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Thomas Bacon’s Life
Birth and Family
Thomas Bacon was
the son of William Bacon and his wife, Elizabeth Richardson, the
daughter of Anthony and Lydia Richardson. The couple were married in St. Bees, Cumberland,
on 27 August 1710. Thomas was probably their eldest child, born c. 1711 or 1712, followed by a
younger brother Anthony, who was baptized on 24 January 1716. After the death of his wife
Elizabeth Bacon c.1725, William married again and had a third son, named William, born after
1725. No records mention that Thomas had any other siblings. Although most sources state that
Bacon was born on the Isle of Man, it is probable that he was born in Cumberland and that his
family later moved to the Isle. Lawrence Wroth, in A History of Printing in Colonial America,
mentions Cumberland as Bacon’s birthplace and that his father was a master mariner, but notes
that he had been unable to document either as fact.
Early Career
Little is known
of Bacon’s early life, but he clearly received an exemplary education, both
in academic studies and in music. Accounts of Bacon’s reason for moving to Dublin and his
activities while there vary considerably in their details. According to Jonathan Boucher, writing
in the 1790s, the shipowners of Whitehaven sent Bacon to Dublin to manage a coal depot. By
1737, when he published his first work, Bacon was reportedly working in the customs service.
Bacon’s obituary referred to A Compleat System of the Revenue of Ireland, in its Branches of
Import, Export, and Inland Duties, Containing I. An Abridgement of English and Irish Statutes
Relating to the Revenue of Ireland. II. The Former and Additional Book of Rates Inwards and
Outwards, etc. III. A View of the Duties which Compose the Revenue of Ireland, etc. IV. The
Method of Making Entries, etc. as a “laborious and judicious Performance.” The abridgement of
English and Irish statutes indicates an early interest in the codification of laws that Bacon
brought to his later compilation of Maryland statutes.
Leo
Lemay identifies Bacon as the publisher of the Dublin Mercury, a bi-weekly
newspaper that began publication on 23 January 1741/42. Bacon was also a bookseller and
printer, according to the notice: “Printed by Thomas Bacon, Printer and Bookseller, at Bacon’s
Coffee-House in Essex Street.” The latter address corresponds to another observation of
Boucher’s, that while Bacon was managing the coal depot he “became acquainted with a smart
widow, who kept a coffee-house, whom he married.” Henry Callister, on the other hand, a friend
of Bacon’s after he settled in Talbot County, offered a different version in a letter written to his
brother Hugh, dated 28 July 1744. The Callisters were also from the Isle of Man, and Bacon was
bringing with him letters for Henry, the representative in Oxford of the Liverpool firm of Foster
Cunliffe and Sons. “This Mr. Bacon you speak of,” wrote Henry, “I suppose is brother to Mr.
Anto. Bacon who kept a store on this River and is now a Merchant in London, for I heard that
one Bacon, a Brother of his in Dublin who wrote a Book of Rates, was expected in this Country
after getting orders in London to be inducted Parson of our Parish, and that he had another
Brother in Dublin who kept a Coffee House.”
Some
biographies of Thomas have identified the brother keeping the coffee house as
William, believing William to have been an elder half-brother of Thomas and Anthony. But the
simplest reconciliation of the various fragments of information about Thomas Bacon’s time in
Dublin, together with probate information for both Anthony and William Bacon, makes it likely
that William was a younger brother and that the widow with the coffee house did indeed marry
Thomas Bacon. Bacon’s wife and their son John accompanied him to Maryland.
Religious Training
Sometime around
1743 Bacon decided to study for the ministry, rather than continue in a
civil service or publishing career, and returned to the Isle of Man where he prepared under the
tutelage of Thomas Wilson, Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man. Wilson ordained Bacon as a deacon
on 23 September 1744 at Kirk Michael and as a priest — “in order to go into the Plantations” —
on 10 March 1745. Bacon and his family sailed for Maryland in the spring or summer of that
year.
Arrival in Maryland
Bacon’s link to
Talbot County, where he first settled, probably came through his younger
brother Anthony, who was in the colony as early as 1733, when he lived in Bullenbrook Hundred
in the household of his uncle, merchant Anthony Richardson. As Anthony Bacon was only about
seventeen at the time, he was undoubtedly learning the mercantile trade from his uncle, with
whom he was associated in business until the latter’s death in 1741.
St. Peter’s Parish
Thomas Bacon took
up the position of curate of St. Peter’s Parish, assisting the aged and
infirm minister, Daniel Maynadier. Callister wrote of Maynadier, “He is very much esteemed by
the best of our people, and almost universally he is esteemed a clever fellow, and I believe a good
man (12 November 1744). After Maynadier’s death, on 23 February 1746, Bacon received from
Governor Thomas Bladen a letter of induction appointing him to the position of parish rector.
Upon presenting the letter and his certificates of ordination to the vestry on 18 March, that body
unanimously voted to receive Bacon as their minister. In an August letter to a friend in the Isle
of Man, Callister wrote of Bacon, “He is now our parson, and I think him the worthiest
clergyman I ever knew, not excepting the Bishop” [of Sodor and Man, the Thomas Wilson who
had ordained Bacon]. By this time, Callister had moved from Oxford to the Head of Wye and
Bacon had relocated his family from the same town to Dover, on the Choptank River.
Music
The two friends
shared not only their origins in the Isle of Man but also a love of music,
easily indulged when they lived in the same town, more rarely pursued after they left it. In letters
written in November 1744, shortly after Bacon’s arrival, Callister told friends in Man that “I
should have pass’d for a tip top Musician if the Revd. Mr. Bacon had not come in.... His
performance on the Violin & Violincello has afforded us much delight & his Conversation as
much. I have a pretty set of Musick & he has still a better. We have had several concerts
together, and may have frequent opportunities to divert ourselves in that way.”
