USA > Maryland > Talbot County > History of Talbot county, Maryland, 1661-1861, Volume I > Part 60
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1 When Mr. Chamberlaine embarked in agriculture grain tillage was rapidly supplanting, in Talbot, tobacco planting.
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which made him one of the most successful farmers of his day, and enabled him to add greatly to the large patrimony inherited from his father and the handsome dower received with his wife. He is said to have spent the first year of his married life at Evergreen, a farm near to Bonfield, the plantation to which he gave the name; where he made his permanent home after the completion, in 1773, of its fine mansion still (1887) standing conspicuous upon its artificial hill, near to Oxford, and on the left of the land approach to that ancient town. There is a tradition of the neighborhood that the earth was brought from the low land at the head of a neighboring creek, by his numerous slaves, women as well as men, without the aid of horses, oxen and their carts, to form this unnatural elevation in a level country. If this be so, this hill is a monument of cruel pride as well as foolish taste, for uncom- pensated labor was made unnecessarily painful to give an incongruous feature to a beautiful site. It is said that Mrs. Chamberlaine, by whose direction and under whose immediate eye this hill was raised, must re- ceive whatever credit or discredit belongs to its conception and execution.2 This old mansion, now abandoned to the occupancy of tenants-a large, tall and not unhandsome structure of wood, arranged with more regard apparently to show than to convenience and comfort "with lofty ceil- ings, broad staircase and hall from which you enter the parlors which
2 A vaulted room beneath the Bonfield house with windows secured by iron gratings and doors of more than ordinary thickness has been used by the roman- ticists of the neighborhood to confirm those stories of cruelty to the slaves of Mr. Chamberlaine, which have acquired a kind of currency, this room being con- verted by the popular imagination into a kind of prison where the blacks were confined and where they were corporally punished, the hooks in the wall to which they were tied while under the lash being shown, with a shudder. Now these stories of cruelty would a priori, be thoroughly incredible as told of kindly people professing sincerely to be governed by the principles of the most benign religion, if we did not know that the finest feelings of humanity become insensible to the sufferings of those of a lower caste in a servile condition. Slavery, of itself, in its mildest form is cruelty, but the stories which used to be told of it as existing upon every large plantation in the county, were grossly exaggerated, and those told of Bonfield were no exceptions. The regimen of Mr. Chamberlaine as that of all owners of large gangs of negroes was necessarily strict, and the traditions of rigidity of discipline at Bonfield are probably more than ordinarily well sustained; but that there was habitual and excessive cruelty "stands not in the prospect of belief." Even the evidences afforded by the vaulted room, with its grated win- dows, heavy doors, and iron hooks, disappears when examined by the light of common sense, and this "chamber of horrors" shown to be nothing more than a dark cool pantry for the preservation of fresh meats and other perishable pro- visions.
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are wainscoted" and all finished in a style of elegance commensurable with its evidently great cost-resists decay by the excellence of its materials and workmanship. Its upper stories overlook a scene of beauty hardly to be equalled in a flat country, having the attractive town of Oxford in front, with its beautiful harbor, having on the side the fine expanse of water at the debouchure of Third Haven into Chop- tank river, stretching down to Sharp's Island and the Chesapeake bay, and having in the rear the land-locked Boone's Creek, bordered with farms, and intervening forests.3 It is possible that in the first years of Mr. Chamberlaine's residence at Bonfield, this fine mansion may have been the scene of festivity and gaiety; but these, if they ever existed, were soon quenched in the gloom produced by the death of Samuel Chamberlaine of "Plain Dealing," by the anxieties of flagrant war, and the isolation of unpopular political opinion. After the war was over, filial sorrow assuaged, and social intercourse renewed, the austerities of deepening piety suppressed all effervescent mirth, and a devout cheer- fulness was thought to be a sufficient and proper substitute for a merri- ment that was deemed dangerous when not tempered with religion. In later years, when Bonfield house fell into the hands of the son of its builder, religion combed the ashes from her head and cast away the sack-cloth from her person, to adopt the latest modes of coif and gown and then came "Jest and youthful jollity."
