's.4 In a letter to Messrs. Foster Cunliffe & Sons of Oct. 4, 1750, he refers to new firms for busi- ness in his neighborhood. One, having the style of Anderson Com- pany, consisted of Mr. W. Anderson of London, Mr. Robert Morris and Mr. J. Hanmer of Maryland. Their store was said to be eight miles from his at Head of Wye, and of this Mr. Jonathan Nicols was the factor. He intimates very clearly in a letter written after Mr. Morris' death, his belief that Mr. Morris and Mr. Hanmer, the head factors of the Messrs. Cunliffe had been conducting this business clandestinely, or without the knowledge or consent of their principals. He also inti- mates that Mr. Morris had been playing the same game at Dover under the firm name of Anthony Bacon & Company. He said explicitly:
Mr. Morris in his most unguarded hours never gave me the least hint of it. * * * If he has not himself advised you of this pro- ceeding, then I am right.
These insinuations made under the guise of solicitude for the interests of his "masters," against the probity of a man who had doubtless, from the day of his landing, befriended him, and who was probably the greatest merchant of his day in Maryland, give us a view of Mr. Callister's character the most unfavorable. Evidently there had existed a jealousy of Mr. Morris' personal standing with the Messrs. Cunliffe, and envy of his commercial success and eminence. Of this Mr. Robert Morris of Oxford, whose name has a celebrity from its being borne by the signer of the Declaration of Independence and distinguished financier of the Revolution,5 his son, a separate memoir has been prepared, in which will be found many references to Mr. Callister, who seems to have enjoyed a more intimate relation with him than usually subsists between superior and subordinate. Mr. Callister was with him in his last hours, and was remembered in his last will, with these words:
I give to my friend, Henry Caleister, Merchant, six volumes that he shall chuse out of my Library, and ten pounds sterling and one mourning ring and one of my mahogany armd chairs.
4 The records of Queen Anne's Court indicate the existence of a commercial firm or company in 1756 composed of Richard Lloyd, Edward Lloyd and William Anderson.
5 This day, Jan. 3, 1888, the public journals announce that the great-grand- daughter of Robert Morris, the Revolutionary financier, who was allowed to be imprisoned for debt, is begging the contribution of one hundred dollars, for the purpose of securing her admission to a charitable institution of Washington.
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The 'factories' of the Messrs. Cunliffe were supplied by them with every article of luxury or necessity demanded by the people of the county including cloth from the Isle of Man, wine from the Madeiras, spirits and sugar from the West Indies and negroes from the coast of Africa. In payment for these their ships took homeward tobacco, 'skins,' wheat, pork and lumber-perhaps little else. At or about the time of the coming of Mr. Callister, the chief factor at Oxford had introduced, in default of a good law for the grading of tobacco a system of private inspection, for which duty skilled receivers were appointed. In a letter of July, 1745, Mr. Callister said:
I dare say you will meet with very little bad tobacco this year : indeed most of the planters are as great knaves as ever, but the receivers are not so. They refuse, I believe a third part as much as they receive and the planters cull it over again and get sometimes a hogshead or two out of two or three bad. Though the receivers are so hard to please, we find a good deal of trash that has escaped them, after fetching it in, which we debit the planter for.
In the following year the matter of a general inspection law came before the General Assembly of the Province, and as every contempo- rary reference to the politics of Maryland, at a period when the public press gave so little information of public affairs is of use to their under- standing, the following extracts from a letter of Mr. Callister to his "masters" dated May 4, 1746, may possess some value.
