USA > Maryland > Talbot County > History of Talbot county, Maryland, 1661-1861, Volume I > Part 52
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COLONEL SAMUEL HAMBLETON
by Col. Wm. Hughlett. In this year one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of Maryland occurred, and one with which Mr. Hambleton was connected. In the autumn of 1836 when the electoral college assembled for the choosing of State Senators according to con- stitutional provision, nineteen of the Democratic electors withdrew from the college and refused to go into an election, for the reason alleged that the college did not fairly represent the opinions of a majority of the people of the State-was, in fact, elected by a majority. This most extraordinary procedure aroused intense indignation throughout the State, and nowhere was this more vehemently expressed than here in Talbot. A public meeting to assemble in Easton was called of those citizens, as was set forth in the advertisement, who were opposed to revolution, opposed to the total overthrow of the constitution and the laws under which they and their forefathers had lived for sixty years, to consider the present crisis of their affairs as citizens of Maryland; to adopt such measures and utter such expressions as became them at the existing unexampled condition of things. Speeches were made of a stirring character, resolutions were passed of an inflammatory kind, and committees of vigilance appointed for each election district. Of the committee for the Easton District Mr. Edward N. Hambleton was one, as he had been one of the most active in stimulating popular indignation against the recusants. It is not proposed to give a full history of this shameful transaction. Suffice it to say here, that driven either by the wrath of the people, unequivocally expressed; by the threats of the Executive plainly declared, or by the goads of an awakened sense of duty, a few of the withdrawing members of the college united with those who had not forgotten their constitutional obligations, to make a quorum, when the election of Senators was perfected, and among those chosen was Mr. Edward N. Hambleton, of Talbot. He served his term of five years but after its expiration he appears to have held no public office, giving himself up to the pursuits which were his con- solations and compensations for those disappointments which come to all-disappointments that follow success as surely as they attend defeat in political life. He never lost interest, however, in politics. He was fond of the contentions and strifes of parties. He continued as long as health and strength permitted to give such aid to the Whigs as came from weight of character, wisdom in council and words of exhor- tation. He was a ready speaker and fond of exercising his oratory. In social life he is represented to have been most agreeable-even fascinating. In his manners he was courteous without pretension
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and in his sympathies cordial without affectation. With a good mem- ory of men and things as he had seen or heard them, with a lively imagination that embellished the most trivial or commonplace incidents with mirthful or sentimental accessories, and with a fluency of speech that could represent with great vividness what memory had preserved or imagination invented, his conversation was the delight of those who enjoyed his intimacy. The religious sentiment was not strongly devel- oped in him, and though his formal attachment was with the Protes- tant Episcopal Church, a Quaker ancestry gave an indelible impress to his convictions and an irreversible direction to his conduct. On the 31st of March 1799, Mr. Edward N. Hambleton married Mary, the daughter of Hugh and Elizabeth Sherwood, and eight children were born to them of whom but a single one now (1886) survives. After a long life of more than usual happiness, to which a cheerful disposition, an equal mind, unbroken health, moderate wealth, honoring respect of neighbors and friends and the reverent affection of children contributed, he died April 30th, 1854, at Londonderry, his home, and lies buried in the cemetery of Easton.