Evidence does not exist of the participation of Mr. Samuel Chamber- laine in political life in the anti-revolutionary period, though in the year 1768, upon the death of his brother Col. Thomas Chamberlaine, he re- ceived the appointment of Naval Officer and Collector of the Port of Oxford, a post which he held until the close of the Proprietary regime; but whether this was obtained through parental favor, or was bestowed as a partisan reward it is useless and vain to enquire at this day. Of
3 At the foot of the hill there was planted a row of Lombardy poplars, which, when grown, gave an imposing aspect to the place. This stately tree was, at one time, a favorite variety for shade and ornament, and its presence at any home- stead gave an appearance of dignity, that was thought to betoken aristocractic pretensions on the part of the owner. These trees have now entirely perished, as they are short-lived in this country and incapable of seminal propagation; and as proud families with democratic environments are likewise of short social duration, a kind of superstition has grown up among the common people, who are apt to be imaginative, that the decay of the trees and the decadence of families possessing them are in some way mysteriously connected. So it used to be said that Lombardy poplars and pea-fowls about a place, as they were signs of pride, prognosticated a fall.
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his opinions upon public questions there is no recorded testimony and all that can be said of them must be conjectural or at best inferential from a knowledge of the preponderance of certain sentiments and of the control which certain circumstances must have exercised upon his mind. In the long contention between the Lord Proprietary represented by the Governor and the lower house of Assembly, Mr. Chamberlaine was too young to form independent judgments, and probably accepted those of his father who was long a member of the Council and expected to maintain the rights and privileges of Lord Baltimore against the popular encroachments of the Assembly of Deputies. When the con- troversy which had continued almost equally long between the mother country and the colonies had culminated in the passage of the Stamp Act, he was not too young to share in the passionate protests with which that measure was received in Maryland and Talbot, and though nothing whatever is known of the position assumed by him at this great crisis, we should be probably doing his memory a great injustice, if we believed his opinions upon this obnoxious measure were not different from those of his father and brother and were different from those of the great majority of his fellow citizens of this state and county. But his father and brother had official relations and were under official obligations to the Proprietary Government, and whatever may have been their private sentiments of the Stamp Act, they were unwilling to compromise the Lord Proprietary by an avowal of hostility to the measures of the Crown and its advisers at a time when it was necessary to conciliate them for the preservation of rights and privileges which were in jeopardy. In 1768 Mr. Chamberlaine himself accepted office, and though the Stamp Act had been repealed, the principle of taxing the colonies had not been abandoned. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that either his views had undergone a change through the logic of interest or that he had from the first justified the course of the British ministry, and ap- proved the policy of Lord Baltimore in yielding a silent and politic assent to the taxation of his province. However, this is largely conjec- tural, though, it must be said, his subsequent conduct throws some light upon this portion of his career.
We are no better informed of the attitude assumed by Mr. Cham- berlaine in the famous controversy concerning the Proclamation and Vestry Act, a notable incident in our provincial history. In 1770 it will be remembered Governor Eden attempted the restoration of the old rates of the fees to which public offices were entitled, and the old tax of forty pounds of tobacco per poll, for the clergy, by an executive
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order, after the law of 1763, which had established the fees and the tax at a lower rate, had expired by limitation. Now, as Mr. Chamber- laine was an office holder, and from his youth had been a devoted son of the Church of England, he could hardly have severely condemned the course of Gov. Eden, though he may have thought it somewhat arbitrary. The bias of the judgment by self interest is so familar a moral phenomenon, that we should be surprised if we should learn that Mr. Chamberlaine conscientiously believed the old fees might be legally and honestly claimed; and as for the poll tax, there is little doubt he considered that sum of forty pounds per head a very inadequate com- pensation to the ministers of the church for their services. Those of the present day, and they are many, who believe the benefits conferred by the clergy are in a direct proportion to the amount of their stipends and gratuities, will easily pardon the sanction, prompted as it was by both priestly suggestion and pious motive, which so zealous a disciple as Mr. Chamberlaine gave to a measure of hardly doubtful legality but of unques- tionable inexpediency-that is to say, if he did give it his sanction, which is exceedingly probable. Moreover, he may be excused even by those who favor the restriction of prerogative to the narrowest limits and insist upon the most rigid conformity with the law of those in authority, when they remember that some of the first statesmen and legal minds, notably Daniel Dulaney, of the province, defended the course of the Governor with arguments of great power and acumen, and that it required the logic of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, learned in the best school of specious dialectic, a Jesuit College, to give a show of legality to the pop- ular opposition.
