Mark McPherson (1754-1847)
MSA SC 3520-16776
Biography:
Mark McPherson was born in 1754 in Charles County, Maryland. The
son of a planter, McPherson likely lived on a small plantation that
provided income for the family. His father, Alexander McPherson, was a
man of modest wealth who owned several tracts of farm land in the
county; he died while Mark was still young, leaving his son a plot of
land that contained seventy-five acres. Another plot containing eighty
acres was split between Mark and his brothers (William, Alexander, and
John). The McPherson brothers received this land when their mother,
Elizabeth, died a short time after their father.[1]
Mark's
inheritance, totaling about ninety-five acres of Charles County land,
placed Mark McPherson within the great majority of the county’s free,
landowning population. Though he was one of the ninety-five percent of
free white males in Charles County that owned more than fifty acres of
land, McPherson fell just short of the 100 acre mark that three
quarters of this group surpassed. He likely continued to farm the land
that he had acquired from his family, dealing tobacco and grains at
Port Tobacco, the main center of trade in the county.[2] Despite the
size of his landholdings and his familial connections in the area, Mark
McPherson did not settle down on his property or attempt to start a
family of his own. Instead, he decided to take up arms for the cause of
the colonies against Britain.
Charles County was not a center of
radical patriotic attitudes in the years leading up to the Revolution,
making the motive behind McPherson’s service more intriguing. While a
number of governing bodies, several in Maryland, were established in
the colonies and spoke out against British policies and taxes, the
residents of Charles County seemed to be most reactionary against taxes
collected to pay the administrators and clergy of the Anglican Church
in the county. The Stamp Act was not supported by the county’s
inhabitants, but they met it with an attitude of avoidance more so than
rebellion, as they did to most of the other oppressive laws. This
seeming indifference to the major events that sparked the American
Revolution was likely due to the fact that Charles, being a rural
county, did not have as much to lose as the urban centers did, nor did
it have as easy of a way to mobilize its residents for action. It was
not until the beginning of the war that the revolutionary movement took
hold in the county and its inhabitants offered support to the patriot
cause.[3]
Lacking a strong and unified patriotic influence
around him, Mark McPherson probably went to war as a result of the
economic conditions he faced. Land was the currency of Charles County,
and, though he owned some, he was not one of the wealthy elites with
large landholdings who were influential in the county. McPherson was
young when he inherited the land that his father left behind, and,
around that time, Charles County was entering a period of economic
difficulty. Port Tobacco had boomed as a market for importing and
exporting goods, but, as happened elsewhere in the colony, a depression
took hold in the early 1770s. Prices dropped, and talk of
non-exportation legislation threatened the transatlantic trade profits
that had steadily been coming in from Britain. There was also a problem
of growth, for Charles County’s population had greatly increased
throughout the course of the eighteenth century. Most of the
inhabitants were native-born rather than immigrants by the mid-1770s;
these growing numbers meant less land was available and that there were
fewer economic opportunities in the county, realities that McPherson
would have felt as a young planter at the time.[4]
Whatever his
reasons, McPherson enlisted into the Continental Army at Port Tobacco,
the town where he had previously traded and exported his goods, in
March of 1776. He joined as a Private in Capt. John Hoskins Stone's company
of the First Maryland Battalion, possibly with his brother, John.[5] He
marched to New York with the Battalion and participated in the Battle
of Brooklyn (Long Island) as a part of the Maryland Line. When the
Continental Army was reformed later that year, McPherson enlisted into
the First Maryland Regiment as a sergeant. After his second term of
enlistment expired, he reenlisted into Col. Peter Adams'
Regiment and was commissioned as a Lieutenant. McPherson fought in the
battles of Long Island, White Plains, Brandywine, Germantown, and
Monmouth, as well as at the storming of Stony Point, the siege of
Yorktown, and the taking of Cornwallis during his military career. He
also followed his regiment to the southern theater and fought with them
there, and he remained in the army until the end of the Revolutionary
War.[6]
Serving in the war for this length of time, McPherson
saw very different faces of the Revolution. His first experience with
combat was at Long Island, a terrible defeat that almost ended the war.
By the war’s close, however, the Maryland Line had gained a reputation
for being an elite fighting force and a vital part of the Continental
Army, which itself had matured greatly since the fighting began.
McPherson served with the Maryland troops though their highs and lows;
they shined at Long Island and were victorious at Cowpens, but they
were blamed for the loss that the army suffered at Guilford Court
House. He also served in the battles of Camden and Eutaw Springs.[7]
After
he left the service, Mark McPherson could have remained in a Charles
County that persisted much the same as it had been before he enlisted.
Land and farming were still the most important aspects of Charles, and
most of the area’s inhabitants lived on plantations spread throughout
the county. The largest town, Port Tobacco, had only ninety-nine
residents in 1782, but it remained the county’s marketing center after
the war ended. Britain quickly attempted to regain its tobacco trade
with the Chesapeake, and a renewed demand from overseas raised prices
and boosted the area’s economy. Opportunities were created for the men
returned from war, as connections made in the service could be and were
exploited to produce business prospects.[8] Even though he did return,
these developments were not enough to hold him in his home county
permanently.