Samuel Hambleton, long called Samuel Hambleton, Junior, to dis- tinguish him from his uncle, the Purser, was the son of Edward Needles and Mary (Sherwood) Hambleton and was born Jan. 8th, 1812, at Waterloo, a farm lying between Easton and the village once known as Hole-in-the-Wall, but now as Hambleton, having been so named in honor of the subject of this memoir who first secured for it, while he was a member of Congress, the distinction and convenience of having a post-office. His primary education was received from private tutors in his father's family, but at an early age he was entered at the Easton Academy, then exceedingly prosperous, under the tutelage of Richard White Thompson. In this institution young Hambleton acquired a fair knowledge of the ancient languages which he was not loath to cultivate even to his end, and of the mathematics. He had not the advantages of that higher and more extended instruction which a colle- giate course would have offorded, but he acquired a relish for liberal studies which he never lost in the most active portion of his career and when most absorbed in the affairs of life. Approaching manhood he entered the office of the Hon. Theodore R. Loockerman, an eminent member of the bar of Talbot county, whose fine abilities at that period promised the greatest legal distinction, haplessly never realized. He, after a proper period of study, was admitted to the bar in the year 1833, Justices Richard Tilghman Earle, John Bowers Eccleston and Philemon
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B. Hopper being upon the bench, and William Hayward, Esq., the Deputy States-Attorney for the county. At this period the bar of Talbot was conspicuous for an array of talented men such as it never before had presented nor has presented since. Thomas James Bullett, venerable for years, was the titular Judge of the Land Court for the Eastern Shore. William Hayward, Jr., shone with full-orbed brilliancy too soon eclipsed by death. Theodore R. Loockerman was in the very zenith of his power, as yet unnerved by vicious habit. John Leeds Kerr, armed at every point, was in mid-career in the legal lists and still carrying off honors. John Bozman Kerr, the son of the before-mentioned, just home and overweighted with loads of learning from the schools of Harvard, was giving great promises of future distinction, unfortun- ately never to be fulfilled; and, finally, Philip Francis Thomas was just beginning to show those talents for politics and law which have kept him in the front ranks of his profession and in office to the present day.
The rewards of the profession of the law have never been great in Talbot. They were at this period less than now, but not so divided as at present. Young Hambleton from the first seems to have had a liberal share of the emoluments and, as usual with young men, more than a share of the uncompensated labor. In time business grew, and nour- ished by diligence and integrity it finally equalled, if it did not exceed, that of any member of the bar in this county. With the decline of the mental powers of his distinguished preceptor his clients became the clients of the capable and trustworthy pupil. With the disappearance of the older men he had to compete with the younger, quite their equals in ability. His earliest rival worthy of mention was the Hon. Philip Francis Thomas, his senior by a few years, but his survivor it is hoped by many. They were of opposing political opinions and were generally opposing counsel, but the many political employments of Mr. Thomas took him so frequently and so long away from the county that at last there was only occasional interference in their legal career. But his principal rival for precedence at the bar was Mr. James Lloyd Martin, with whom his professional antagonism-for they were employed upon opposite sides in almost every important case in the courts-was em- bittered by political oppugnancy and personal incompatibility. There was not only alienation founded upon differences of opinions, but there were antipathies founded upon differences of character. The arena of the courts gave opportunity for indulging these feelings; and occasionally this gave rise to personal encounters that pleased "the ears of the ground- lings," but made "the judiciary grieve." In addition to these competi-
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tors for business must be mentioned Henry Hollyday Goldsborough who came to the bar many years later than either of the others, and was a legal antagonist quite the equal of Mr. Hambleton in all the qualities of a good lawyer and gentleman. With all of these he maintained a creditable contest in the tournaments of the court, and often carried off the prizes of victory. By those capable of estimating the abilities and acquirements of Mr. Hambleton, he was thought to be well versed in law; to be a judicious as well as prudent counsellor, and a capable as well as zealous advocate. It is not known that he was employed in any great and celebrated cases, nor in courts beyond the State. His reputation was local, but during many years there were few trials of importance within the county in which he was not engaged, and rarely to the regret or dissatisfaction of his client. In his forensic efforts he was ready in discussion, dextrous in argument, copious and fluent in diction and earnest in delivery. Attempting no great flights of oratory he would nevertheless sometimes rise to eloquence. He never sank to triviality or vulgarity. His Scotch blood forbade his indulgence in humor except of the most sober kind. It may be said without any derogation from his qualifications as an advocate that his personal character gave a weight to his utterances which would have lost much in effectiveness if that had been wanting. To the Court he was point- edly deferential. To his brethren of the bar he was courteous and con- ciliatory, and though always ready to maintain sternly and firmly his rights and dignity when assailed, he was equally regardful of those of others. He was capable of apology and ready to make it, if betrayed in the midst of the contentions of the forum into saying or doing that which wounded the sensibilities of others; but his memory of injuries and insults was tenacious and he made no pretensions to that flabby kind of amiability that forgives readily because it feels slightly, or that feigned religiosity that, as it can believe the incredible, can also perform the impossible-love an enemy.