Tuesday Club
The following year
found Bacon across the Bay in Annapolis, delighting the members of
the capital’s most famous social group, the Tuesday Club, with his musical abilities. The
minutes of the 26 November 1745 meeting recorded that “This night the Rev. Mr. Thomas
Bacon, Being invited to the Society, entertained them agreeably with Instrumental music on the
violin, and was by the Society admitted an Honorary member.” The Club often entertained non-
members in the status of Stranger, but made only a few guests honorary members. Bacon
attended meetings of the club irregularly, not returning for a second visit until 24 February 1747.
At that time, Charles Cole, in excusing his own absence from the meeting, wrote that “if the Rev
Mr. Bacon, one of our worthy honorary members, be with you, as have heard he will, Mr.
Speaker [Cole] being absent, must desire the favor of Mr. Secretary, to make my Compliments of
congratulations on his appearance in Club, after So long an absence.”
Bacon returned on
the 26th of May to help celebrate the second anniversary of the club’s
founding, this time in the company of three other honorary members, one of whom, Robert
Morris, was now the Oxford representative of Foster Cunliffe and Sons. For the evening’s
performance of string instruments and two singers, Morris played the violin and Bacon the viol
de gamba. His next visit came in November 1749, when he was accompanied by a “Stranger”
well-known to him, his brother Anthony, soon to leave for England and commissioned to procure
a seal for the club. The following year, Bacon returned in May for the fifth anniversary
celebration, at which the musical members played the anniversary music, “Consisting of an
overture, air for his honor [the club president], minuet, and Pastorale, Composed by Mr. Bacon,
otherwise Signr. Lardini.”
Bacon, Morris,
and the Rev. John Gordon constituted the “Eastren Shore Club” or
“Eastren Shore Triumvirate” of honorary members. In September 1750 the club noted with
regret the “late Inexpressible loss” of Morris, and approved the request of the remaining
members to replace Morris with Mr. James Dickinson. “The Revd. Mr. Thomas Bacon
Entertained the Club with Several excellent pieces of music Solo, upon the violin after Supper.”
In May 1751, on the occasion of the sixth anniversary, Bacon requested a “Commission ... for
the Eastren Shore Triumvirate,” a request granted two days later, naming the three as “a Legal,
valid, effectual, and Right worshipful Triumvirate.” At the same meeting, “our Trusty and well
beloved John Bacon Esqr.” was appointed “a right worthy and dignified Squire of our Eastren
Shore Triumvirate under the noble title of Sir John.”
John Bacon, known
to club members as John Gabble, was a vocalist who had performed
during the anniversary program with “an excellent good Grace.” He was also Thomas Bacon’s
son. On 6 August 1754, Governor Horatio Sharpe issued a commission appointing John Bacon
as third Lieutenant of a “Company of Foot now raising within the province.” Bacon appeared at
the 24 September meeting of the club, requesting a commission from the president to serve on
behalf of the club against the French. The president refused his request and the attorney general
noted that Bacon “had sat all the time upon his Bum, and never once offered to rise and make a
proper obeisance to the Chair.” Bacon replied that he had been on guard duty, with the army’s
recruits, at the guardhouse the preceding night and did not have the strength to stand for any
period of time. The secretary then noted that Bacon was “Second Leutenant to the Independent
Maryland foot Company, now on their march, against the French at the Ohio, which commission,
it is supposed, he got by his gallant behaviour in the Station of Triumvirate Champion.”
Thomas Bacon
attended meetings of the Tuesday Club through 1754, continuing to
entertain with his musical performances and to compose music for the club’s anniversaries. He
outlasted both of his fellow members of the Eastern Shore Triumvirate, Gordon’s last appearance
being in May 1751 and Dickinson’s in October 1752. Alexander Hamilton’s The History of the
Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club and the Records of the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, 1745-
56 provide a complete account of Bacon’s association with the Tuesday Club – a relationship
significant not only for the opportunity it provided Bacon to compose and perform, but because
the associations he enjoyed as a result of membership in the club undoubtedly aided him greatly
when he embarked upon his compilation of the laws of Maryland.
Religious Activities
Ministering to
the inhabitants of his Talbot parish was, of course, Bacon’s primary
activity, the Tuesday Club being only a pleasant and sociable diversion, an interlude of friendship
and culture in the increasingly sophisticated capital of the colony. No Alexander Hamilton,
however, followed Bacon as he made his parish rounds, so the evidence for this aspect of his life
is less easily obtained. But some clues do exist that offer evidence of his concern for the
education of the children of his parish, for the religious upbringing of the slaves held by his
parishioners, and for the internal affairs of the colony’s Anglican church.
Bacon, himself a
slaveowner, combined a concern for the welfare of the parish’s black
population with an acquiescence, at best, in a social order that saw Africans and African
Americans held in bondage as occupying their rightful place in the ‘chain of being.’ Two
Sermons Preached to a Congregation of Black Slaves at the Parish of S.P. In the Province of
Maryland, By an American Pastor (London, 1749), addressed to “my dear black brothers and
sisters,” held that blacks occupied the same position with respect to whites as children did to
loving fathers, but that blacks who behaved properly, who did their duty toward their masters and
followed the teachings of the church, had the same expectation of going to heaven as did whites.
Four Sermons upon the Great and Indispensable Duty of All Christian Masters and Mistresses to
Bring up Their Negro Slaves in the Knowledge and Fear of God (London, 1750) signaled
Bacon’s equal concern with the obligations of masters to the people they held in bondage. The
latter volume was included among books chosen for distribution by the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge.
Charity Working School
Bacon did not
limit his concern for the well-being of slaves to their religious education.