Upon the attitude assumed by Mr. Chamberlaine in regard to the measures of the British government imposing duties upon colonial im- ports, in the absence of express and direct testimony, we must as before look to circumstance and implication for such light as they can give, uncertain as it is. We have seen that he assumed office, as a collector of the Port of Oxford, the year following the passage by the Parliament of the Act to raise revenue from an import on certain articles of colonial importation, and though this office was of proprietary and not of royal appointment, it was necessary upon its assumption to take oaths of fidelity and obedience to the British crown, which act under the existing conditions affords presumption of there being no oppugnancy in his mind to the ministerial measures that he would have some share, indirect it is true, in carrying into execution and that were receiving violent pop- ular condemnation. We, in this day, might not find it difficult to point
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out men, reputable and deemed honorable, ready and willing to take offices of profit even when that involves them in the political incon- sistency, if we may not say the moral culpability of approving by their conduct what they condemn by their convictions; but we should find it difficult to conceive of one conscientious to scrupulosity, and raised above the sordid temptations of mercenary motive, as Mr. Chamber- laine was, who could give even such tacit consent as is implied in his oath and his willingness to enforce them, to measures of government really obnoxious to himself as well as to his fellow citizens. But again: if assuming that he did approve those measures which the great majority of his people thought were designed to abridge their liberties, we must find apology for his dissidence from popular opinions in his intense loyalty and reverence for kingly authority-sentiments which we, who know nothing of the sacredness of majesty, who question all rights, and acknowledge no prerogative, have wholly lost, and with them in great measure the power to appreciate their influence upon honest minds and hearts. With the adoption by the people in their irregular assem- blies of measures prohibitive of commercial intercourse with England and her West India colonies, and the formation of associations and committees of correspondence, for carrying these measures in effect; and particularly after the famous Boston Port Bill had been promulged, followed as it was by the resolutions of Congress forbidding trade with the mother county, Mr. Chamberlaine's active duties as Collector and Naval Officer at Oxford ceased, for there was nothing for him to do: and after the expiration of the proprietary rule by the expulsion of Governor Eden and the assumption of executive and legislative powers in the province, by the Convention, his official station ceased to have any recognition, and if it was not surrendered, it was as much because there was no one legally authorized, as he thought, to receive his resigna- tion as because he conscientiously thought it to be his duty, in the midst of a tumultuous and seditious people, to continue the recognition of his allegiance to his King and fidelity to his Lord, and because he thought he should not, or perhaps that he could not divest himself of these obliga- tions. When the Convention ordered that a test oath should be prof- fered to every citizen of the province as a pledge of fidelity, Mr. Cham- berlaine positively declined to accept it, declaring, as we may very well believe, in the absence of all testimony, that while he was no whit behind any one of those who framed this oath in his love of his native country, and while his silent aspirations for her welfare were no less incessant and warm than those of the most vociferous of the "Sons of Liberty,"
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he regarded the oaths he had already taken as a true sacrament, not to be violated by a change of fealty or by positive disobedience. He was accordingly enrolled among the non jurors, and subjected to all the penalties and disabilities which were subsequently imposed by law upon this class, such as the payment of treble taxes, deprivation of the elective franchise and exclusion from public office, to which must be added the obloquy and mistrust of patriot neighbors and friends. It is a part of our most familiar knowledge that the word tory, losing its original meaning of outlaw when it became the nickname and then the adopted name of a great political party in England, ceased to be a term of reproach; but that from our revolutionary era in America it has borne a sinister meaning because it was applied to the loyalists who favored a contin- uance of the royal authority in these provinces, though more particu- larly to those active partizans of the King and his ministers who give expression to their opinions and desires in acts of hostility to the patriot cause. There may have been some violent men who applied the name in this opprobrious sense to Mr. Chamberlaine; but that he deserved to bear it, for any participation in the councils or the procedures of the enemies of colonial independence cannot be said with truth. During the continuance of the war, he remained in the solitude of his home at Bonfield, a quiet though interested spectator of the great events which were occurring, without uttering a word, lifting a hand, or contributing a shilling for the defeat of the patriot cause, though doubtless longing for the adoption of some basis of reconciliation between the mother country and recalcitrant daughters upon which they could stand in harmonious union. Indeed it has been asserted of him that it was rather an excessive scrupulosity in the observance of his oaths than a condemnation of the opinions and conduct of the patriots which withheld him from active participation in the measures for colonial in- dependence.