Following a custom which, at the period under view, seemed to have the invariableness of a law of nature, that the young lawyers of the county should engage actively in politics, Mr. Hambleton in the year in which he was admitted to the bar, 1833, also the year in which he reached his majority, was nominated for a seat in the Lower House of Assembly by the Anti-Jackson party, as the opposition was called until it assumed the name of Whig. It should be noted that its characteristics were an intense hatred of Gen. Jackson and an almost idolatrous ad- miration of Mr. Clay; an ardent devotion to the union of the States as
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opposed to nullification in South Carolina; a support of the principle of protection to American industry by means of tariffs upon importations; an advocacy of the policy of appropriating public money to works of internal improvement; and finally, an approval of the renewal of the charter of the United States bank. All these sentiments and opin- ions were felt and adopted by Mr. Hambleton at the outset of his career; and if he had not warmly entertained and defended them throughout a large part of his mature life, from his complete conversion from them in after years one would have been compelled to think they were not accepted by him sincerely and after deliberation, but that they merely devolved upon him a part of a political patrimony. At the date of his first candidacy the two parties in the county were so equally divided that a portion of each ticket was chosen, but Mr. Hambleton was one of the candidates rejected, probably because of his youth. There was nothing mortifying or discouraging in this, for to be thought worthy of a nomination at his age was complimentary. An incident and illus- tration of the society of the day deserves mention here. While Mr. Samuel Hambleton was speaking at Trappe, during the canvass, he was interrupted by Mr. Joseph R. Price in a manner to give umbrage to the brother of the speaker, Mr. Alexander Hambleton. This led to the sending and the acceptance of a challenge to a duel. The parties as- sembled upon or near the duelling ground at Bladensburg, but owing to some frivolous dispute about lines they were not brought into actual conflict; so the gentlemen returned home unharmed except by the shafts of ridicule that assailed them upon their arrival.
Mr. Hambleton was again nominated in 1834 for the same place, and though extraordinary efforts were made by the Jackson party to secure a full delegation from Talbot in order that the Hon. Robert Henry Goldsborough should be disappointed in his aspirations to the Senate of the United States, the anti-Jackson party elected their whole ticket, consisting of Mr. Hambleton, Mr. Geo. Dudley, Mr. Joseph Bruff and Mr. Solomon Mullikin.1 During the legislative session of 1834-5,
1 It may be interesting to note here that at this election of 1834 the sense of the people was taken by a viva voce vote, whether the Act of Assembly of 1833, entitled "An Act supplementary to an Act to provide for the public instruction of youth in primary schools throughout the State" should become a law for this county. There were 980 votes in the affirmative and but 180 in the neg- ative, 67 persons refusing to vote either way. This was what was called and known in subsequent years as Spencer's School Law, because it was framed by Mr. Richard Spencer of this county. It is due to Mr. Hambleton to say that although he registered his vote against the adoption of the law, as he subsequently
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Mr. Hambleton acquired reputation for a speech upon the much-vexed question of the Virginia boundary line, which was pronounced to be "able and well considered." A vote of his during the same session, in favor of indemnifying those persons whose property in the city of Baltimore had been destroyed by the violence of the mobs, brought upon him much severe animadversion from his political opponents and in 1839 involved him in an acrimonious controversy with Mr. James Lloyd Martin which terminated in the sending and acceptance of a challenge to a duel. Actual conflict was prevented by the arrest of Mr. Hambleton when on his way to meet his antagonist, and so the matter was allowed to die, both parties being anxious that it should be forgotten as the ebullition of youthful impetuosity.2
The same names were placed upon the anti-Jackson or Whig ticket in 1835 and were again elected. In the following year, Oct. 24th, Mr. Hambleton was appointed deputy State's attorney for Talbot county, Mr. Josiah Bailey of Dorchester being attorney-general for the State. This position Mr. Hambleton held uninterruptedly for eight years until 1844, when he was succeeded by Mr. John Bozman Kerr. In this year he was upon the electoral ticket of the Whigs for the President of the United States, Mr. Clay being the candidate of the party, and was elected, though he was not gratified it is unnecessary to say by the choice of his great leader to the chief magistracy. Before the presidential election he had, in October of the same year, been elected State senator for Talbot over Mr. Nicholas Martin, democrat. He held this position until 1850 when he was succeeded by Mr. Edward Lloyd. The question of a revision of the State constitution becoming the most prominent, Col. Hambleton with many conservative Whigs opposed that measure which was finally carried to a consummation to be lamented. In 1853 he was nominated by the Whigs for a seat in the second legislature under
acknowledged when he was publicly assailed for being hostile to the public schools, his opposition was to certain obnoxious provisions of the law and not to its fundamental principle.