In 1750 he initiated a movement to provide a school for free, manual training for children
without regard to race, sex, or status. The subscription paper seeking funds for the Charity
Working School cited the “profaneness and debauchery, idleness and immorality ... especially
among the poorer sort in this province” as justification for its appeal. Yearly subscriptions would
allow for “maintaining and teaching poor children to read, write and account” and “instructing
them in the knowledge and practice of the Christian religion, as taught in the Church of
England.” “God only knows,” wrote Bacon, “the necessity of such work in this province, where
education is hardly to be attained to, at any rate, by the children of the poor.” Within a few years,
Bacon had raised sufficient funds to purchase 120 acres of land from David Robinson and built a
substantial brick home and school. The school flourished for a time, but three decades after its
founding, with Bacon and most of the trustees dead, the property was turned over to the county
for use as a poorhouse.
Thomas Bacon’s
abilities were recognized as well within his congregation and among the
clergy of Maryland. The parish church at Whitemarsh had fallen into disrepair prior to Bacon’s
tenure, but after his arrival, the church was enlarged to nearly double its original size to
accommodate the growing numbers of parishioners. Bacon also oversaw repairs to the chapel of
ease and reinstituted services in that location. When the clergy of Maryland met in Annapolis in
August 1753 to consider the question of clerical discipline and the quality of Lord Baltimore’s
appointments, the gathering appointed Bacon as clerk and recorder of the proceedings. The
meeting had been prompted by an address issued by Thomas Cradock, a Baltimore County
minister, in which he laid the blame for the lack of religious zeal among the colonists to the
proprietor’s practice of appointing unsuitable men to the parishes in his colony. The group met
for two days, at the tavern of Mr. Middleton, where they prepared letters to both the proprietor
and the governor, working from drafts written by Bacon. The governor’s letter was delivered in
person, with the delegates met at the gate by Governor Sharpe, who conducted them into his
house and entertained them at dinner. It is ironic that following Bacon’s death, the proprietor
named as his successor at All Saints Parish in Frederick perhaps the most unsuitable man ever to
receive a living in Maryland – Bennett Allen, to replace a man characterized by historian Charles
Barker as the “most scholarly of the Maryland clergy.”
A smaller group
of clergymen reconvened in Annapolis in October of the same year “to
consider of an Address to the Proprietary against the dangerous Encroachments of Popery, and its
Growth in this Province.” According to Barker, Bacon played a conservative hand in the
meeting, preventing the group from organizing formally and thus from taking any action as a
body – a step opposed by the proprietor as an infringement on his prerogative. The only account
of the second gathering comes from Bacon’s own pen, in a report that he sent to England,
probably directed to Cecilius Calvert, the Principal Secretary. Bacon, aware of the apprehension
experienced by the governor and “Some Friends of the Government,” encouraged the other
Eastern Shore clergymen to remain at home, but, as he “told his Excellency ... I wou’d be upon
the Spot; as well to prevent Mischief, if in my Power, as to give him timely Notice of what was a
doing, that he might take proper Measures: which he approved.” He had also discussed the
matter with Edmund Jenings, the deputy secretary, “in the Conference Chamber [of the State
House] at a Ball given by the Governor,” prior to Jenings’s return to England on 15 September.
The more radical
portion of the clergymen present were led by Rev. Thomas Chase
(father of Samuel), at that time minister of St. Paul’s Parish in Baltimore. According to Bacon,
Chase “was the Man behind the scenes who managed the Wires, & some others present were
little more than Poppets played about by him in different Attitudes.” Chase had drawn up a list
of seventeen queries, read to the group by one of his puppets, at which point he asked the others
to approve a resolution to present the list to the Committee of Aggrievances of the Lower House.
Bacon argued long and persuasively against such action, convincing the others that to assert as
fact charges that were mostly supposition and to interfere in political matters would only bring
further disrepute upon the clergy. He held that religious goals would be better served by diligent
attention to ministerial duties, instructing their congregations in the “Knowledge of the holy
Scriptures, those eternal Bulwarks against Error & Superstition,” and thus enabling their flocks to
resist popery in all its forms. In the end, the entire body signed a memorial to the governor and
Chase with a few allies presented his charges to a member of the house committee. Bacon
reported that the “Memorial thrown by our rash Minority before the Committee, was by them
tack’d to their own Report concerning Popery, and fell together with it in the lower House.”
Bacon’s report
to the proprietor reveals more than the moderating influence that he
attempted to exert upon the proceedings. The missive provides testimony to the intellectual
attributes for which he is known – the skill of his pen and the quality of his mind. But Bacon’s
narrative also subtly reveals the place he enjoyed among the provincial gentry: he was entertained
as a guest by the governor both at a ball and at dinner, he enjoyed the confidence of the deputy
secretary, and he excused himself from the clerical gathering at one point “having promised to
meet Col. [Edward] Lloyd [of Talbot County] about this House, in Order to make Oath before
two Provincial Justices as one of the Witnesses to his Security-Bond as Agent [and Receiver
General], a man described as “the greatest merchant in the province” and one of the colony’s
wealthiest men. The following year, perhaps in recognition of his efforts on Lord Baltimore’s
behalf during the convocations of the clergy in Annapolis, the proprietor appointed Bacon one of
his domestic chaplains in Maryland, an honor that Bacon valued enough to identify himself
eleven years later on the title page of the Laws of Maryland as “Rector of All-Saints Parish ...
and Domestic Chaplain in Maryland to the Right Honourable Frederick Lord Baltimore.”
Legal Troubles
The middle years
of the decade, beginning in 1754, proved to be difficult ones for Bacon.