Tempted by the new opportunities and boom in the
tobacco market, McPherson returned to Charles County for a short time
after the war ended. However, he likely had to deal with the same
struggles he had faced in the county prior to leaving for the
Continental Army. The postwar appeal of Charles was deceiving; he knew
that, despite its rural appearance, there was little land that could be
easily acquired. Much of the soil that was available had been exhausted
by years of use, and McPherson had experienced the volatile nature of
an economy centered on tobacco during his years as a farmer before the
war. He still had brothers and sisters in Charles County and the land
that he had inherited from his father, but these anchors were not
enough to hold him to his home.
Having served through the end of
the war, McPherson was granted bounty land by the state. He was given
the rights to 200 acres, an officer's share, in Allegany County,
Maryland, near what is now Savage River State Forest in present-day
Garrett County.[9] Despite having the opportunity to claim more land
than he owned at the time and remain in his home state, McPherson
decided to quit Maryland altogether and moved to Lincoln County,
Kentucky. He claimed his bounty land was “absolutely good for nothing .
. . unfit for Cultivation,” and he sold the land in 1815 at fifty cents
per acre. McPherson recorded that selling his land at such a low rate
caused him a dear loss, but he got the exact value of the land as it
was assessed in 1812.[10]
Although the date in which McPherson
relocated to Kentucky is unknown, he was counted in the census of
Charles County in 1790. However, he married and was living in Lincoln
County, Kentucky, in 1795.[11] This indicates he had been in the area
for at least a small amount of time prior, as his wife was from the
area and he could not have known her before his arrival. It is likely
that McPherson returned to Maryland for a few years after he left the
service in an attempt to earn enough money to make a trip west, and he
received his bounty land in the late 1780s or early 1790s.[12] Seeing
that the land was not profitably workable, he then sold the tracts he
had received for his service and began his emigration to Kentucky a
short time later.
In the years after the Revolutionary War,
Kentucky became a popular destination for settlement. The territory,
part of Virginia until 1792, had a population of about 150 inhabitants
when the war began due to a lack of exploration and the presence of
Native Americans. By 1784 this number had doubled, and the growth
continued; the 1790 census recorded a population of over 73,000. Most
of these new inhabitants were migrants from eastern states, as was the
case with McPherson. The abundance of land and the economic opportunity
it could offer made Kentucky attractive to the migrants, for the states
that these people were leaving, such as Maryland, were already settled,
their lands owned and being worked. The Kentucky territory had vast
amounts of acreage that could be claimed by settlers and used for
whatever purpose they desired.[13]
Not only were settlers from
the east interested in moving to Kentucky, but, as it was a part of
Virginia’s territory during the Revolution, many Virginian soldiers
were promised land in the area for their service. The presence of other
veterans may have been an attractive feature to McPherson as he had
served, possibly even beside some of the men who settled there. The
county he settled in, Lincoln, included land that was reserved for
military claims, increasing the likelihood that McPherson settled there
because of his military ties. Aaron Spalding, another veteran from
Maryland and a man that McPherson served with throughout the war,
relocated to nearby Washington County, Kentucky, and they remained
close enough for McPherson to testify to his service in pension
hearings.[14]
While McPherson had been a small planter in his
native Charles County, Maryland, his move to and land ownership in
Kentucky placed him in his new state’s wealthy minority. Numbers
indicate that over half of the free, white male population of Kentucky
did not own land at the turn of the nineteenth century. Another
estimate places this total at two-thirds around that time.[15]
Inclusion in this minority was a strong contrast to McPherson’s status
in Maryland; before, he had been a planter wealthier than only five
percent of the rest of his county and poorer than at least three
quarters of its remaining population. By 1820, McPherson owned 100
acres of land outright and was paying off another fifty acres in his
possession. His 150 acre total was nowhere near that of the largest
landholder in the state, who owned over 100,000 acres, but the fact
that he owned two tracts placed him above the vast majority of the
other landholders who possessed only one (eighty-six percent of
Kentucky’s population in 1820). Not only was McPherson a member of the
landed minority in his new state, but he was also in the minority of
that group as the owner of multiple tracts.[16] His migration
transformed him from a small planter with no chance of improvement to a
member of an exclusive group at the top of society.
After
settling in Kentucky, McPherson remained a planter until age and
infirmities prevented him from working. He was likely a popular person
in his community, as fifty local men supported him by signing a
petition to reinstate his pension after it had been denied. Mary
Middleton, the woman he married in 1795, was around twenty at the time
of their marriage, and the couple had eight children together: Lydia,
Alexander, Samuel, Walter, William, Henry, John Bailey, and Mark Jr.
The McPherson family lived out their days in Lincoln County, sustained
by the money he had earned through farming and the pension he had been
granted in 1818. Mark McPherson died in Lincoln County in 1847.[17]
Jeffrey Truitt, 2014
Notes:
[1] Charles County Register of Wills, Wills, 1760-1766, Reverse, MdHR 7286-2, 106 [MSA C681-6, 01/08/10/06].
[4]
Lee, The Price of Nationhood, 22, 34, 104, 110.
[6]
Pension of Mark McPherson.
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