2 No reference would have been made to these abortive duels noticed in this contribution if the mention of them involved any reflection upon private character, and if it did not serve to illustrate the dying tremors of a burlesque chivalry. It is believed that the challenge mentioned above was the very last sent by any individual in this county. Ridicule more than a perception of the folly of such appeals to combat, more than conviction of their wrongfulness, more than the re- straints of law, served to abolish the duel so that now a man who should send a challenge or accept one would be laughed at for his weakness instead of admired for his courage.
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COLONEL SAMUEL HAMBLETON
the new constitution and was elected by a larger majority than was given for any one of the numerous candidates, with Mr. Richard Harring- ton as his coadjutor. He was represented by his opponents as having aspirations to a seat in the United States Senate; and was coarsely accused of obtruding his name before the people as that of a suitable man for the place. This was doubtless erroneous, but his friends urged his claims upon the Legislature, and were not diffident in insisting that they should have recognition. If Mr. Hambleton had the ambition of being a United States Senator it was an honorable ambition and one, too, which his character, abilities and long experience in public employ- ments justified him in indulging. If he had been chosen the State would not then have been humiliated, as it has been since, by incompetency, or that which is worse, though it might not have been illustrated by such pre-eminent talent as it had been some times before. More than once after this time he was named as a fitting person for a seat in the Senate, but his election could not be secured. In the year 1854 Mr. Hambleton was elected to hold the lucrative office of President of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal-that instrument of so much political corrup- tion. He held this place for two years, being removed in 1856. It is not believed he used his position for doing anything more than custom had rendered permissible, if morals had not rendered commendable-to reward partisan service.
During the whole of his political life he had identified himself with the Whigs,-their principles were his principles, their successes his suc- cesses, their defeats his defeats and their hopes his hopes; but as this party after the frustration of its hopes in 1852, began that process of disintegration and recombination with the American or, so called, "Know Nothing" party or with the party which, subsequently, was known as there publican but then by various names indicative of hostil- ity either to the whole system of slavery or to its extension into free territory, Mr. Hambleton gradually severed his connections with the Whigs, and step by step, approximated that party which he had long antagonized, and which had no principle or policy but what he had con- demned, except its approval and defense of slavery. After a vain attempt to organize in this county and State a political body to be known as "Old Line Whigs" which, discarding the religious and ethnical proscriptiveness of the know-nothings and the abolitionism of the free- soilers or republicans, should adhere to the ancient symbols of Mr. Clay that condemned all measures leading to a violent or speedy ex- tinction of slavery and that approved those limiting the "peculiar in-
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stitution" of the south to territory within the lines established by the Missouri compromise, he severed one by one the cords which bound him to his old associates and his former principles. Feeling the isolation of an independent position, so intolerable to the strict partisan, he began coquetting with the democratic party and finally, professing to be fasci- nated with charms that had hitherto been repulsive, he threw himself into those arms with much effusion of feeling whose embrace he would have thought at one time to be pollution. Although the convention of the "Old Line Whigs," so called, that assembled in Baltimore Sept. 17, 1856 adopted the candidates of the "Know Nothing" party, Messrs. Fillmore and Donelson, while rejecting its platform of principles, never- theless Mr. Hambleton cast his vote for Mr. Buchanan, the nominee of the democrats. Ever after this act of fealty, to the close of his life, he was loyal to the party of his adoption, and though there were those of this party, in Talbot, who never forgot nor forgave his former bitterness of denunciation, he nevertheless became one of its trusted leaders. Comment upon this change which some characterized as apostacy and others as conversion, would here be misplaced or at least inop- portune. Those who are always looking for selfish and degraded motives will have no difficulty in finding what they may regard as evidences of the existence and influence of such motives in this case; on the other hand those who take a more generous view of human conduct can easily im- agine how a sincere and conscientious man may, at periods of party dissolution and reconstruction, honestly change his allegiance and form new attachments. This subject will, therefore, not be pursued, but the incidents, only, in the political career of Mr. Hambleton as a democrat, will be noticed without reflections of any kind.