The early moves of the first incident appear in the criminal records of the June session of the
county court, in two seemingly unrelated entries. The first entry consisted of a recognizance
bond, in the amount of £10 and dated the 6th of June, requiring Bacon to present himself at court
during the current session “from day to day to answer unto such things as shall he then be
charged with.” The second entry related a prosecution by the Lord Proprietor against Rachel
Beck, “spinster a mulatto woman,” who on 10 May 1753 “did commit fornication with a certain
person to the [grand] jurors af[oresai]d unknown ... [who] “did beget then and there a bastard
child on the body of the same Rachel.” Beck pleaded guilty and was committed to the custody of
sheriff James Dickinson until her fine and fees were paid. No further mention was made of
Bacon’s bond nor did he appear in connection with any case heard at that session.
Rachel Beck
reappeared in the criminal proceedings in August 1755 when the justices
again committed her to the sheriff’s custody “until she give security in the sum of one hundred
pounds current money for her appearance at the next assizes to be held for Talbot County and
then and there answer until all such matters and things as shall be objected against her.” The
brief entry in the criminal proceedings may have related to a case pending in the civil court,
which began when the justices ordered the sheriff on 9 June to produce Beck in court to answer a
plea of trespass upon the case initiated by Thomas Bacon, with William Goldsborough acting as
his attorney. The clerk entered the date in the court proceedings as 9 June 1755, but the
summons must actually have been issued in 1754, as the case was continued from over a year and
yet reached a settlement in August 1755, the court session where the entry can be found. A 1754
date would mean that Bacon initiated his suit immediately after Beck’s trial, rather than having
waited a full year to take action.
Bacon’s charge
stated that “whereas the said Thomas is a good true faithful chaste
virtuous and honest liege subject of our Lord the King ... and of good name fame reputation
conversation and behaviour among his neighbors ... entirely clear and free and unsuspected of
committing any adultery or any other diabolical or atrocious crime, ... nevertheless the said
Rachel ... most unjustly wickedly and maliciously intending the same Thomas not only in his
good name fame credit and reputation afd greatly to hurt and scandalize, but also into danger of
punishment by the laws of this province to be inflicted on persons committing adultery ... the
twenty ninth day of April in the year ... seventeen hundred and fifty four at the county afd him the
same Thomas falsely and maliciously... did ... charge and accuse with having committed
adultery with her the same Rachel and begetting a bastard child.” By Bacon’s account, during
the June 1754 court a bill of indictment charging Bacon with adultery on 10 May 1753 [the date
of the fornication for which Beck was prosecuted] was presented to both the justices and the
grand jurors as a true bill on the basis of false testimony. “The jurors of the said grand inquest
after a diligent inquiry of the matter ... did endorse [the bill on the back] to the justices afd that
they thereof were ignorant.” In other words, the grand jury referred the bill for trial but expressed
doubts that Beck had truthfully named Bacon as the father of her child. When the case came to
trial, only Beck was prosecuted, although Bacon had been required to attend the court in
anticipation of a charge against him as well. Bacon thus sued Beck for damages to the value of
£100 sterling for the loss of his reputation, his legal expenses, and the “hindrance [he suffered] in
doing his honest and lawfull affairs.”
Beck, through her
attorney James Nicols, requested a series of continuances, which
carried the case through to the August 1755 session, when it finally came to trial after Beck
entered a plea of not guilty. The sheriff, James Dickinson, called a panel of petit jurors to hear
the case, but Beck challenged it on the grounds that Dickinson was “a near kin” to Bacon and
might, therefore, have filled the jury with men disposed to favor Bacon. Dickinson, who had
come to the colony in the early 1740s, acted as a factor for Bacon’s brother Anthony – and was
the first cousin of the two brothers, being the son of their maternal aunt Jane and her husband,
Patrick Dickinson.
The justices
agreed that Beck’s objection was sufficiently valid to warrant dismissing the
first panel and ordered the coroners to seat a second panel. Nevertheless, the jurors who heard
the testimony, which was not recorded in the proceedings, determined that Beck was guilty and
assessed the damages that Bacon had requested. Yet another time, Beck was committed to the
custody of the sheriff, to be kept in “the public prison” until the damages, fees, and costs were
paid. Curiously, although the jury found Beck guilty and awarded substantial damages in the
amount of £100 sterling (not current money, which would have been a lesser sum), they assessed
the court costs at only one pound of tobacco, so nominal an amount as to be the equivalent of
none at all. It is difficult to know whether that award signaled any hesitation on the jury’s part
about the validity of Beck’s accusation. And it is doubtful that Bacon ever collected that sum
from Beck, although he might have obtained some compensation – were he willing to pursue the
matter through further suits – from Feddeman Rolle, who had appeared as Beck’s security,
making him liable for payment should Beck lose the case and fail to pay Bacon the sums
awarded. Bacon had ultimately prevailed, but not before being subjected to the public
humiliation of an accusation of having committed adultery and fathering a bastard child.
Death and Remarriage
Bacon’s
first wife, Mary, died in the interval between the original prosecution of
Beck for bearing a bastard child and Bacon’s prosecution of Beck for slander. In 1755, Bacon’s
son John (evidently his only child by his first marriage) died while serving in the French and
Indian War. The Maryland Gazette had reported in the fall of 1754 that two units of soldiers
“raised in this Province to go against the French” had left Annapolis to march to Frederick
County. The second group departed under the command of Lt. John Bacon. On April 8, 1756,
Jonas Green published the report of a deposition by James Tucker that he had been at Capt.
Waggoner’s fort in Virginia “and heard some of Capt. Waggoner Company say, that Mr. John
Bacon, Lieutenant of Capt. Dogworthy Company, was killed and scalp by the Indians about 4 or
5 Miles from Cumberland Fort.” John Gabble would no longer accompany his father to
Annapolis or add his voice to those of other instruments at musical gatherings. The deaths of his
only family members thus added to the difficulties of these years. Bacon remarried in 1756, but
while the marriage might have restored in some measure the family that Bacon had so recently
lost, in its own way embroiled the minister in a different set of legal problems. Rather than
challenging his moral authority through accusations of personal wrong-doing, the new cases
called into question his faithful performance of his ministerial duties.