An apology is hardly necessary for the insertion here of the following extracts which relate to the motives of many of the non-juring citizens of Talbot, who were accused of toryism. The first is from an incomplete, unrevised and inedited memoir of Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek, by the Hon. J. B. Kerr.
Samuel Chamberlaine, the younger, of Oxford, held this office [of Naval Officer] up to 1774, and left it without a blur or a blemish; but still having over and over again taken the usual oaths of office to the British crown, he was under a conscientious conviction of disfranchisement, being thus forbidden to qualify under other forms of oath up to his
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death. This pure-hearted man brought honesty, capacity and, some might add, too fine and sublimated a concurrence with his oath, to his public duties; but with an abiding hope for the permanency of the new order of things, after a national Declaration in 1776, he merely felt bound to renounce his own chances of official advancement, lest he might seem to balance counter oaths. From Maine to Georgia the nation- alized states of the Union, with belligerent rights confessed, had large bodies of men, once embarrassed from these soul entanglements in the beginning; and yet it was the policy of the day to place them all under a ban, at times with threatened penalty of treble taxes. Incident to the Great Rebellion, prior to 1660, and the later Scotch ones of 1715 and 1745, even exiles and confiscations, keenly remembered in many a family genesis, almost everywhere over the American colonies, so that a long and wasting war, inevitable on a declaration of independence, became a momentous question with all the anti-constitutional breach- faith [sic] on the side of Great Britain.
The second extract is a small part of a poorly written article in the Maryland Herald of Sept. 13, 1803, repelling the insinuation of toryism made against many Federalists.
Perhaps, indeed, it is certain, that a very slight comparison of the causes on which the motives and principles of the old tories were formed would appear scarcely censurable [sic] along side of those which now apparently influence and stimulate the adherents of democracy. Whilst innocent ignorance, much occasion of fear and the force of the sacred- ness of oaths formed the inactivity of the tories, what can we see of our democrats but an outrageous thirst for power and wealth, ever active in the destruction of that constitution which was framed by our wisest and best men.