Year by year it was becoming more and more obvious that the great national parties would divide upon the line of slavery, and, though attempts were made to prevent this result, they were futile. There was no party in this county, and hardly in this State that advocated the abolition of slavery, and yet year by year the instability of the institution, and the insecurity of property in slaves became more and more evident. In the year 1838 a meeting of the citizens of Talbot, irrespective of their party affiliations, was held at Easton, to appoint delegates to a convention of the slave holders of the Eastern Shore, to be held at Cambridge. At this meeting Col. Hambleton took a conspicuous part, and he was appointed one of twenty persons to attend the proposed convention to be held in the adjoining county on the 3rd of November. The object of this was said to be the divising measures for additional security to
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slave property, which was endangered indirectly by the continued agitation of the subject of abolition at the North, and by the presence here of a large body of free negroes. This convention was addressed by Col. Hambleton, who, though he was unwilling to take the extreme ground of certain members of that convention who favored the enslave- ment of those colored people who had been emancipated, and the de- priving them of their little property, he was nevertheless earnest in the advocacy of drastic measures. He was one of a committee to draft an address to the people of the State; but as it was discovered that the violent sentiments expressed at the convention, met with no hearty response from the people at large, whose sense of humanity and justice was shocked, this committee contented itself with recommending a State convention to assemble in Baltimore for the purpose of recommend- ing measures for legislative action. Col. Hambleton was thus committed to a course from which he never deviated, and which led him into the camp of the extreme Southern party that soon after was formed under able leadership. In the campaign that preceded the election of 1860, he took a conspicuous part in concentrating the votes of the electors of this county upon the Breckenridge ticket; and to this end he was one of those persons who secured the presence in Talbot of Mr. Yancy, the representative of the extreme doctrines of Secession. Col. Hamble- ton had so far progressed that the moderation of this "fire-eater," to use the phraseology of the day, who tempered his heats in the presence of people unaccustomed to such fervors as he had been used to diffuse in the warmer political atmosphere of the South, was not satisfactory, and he is said to have prompted Mr. Yancy to the employment of a more sulphurous oratory-a small matter that gave rise to much ad- imadversion at the time, and long after.
After the election of Mr. Lincoln Col. Hambleton used his utmost influence with the people of this county to draw them into the vortex of secession-with what success this is not the place to relate. During the war that ensued he arrayed himself on the side of the insurgents and did all that was possible, consistent with his own safety, to promote the disruption of the Union. Of this portion of his life nothing more will be said, for the events of that troubled time are too recent, or, at least, the impressions they made are still too vivid to enable one who witnessed and shared in them, to take a dispassionate view of the motives and conduct of men who participated in them. No injustice is done Col. Hambleton in saying that he, during the war, never uttered a word or performed an act, as far as known, that a jealous and watchful
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