On 10 December
1755, Bacon had officiated at the marriage of Elizabeth Bozman,
daughter of Col. Thomas Bozman, a prominent county resident, and the Rev. John Belchier, an
adventurer with one wife already in England. Bozman left her husband in Philadelphia when she
learned of the bigamous nature of her marriage, returned to Talbot County, and within the year
married Bacon. In neither instance had marriage bans been read from the pulpit or a public
notice been placed at the courthouse door or meeting house, nor in either case was there a
certificate from the clerk of the court or another minister stating that such notice had been given.
The legislature had set the penalty for failure to follow proper procedures at five thousand
pounds of tobacco – a portion of which fine would go to anyone informing the court of an
infraction of the law. Bacon found himself facing prosecution for his actions in both marriages.
The first case
concerned Bacon’s own marriage to Elizabeth Bozman. On 11 November
1756, the justices ordered the sheriff to bring Bacon to the March court to answer a civil suit filed
by Archibald McCallum, on behalf of himself as the informer and the Lord Proprietor,
demanding payment of the five thousand pound fine. McCallum, a Talbot innkeeper, charged
that Bacon “did privately contract marriage with a certain Elizabeth Belchier alias Bozman” and
that the couple married contrary to the Act of Assembly regulating marriages [it would appear
that Bacon himself performed the ceremony, as no minister was prosecuted]. “Although often
required[,] the afd five thousand pounds of tobacco or any part whereof ...[Bacon] hath not paid
but the same to them to pay altogether refused and doth still refuse.” The case was continued
through four court sessions to March of the following year, when Bacon finally agreed that he
“cannot gainsay the action but oweth ... the said five thousand pounds,” to which, by this time,
his refusal to pay without going to court added 258 pounds and 6d. in court costs.
In March 1757, at
the same court session in which McCallum brought his civil suit,
Bacon appeared in court to answer criminal charges filed by James Nicols (who had been Beck’s
attorney, but was now the proprietor’s prosecutor for Talbot County). Nicols “gave the justices
to understand” that Bacon had married Bozman and Belchier without proper notice by which
action he forfeited a second fine of five thousand pounds of tobacco. The case was continued for
two years until the March 1759 session, “whereupon the attorney of the afd Ld Propr[ietar]y saith
that against the afd Thomas Bacon ... the said Ld Propry will not prosecute.” At one court
session, in November 1757, Bacon had said “that he was not thereof guilty and thereof of good
and evil did put himself upon the country,” but for reasons not explained a jury was not
impaneled to hear the charges. Nor did Nicols offer any explanation for the decision to drop the
suit.
The toll that the
events of these years took on Bacon’s spirit is revealed by a letter written
to Henry Callister in March 1757: “‘few are the friends I have now in this world....If bad
[news] keep it to yourself for I have no other for some time past and begin to be heartily tired of
it. I would not write to you on such a scrap of paper, if I had plenty of it as formerly; but the man
without money or credit, must do as he can. Music has departed and gone into another world
from me.”
Removal to Frederick
It is not
surprising, therefore, that when the living of All Saints parish in Frederick –
considered to be the most lucrative in the colony and about as far removed from his troubles in
Talbot as any place in the colony could be – became vacant and was offered to Bacon by the
vestry, he accepted the position of curate, with eventual appointment as rector. The family
moved from Dover to Frederick, where Bacon was invested with the living of All Saints in 1760.
Little evidence remains of Bacon’s activities in his new parish, but in 1763 he did receive an
appointment as a member of the board of visitors charged with organizing a free school in the
county. During these years, of course, Bacon worked on his monumental project of collecting
the colony’s laws, by a laborious process of examining original records and transcribing entries,
and then arranging for their publication. As this project was drawing to a close, Bacon
apparently took up his pen once more to debate constitutional and political issues in the service
of the proprietor.
On 17 November
1763, the Public Ledger in London had printed an anonymous series of
questions concerning the character of Maryland’s provincial government, questions clearly
hostile in tone to the proprietary position. The following year, another anonymous pamphlet,
similar in tone to the Ledger questions, appeared as written “By a Friend to Maryland,” under the
title “Remarks upon a Message sent by the Upper to the Lower House” during the March-April
1762 session of the legislature. (According to Wroth’s analysis of the typography, the
“Remarks” came from Benjamin Franklin’s press, and presumably were written by Franklin.)
Toward the end of the year, a second pamphlet of one hundred and sixty pages appeared, also
written by a “Friend to Maryland,” under the title “An Answer to the Queries ... and to the
Remarks.”
The Calvert
Papers collection at the Maryland Historical Society contains a rough draft of
the latter pamphlet, a manuscript with extensive corrections in a different hand. Comparison of
the corrections with other manuscript materials in the collection points to Cecilius Calvert, the
Principal Secretary, as the editor. The original draft itself is not in Thomas Bacon’s handwriting,
but Daniel Dulany, writing to Cecilius Calvert on 10 September 1764, stated that “It was said
that an Answer was preparing to the Remarks with the assistance of Mr. Bacon. He is an
ingenious man and well acquainted with the springs of our Political Disputes.” Bacon cannot be
positively identified as the author of the rough draft, but a learned essay ably arguing the
proprietary side of the array of issues that embroiled Maryland politics would be entirely
consistent with the skills he demonstrated during the convocations of the clergy a decade earlier.
(The pamphlets, in an abridged form, are included as an appendix to volume 59 of the Archives of
Maryland, Proceedings and Acts of the Assembly, 1764-65, pp 372-457.)