A man who during the distractions of the war bore himself with the prudence and dignity of Mr. Chamberlaine was not likely to incur the lasting reproach of his fellow citizens, who when the passions of the hour had subsided respected his sincerity though they may have continued to condemn his judgment. After the war had closed, indeed before the signature of the treaty of peace he appears to have recovered any social prestige he may have lost, and regained the confidence of the people: and after the removal of his political disabilities, which seems to have been done as early as 1781 we find him taking part as a private citizen in public affairs, and even holding an office of much responsibility under the newly organized state government. Since the old system of levying taxes upon polls had been abolished by the constitution of 1776, no other had been adopted that was satisfactory, but in 1781 at a session of the General Assembly, held in November, an act was passed entitled an
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"Act to raise supplies for the year 1782" under which a board of assess- ment, review and collection for each county was formed, which was called the Commission of the Tax. The members for Talbot were Messrs. Thomas Sherwood, Howes Goldsborough, Samuel Chamber- laine, Pregrine Tilghman and Samuel Thomas. This board had other duties beside those above indicated, which need not be detailed, but it may be well enough to say that the collection and purchase of military stores for the Maryland soldiery was one, which ceased, of course, with the war. A seat in this board was held by Mr. Chamberlaine for many years, his name last appearing in 1803. In 1793 he was made one of the Trustees of the Poor of the county and in 1800 one of the Judges of Elec- tion for the third District.4 Mention is made of these appointments not as conferring any great honor upon him, but as indicative of the absence of any prejudice against him for his having assumed the position of a non juror, and of the restoration or continuance of the respect and con- fidence of his fellow citizens which he enjoyed previous to the war. There were some, in later years when the two great parties were form- ing, or had formed, who gratified their malignancy by references to his alleged toryism; but these were rebuked by the more temperate and
4 It may be well enough to note here, that previous to the year 1800 elections in the counties were held by the Sheriff acting as Judge, summoning, however, two Justices for the preservation of the peace only, at a single polling place, namely the Court House. But in 1798 and 1799 the Constitution of the State was altered by acts of Assembly, and in conformity with this amendment a law was passed in the last named year, entitled "An Act to regulate elections," authorizing the division of the counties into election Districts, and the appointment of election Judges by the county Courts. The division was made, the Judges appointed, and those for Talbot met at Easton on the 6th of August in the year 1800, "for the purpose of deliberating upon the means of discharging their important duties, and of fixing upon uniform rules for conducting the election," and were as follows:
First District William Hayward, Nicholas Hammond, and Henry Nicols, Esquires. Second District Henry Banning, William Hambleton and John Kersey, Esquires. Third District Samuel Chamberlaine, Samuel Dickinson and Joseph Martin, Esquires Fourth District John Roberts, Arthur Bryan and Charles W. Benny, Esquires.
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sensible of their own group of politicians, but more severely by his spot- less character and sterling virtues.
The failure of the government under the Articles of Confederation was too flattering a testimony to his political perpicacity, which had foreseen the result, to be deeply regretted by Mr. Chamberlaine; but when a more compacted system was instituted he fancied that he saw in that symbol of nationality, the Constitution of the United States, an imperfect imitation of that of Great Britain, and therefore gave to it such obeisance as his veneration for his ancient idol would allow. He also soon began to transfer a portion of that homage which he once thought was due only to royalty to Washington, and at last became as devout a worshipper at the shrine of our first American President as ever burned incense upon the altar of a deified Roman emperor. When the current of political opinion began to divide into two streams, which have maintained their distinction to the present day, Mr. Chamber- laine, as was natural, or, as one may say, necessary for a man of his bent of mind, drifted into that of the Federalists, whose fundamental principles of centralization harmonized with his own preferences for the monarchical form of government and whose alleged hostility to the lev- elling tendency which he verily thought was imparted by the American revolution and strengthened by the French teaching of the equality of men, corresponded with his own proclivities to an aristocratical form of society which were implanted by a provincial experience and nurtured by English example. There is no doubt his religious views and senti- ments had a controling influence in determining his party partialities and connections, for democracy and deism were intimately associated in a mind singularly firm in its convictions and reverent in its feeling. If he after the war ever indulged any political aspirations, they were confined to his own bosom, for if shown they would have been extin- guished by the exigencies of party success which could not be jeop- arded by the nomination of a person however fitted by integrity and ability for official station to whom was attributed the possession of tory sentiments. But he was not restrained by any imputations of dis- loyalty to his country nor did he refrain from any indifference to her policies, from participating in the political movements of the Federalists, for we find him attending a meeting of his party held at Easton, May 3, 1796, and appointed one of a committee to prepare an address to Congress urging the adoption of measures for the execution of Jay's treaty-matter then considered to be of momentous importance as involving the peace and prosperity of the country. We find him also attending another
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