We are in great hopes of getting an Inspection law made. Our Assem- bly seems to have it in their heads and it is approved by most of the Clergy and Officers, who were the chief objectors at first, and the Planters are in general convinced of the necessity of some such scheme as they have in Virginy [sic]. Some are for a burning law, such as they have had formerly in Maryland. Another plan has been proposed, but as it is blended with the Revenue bill for 2£ 9s stl., further duty per hhd., on Tob'o exported (a scheme to pay quit rents which they had under consideration last year and which the government is very earnest for,) and as the Tob'o is there confounded with other branches of trade that ought to stand on their own bottoms, I hope they will find out a better method than to set up an insignificant lumber trade at the expense of the Tob'o trade which is the only great support of the Colony. The Revenue bill is the absurdest scheme that ever was invented, yet many are for it, though its most potent advocates can offer no better reason to support their opinions than that the people desire it, and that if the Planters lose by it, they will not be sensible of the loss, because then the Merchants and Shippers will pay the Land Rents, both for them
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and those that make no tobacco; not considering that the merchant knows how to proportion his price to their incumbrances-a strange delusion and at the same time a very poor compliment to Messieurs the Planters to imagine them so stupid and insensible of their interest that they will suffer themselves to be so grossly imposed on. *
* But further as to the Inspection plan: it is by some proposed, besides the Officers and Clergy allowing a reduction of their fees in proportion to the meliority of the staple when regulated and improved, that the merchants &c. shall also proportionably abate their bonds and outstand- ing debts, [no] doubt they ought to be consulted upon an affair where their property is so much concerned; which, however, unreasonable it may be to retrench anything of a just debt that was contracted to be paid in Toba'o of the same quality that this scheme is calculated to give it, as it actually will be so much better than they can otherwise have it, I believe the merchants will find it to their account in subscrib- ing to these terms.6
While tobacco continued up to the time of Callister's leaving the service of the Messrs. Cunliffe, to be the principal article of export in their ships, already it has been discovered that the lands of this and the adjoining counties possessed that peculiar adaptation to the growth of wheat for which they have since become celebrated, and the culture of this grain, which here grows to such admirable perfection, was gradually supplanting that of the "Sot Weed" which does not attain the excel- lence it displays in other sections of the State. In an inventory of the stock of Messrs. Cunliffe at Oxford taken by Mr. Callister in 1756 there are items of 3436 bushels of wheat in the graneries and only 7 hogsheads of tobacco in the warehouse. The former was valued at three shillings and six pence currency per bushel and the latter at three pence currency per pound; or by reducing these prices to Federal money at the rate
6 The last part of this extract is somewhat obscure, but it has been copied as it was found written. The Inspection law of the passage of which Mr. Callister was so sanguine failed to receive the approval of "Our Parliament" as he calls the General Assembly of the province, in the letter; but in 1747 an act for the improvement of the Staple of Tobacco did pass, which had supplements and amendments in subsequent years. To this law of 1747 he refers in a letter of August 6th, of that year when he speaks of the necessary changes to be made in the methods of business through its provisions. In this letter he speaks also of a class of country merchants in this county who were styled Chinces (if this word be correctly read) and who bought tobacco of the small planters generally in debt to them. Mr. Callister states that the large planters shipped their tobacco upon their own account, without the intervention of factors. It may be said that no effectual Inspection Law was framed and adopted until the great act of 1763, which had notable political consequences.
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of two dollars sixty-six and two-thirds cents to the pound Maryland currency we discover that in our golden age, in the "good old times" of 1756 wheat was worth in Talbot county at tide water only forty-six and one-half cents and tobacco but three and one-third cents, which may be consolatory to the farmers of the present time. The article which was the first to be exported from Maryland namely peltry, was dimin- ishing in quantity with the spread of the settlements and accordingly we learn from a letter of Mr. Callister already quoted that at Oxford 'skins' were scarce in 1743, but were still an object of commerce. He mentions in another letter the exportation of 'walnut logs and plank,' and to this more than to home consumption may be attributed the rapid destruction of a valuable timber and the almost complete exter- mination of a beautiful ornamental tree which grows when permitted with great vigor and luxuriance in the soil of Talbot. In Mr. Callister's letters there are many casual references to the participation of the Messrs. Cunliffe in the slave trade which they carried on both directly with the Coast of Africa and indirectly through the Barbadoes. Thus after the death of Mr. Morris in a communication addressed to the Liverpool house he said:
You gave him a very remarkable proof of your particular indulgence by admitting him a partner in the Oxford snow for the Guinea trade.
There are references to a trade with Senegal also. The allusions to the arrival of ships at Oxford from the West Indies with negroes on board are so numerous as to indicate that this kind of commodity very commonly made a part of the cargoes from those islands. There is not positive evidence in the Callister letters that the Cunliffes engaged, as many of the Liverpool merchants of the time did, in private predatory naval warfare after the breaking out of hostilities between England and France, in the year 1744; but there are intimations that in the fall of that year it was in contemplation at Oxford to fit out the new ship Cunliffe, then just completed at Skillington's Point at the mouth of Trippe's creek, as a privateer. It appears however that she went to sea an armed merchantman prepared to defend herself and cargo rather than to spoil the enemy, but perhaps ready to attack vessels of her own class if there should be favoring opportunities. She encountered on the 7th of January, 1745, a French privateer of twenty guns and two hun- dred men, off Cape Clear, when a severe fight ensued. The Cunliffe succeeded in driving off the enemy and arrived safely at Liverpool, but she lost her brave captain in the engagement. Referring to this action
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