Bacon’s Estate
Bacon died
intestate in Frederick on 24 May 1768, leaving his widow Elizabeth and three
daughters, Rachel, Elizabeth, and Mary. The court-appointed appraisers valued his property at
£384.10.10, not an enormous estate but one that placed him well above the median wealth of his
contemporaries. Music may have departed, but Bacon retained his “old harpsichord” and “two
old violins.” He owned a gold snuff box, valued at £22.10.10 and left as a legacy to his wife, and
a number of pieces of silver: six tablespoons, six teaspoons, and a strainer. A pair of temple
spectacles testified both to his age and to the library that he owned: a listing of titles that covered
four pages of the inventory and included a number of medical books, religious works, many
classics of literature, two gardening books, and two copies of his own “Bacon’s Laws,” one
stitched and one bound. Twenty-eight small framed and glazed pictures decorated his walls as
did two large portraits, one of Bishop Thomas Wilson and the other of his brother Anthony;
Bacon also owned three dozen prints depicting the same Bishop Wilson. And he owned three
slaves, a boy and a woman and child, valued at £100.
Elizabeth Bacon’s
payments out of Bacon’s estate included £20 for her husband’s funeral,
£3.5.0 for the coffin in which he was buried, and 2s. 6d. for having the corpse shaved.
The Bacons’ evidently rented their land and home from Daniel Dulany, Jr., son of the developer of
Frederick County and still a major landowner in the area, paying £35 rent for the property. The
account submitted on 9 July 1769 listed payments totaling £188.1.1, but was not the final
accounting, although the only record to survive. In June of 1768, Benedict Calvert had submitted
a petition to the General Assembly on behalf of Bacon’s daughters, but it was decided in the
negative by the Lower House on the second reading. The substance of the petition does not
survive but must have dealt with settlement of Bacon’s estate. It is worth noting that a number of
prominent members of the house, including William Paca, James Dickinson, Thomas Jennings,
and James Hollyday, voted in favor of the petition and that Benedict Calvert was a member of the
upper house and governor’s council. By the time that Bacon’s brother Anthony wrote his will in
1785, Thomas’s daughter Elizabeth was in England but Rachel and Mary still lived in Maryland;
Mary had married a Moses Passapae and Rachel was the wife of Risdon Bozman Harwood.
Obituary
Bacon’s obituary,
which appeared in the 9 June 1768 issue of the Maryland Gazette,
summarized his life as follows:
On
Tuesday, the 24th Ult. Died at Frederick-Town, in Frederick County, the Rev’d
Thomas Bacon, Rector of All Saints Parish, in that County, Author of a laborious
and judicious Performance entitled, A Complete System of the Revenue in
Ireland, published in 1737, by Order of the Chief Commissioners and Governors
of the Revenue, in that Kingdom. He also published several other valuable
Pieces; and in the Decline of Life, by several years intense Labour, compiled a
compleat Body of the Laws of this Province, as lately published. – His humane,
benevolent Disposition and amiable Deportment, gained him the Love and Esteem
of all his Parishioners. He was likewise an affectionate Husband, a tender Parent,
a kind Master, and a most agreeable Companion; which renders his Death not
only a Loss to his acquaintances but to Society in general.
Thomas Bacon’s Laws of
Maryland
Planned Abridgement of
the Laws
In his 1757
letter to Henry Callister, quoted in part above, Bacon had also written that
‘[t]he laws are my employment and my amusement,” referring to a project on which he had first
embarked in 1753 and which culminated in the work for which he is still known, the Laws of
Maryland at Large, with proper Indexes, printed in 1765 by Jonas Green. Lawrence C. Wroth, in
his comprehensive A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland, 1686-1776, described Bacon’s
compilation as “not only the most important of the legal publications of the Province of
Maryland, but ... also to have been a specimen of typography which has not been exceeded in
dignity and beauty by any production of an American colonial press”.
Bacon submitted a
petition to the Talbot County court in December 1753 that outlined his
initial proposal for an abridgement of all the laws currently in force, organized under an
alphabetical list of subject headings, similar to his earlier work on the Irish revenue laws. He
made this proposal, Bacon stated, “by approbation of his Excellency Horatio Sharpe, Esq.,
Governor” and with the encouragement of “several eminent lawyers, and other gentlemen.”
Sharpe he knew from the convocation of the clergy that had taken place in Annapolis a few
months earlier; the lawyers and other gentlemen may well have been fellow members of the
Tuesday Club, parishioners, or neighbors. Because of the scarcity of printed copies of legislative
acts, Bacon’s petition sought permission to consult the printed collection of laws that was the
property of the county and its justices. His request meeting with approval, the court granted him
the right to “apply to the Clerk of this County to have recourse to the Acts of Assembly,
afor[sai]d and that he shall not remove any of them out of the said Clerk’s office.”
1758 Petition for
Legislative Support
Four and one-half
years later, Bacon, having perhaps ridden the several miles from his
home in Dover to the courthouse to consult the Acts as frequently as his other responsibilities
and obligations allowed , announced in the 22 June 1758 issue of the Maryland Gazette a
prospectus for publication of his “compleated” abridgement. Bacon had prepared his manuscript
but now needed funds to print it. In the same announcement, however, he went on to inform the
public that he had applied to the last session of the General Assembly for support in making his
abridgement a supplement to a Body of Laws, to also include a transcription of the colony’s
charter and “other useful matters.” Because the Assembly had postponed consideration of the
proposal, Bacon invited readers to support his publication through subscriptions, which could be
arranged through agents who were prepared to collect the funds in several counties .
