1781 the Free State confiscated one hundred ninety-five acres
belonging to the Company and sold the land at auction.91

The Revolution also produced a new generation of leaders.
Counted among the gentry were Charles Carroll of Carrollton and
John Eager Howard. Carroll put the family fortune at risk by
signing the Declaration of Independence; he subsequently
succeeded to ownership of the family lands in 1782 upon the death
of his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis. Col. John Eager
Howard, who fought with George Washington, inherited Lunn's Lott
from his father, Cornelius, in 1777. Numbered among the new
merchant-chiefs  was Col. Samuel Smith, who resigned his
commission in 1779 to rescue the moribund family mercantile firm
of John Smith & Sons; this he did through privateering and
government contracts. He was joined in these enterprises by his
Scotch-Irish Presbyterian co-religionists and relatives, the
Steretts, the Spears, and the Buchanans, all of whom were heavily
invested in slaves, ships, and waterfront property.92

The Revolution also signalled a republican ideology that
encouraged break-up of ancestral estates. A favored technique of
the landed aristocracy had been to strictly settle family lands
so as to prevent any present generation from selling or
subdividing the ancestral land. As we have already seen, John
Moale employed this device when he devised Upton Court,
resurveyed to include four hundred-acre (including several
operating iron mines), to son Richard in 1740. Under the
entailment the "dead hand" of John Moale dictated that enjoyment

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