Bacon’s proposal
came before the Lower House on 3 April 1758, when it was submitted
by William Goldsborough, Esq. of Talbot County, a member of the Upper House and of the
governor’s council, but also one of the two Talbot County men Bacon later named as agents for
his proposed subscription, and perhaps one of the lawyers Bacon had referred to as encouraging
his efforts. The timing of Bacon’s petition is suggestive. Goldsborough (who also served on
Bacon’s vestry in 1747, was a trustee of Bacon’s Charity Working School, and had been Bacon’s
attorney in his suit against Rachel Beck) may well have alerted Bacon to an earlier petition,
presented to the Upper House on 16 February on behalf of Thomas Clark and George Scott
(possibly Prince George’s County lawyers), “setting forth that having spent some Time in
collecting the public Laws of this Province, which they propose to print ... [and] pray that some
Encouragement may be given them by the Legislature toward the Publication of the same.”
Bacon’s June Gazette announcement stated that consideration of his petition had been postponed
“by a particular accident” – perhaps the nearly-concurrent submission of a competing proposal
leading the committee to which both requests had been referred to avoid making a choice by
taking no action at all.
Bacon’s efforts
to secure public funding for his proposed Body of Laws thus began in
conflict with the similar proposal by Clark and Scott, and they continued to be surrounded by
controversy for the next the next three years. Subsequent petitions ended in failure, however, not
because others wished to do the same work, but because they became pawns in the ongoing
struggle between the Upper House’s defense of the proprietor’s prerogative and the Lower
House’s efforts to place limits upon those powers, a struggle intensified during these years by
profound disagreements over funding for the French and Indian War.
Second 1758 Petition
On 27 October
1758, the Upper House delegated Richard Lee to convey a new Bacon
petition to the Lower House, which noted its arrival on the 28th, when it was read and ordered to
lie on the table. A month later, on 29 November, Colonel Benjamin Tasker again delivered a
petition (perhaps the same one, perhaps a revision), endorsed by the Upper House, to the Lower,
where it was read and again ordered to lie on the table. Two weeks later, on 16 December, a
Saturday, a committee of nine members, charged with considering the proposal, met and
requested more detailed information from Bacon about his plans. Bacon, who was in Annapolis
at the time, supplied the answers the following Monday, stating that he would provide eighteen
copies of the Body of Laws for public use for the sum of £300 currency and that each subscriber
would pay £2 for his copy. The committee subsequently reported “their Opinion, that the
Publication of a Body of Laws of this Province, in the Manner proposed by the Petitioner, would
be of great and general Utility.” They recommended that the Lower House appoint three
members to meet with Bacon to inspect the provincial records to determine what laws “are in
Force, or proper to be inserted.” They agreed to the charge for the public copies, providing they
be supplied within eighteen months from the date the committee of three approved the original,
but recommended that the price for subscribers’ copies be determined when the work was
complete and the number of sheets known.
Unfortunately for
Bacon, the committee further recommended that any bill authorizing
the project contain a clause stating that “all Laws heretofore made, and more especially such, the
Force or Existence whereof have been any Ways questioned or disputed, shall remain, continue,
and be in the same State and Condition ... as if the said Body had not been collected, compiled,
and published; and that no Law whatever, or any Part thereof, shall be repealed, abrogated, or
made null or void, or receive any additional Force or Strength, thereby.” This last signaled the
point of conflict between the two houses: the status of the Tobacco Export Duty Act of 1704,
which the Lords Baltimore claimed allowed them to appropriate for their own personal use the
duty of twelve pence levied on each hogshead of tobacco exported from the colony. As long as
the two houses disagreed over the legitimate status of a legislative act, they would not be able to
agree on the content of the Body of Laws.
1760 Petition for Legislative
Support
The Lower House,
concurring with the report of its committee on 23 December, noted
that it was to be referred to the next session, the 23rd being the last day of the 1758 session. The
assembly met next in April 1759, but no reference to Bacon’s petition occurs in the journal of
either house. The next meeting of the assembly began on 22 March 1760, with Bacon’s petition
referred to the Lower House on 31 March. That body read the request on 1 April but deferred it
again to the next assembly session. The third session of this body of representatives began on 26
September 1760 and on the 11th the delegates once more took up Bacon’s petition, reading it for
the first and second time, authorizing access for Bacon to old journals and copies of laws among
the records of the Lower House, and appointing a committee to draw up a bill for the purposes
outlined in the petition. At the second reading of the bill, on 15 October, the house passed, by a
vote of 22 to 7, a motion to include the committee members’ names in the bill. No further
explanation of this change appears in the journal, but it suggests that the bill drawn up in October
1760 was essentially the same as that proposed two years earlier, by which the Lower House
would name the three individuals who would meet with Bacon to determine what laws “are in
Force, or proper to be inserted.” Given that the two bodies already knew that a serious
disagreement existed on this issue, under no circumstances would the Upper House agree to a bill
permitting the Lower House to name all the commissioners. The Lower House passed its version
of the legislation during the morning of 15 October and sent it “to the Upper House by Mr.
Carroll and Mr. Hammond.” By the time that Benedict Calvert had conveyed a bill from the
Upper House to the Lower and the delegates had read and passed it, Stephen Bordley appeared in
their chamber, returning the bill “for Encouraging a Collection and Publication of the Laws,”
endorsed “By the Upper House of Assembly, 15th October, 1760. Read the first Time, and will
not pass.” Bacon’s efforts had failed once more, but the Lower House took the unusual step of
ordering Jonas Green to print the bill in the Maryland Gazette, where it appeared on 30 October
[included in volume 56, Archives of Maryland: Proceedings and Acts of the Assembly, 1758-61,
Appendix III, 514-516].
1761 Petition for
Legislative Support
A final attempt
to secure passage of a bill occurred in the last meeting of this assembly,
the third convention that began on 13 April 1761. Ten days later the Lower House appointed a
committee of three to prepare a “bill for publication.” On the 25th, Matthew Tilghman delivered
the bill to the full house, which read it for the first time. Three days later, before the second
reading, the house named four men to examine its journals to determine what members had
previously been appointed to revise the laws for prior publications of any collection of laws. One
assumes that they sought precedents for the authority they claimed to name the commissioners
appointed for that task. The committee reported back on the 29th in some detail concerning the
procedures followed in 1692 and 1715; in one instance each house named representatives for a
“Committee for Examination and Inspection of the Body of Laws” and in the other members of
the Upper House joined the Committee of Laws of the Lower House for the same purpose.
The Lower House
committee brought in its bill for discussion on the afternoon of 29
April. Delegates defeated a motion to send a message to the Upper House, asking it to name
three of its members to join seven men from the Lower House as a committee to examine the
laws. A revised motion, asking the Upper House to name its members to join the seven named
by the Lower House, passed by a vote of 18 to 17. The following morning the delegates resumed
consideration of the bill, succeeding on their third attempt in agreeing to wording that would
resolve to their satisfaction the status of the Tobacco Export Act. By a vote of 24 to 11, the
delegates resolved “That a Proviso be added to the said Bill, ordering that the Act by which the
Lord Proprietary takes the 12 d. Sterling per Hogshead on all Tobaccoes exported out of this
Province, be not inserted in the Collection of Laws to be made by Mr. Thomas Bacon, but put in
an Appendix thereto.”
On the following
day, 1 May, the “Proposals for Printing a Collection of the Laws of this
Province” were entered into the journal of the Lower House. These included several stipulations
as to the organization of the material, the requirement that a copy of the completed work be
submitted to the governor and both houses for approval by the next session after 25 August 1761,
that the governor and each house receive a printed and bound copy in return for a subsidy of
£200, and that any further payment to Bacon would come from the sale of subscription copies.
The proposals are dated 1758 and signed with Bacon’s name, although they both differ from and
expand upon the responses he had given to the committee in that year. Before adjourning for
dinner, the delegates also sent a message to the Upper House in which they identified the
members they wished to appoint to the joint committee and asked that body to name its
representatives. When deliberations resumed in the afternoon, the Lower House, having received
a reply from the Upper House with the names of its committee members and having inserted
those names in the bill, read the draft for the second time, passed it, and sent the endorsed copy
to the Upper House.
The Upper House
journal next mentions the legislation on 6 May, by which time it had
been carefully scrutinized and amended by that body, a group of men who also served as the
governor’s council, were appointed by the proprietor, and defended his interests. Several of the
amendments were relatively minor: adjusting a salary for the clerk who would assist the
committee, stipulating that Bacon deliver printed copies to each county court in exchange for
payments spelled out in the revision, requiring verification of their delivery, and so forth. Two
changes, however, related to the disputed Tobacco Export Act. The second change deleted the
words “and Appendix,” likely referring to the Lower House amendment that required Bacon to
include the 1704 act only in an appendix. The first change suggests that the bill of 1761
contained some of the language found in the failed bill of the preceding fall, whose text appeared
in the Gazette. The relevant passage from 1760 read: “Provided nevertheless ... That all the
Laws, heretofore made, and more especially such, the Force or Existence whereof have been any
ways questioned or disputed, shall remain, continue, and be in the same State and Condition ...
as if the said Collection and Publication had never been made.” The Upper House amendment
struck out the italicized words. Thus, the Body of Laws, if printed according to the Upper House
bill, would have included the Tobacco Export Act among the laws in use and in force. The
Upper House passed its version and sent the endorsed copy to the delegates. It is most unlikely
that the Lower House would have approved the amended bill without changes, or that the two
houses would find wording acceptable to both, but the governor prorogued the assembly before
the delegates took any action of approval or disapproval.
Publication of the Laws
of Maryland
The circumstances
under which Bacon concluded his labors and succeeded in having the
Laws of Maryland printed are ably described by Wroth in A History of Printing in Colonial
Maryland, but will be summarized here, as that volume is out of print and copies are not readily
available. A request from the Board of Trade to Governor Horatio Sharpe for a printed edition of
Maryland laws led Sharpe to correspondence in January 1761 with Cecilius Calvert, Principal
Secretary to Lord Baltimore for the colony, on the subject of using Bacon’s compilation to satisfy
the Board’s request. Sharpe had paid for a transcript of laws for the Colonial Office out of his
own pocket in 1755, a sum for which the Assembly had refused to reimburse him, and he knew
better than to expect the Lower House to approve any funding for an edition of laws that included
the Tonnage Act. He therefore proposed that publication of Bacon’s collection be achieved
through a general subscription, for which he requested both the proprietor’s approval and a
contribution. In his answering letter of June 1761, Calvert conveyed agreement with Sharpe’s
request and commitments toward the printing costs from Lord Baltimore for £100 sterling and
from himself for £25. Sharpe subscribed £100 current money and obtained £50 current money
each from nineteen men, drawn from “among the principal gentlemen and officials of the
Province.” Seven of the men were members of the governor’s council: Benjamin Tasker, Samuel
Chamberlaine, Edward Lloyd, Benedict Calvert, Daniel Dulany, Stephen Bordley, and John
Ridout. John Ross served as clerk of the Upper House and Upton Scott was his son-in-law.
Walter Dulany and George Steuart represented Annapolis in the Lower House, where they
generally voted as members of the proprietary faction; both Steuart and John Brice were
provincial court justices, and Steuart was also a judge of the Land Office as was Benedict
Calvert. Daniel Wolstenholme, Charles Wallace, and Lancelot Jacques were Annapolis
merchants, and Samuel Galloway of Tulip Hill was a wealthy planter with mercantile interests.
Although Thomas Johnson would become Maryland’s first elected governor in 1777, at this time
he was studying law with Stephen Bordley and in the 1760s was a partner with Lancelot Jacques
in an iron furnace. Only Charles Carroll the Barrister and Charles Carroll of Annapolis appear to
be anomalies among this group. Sharpe’s influence and support may have persuaded most of
these individuals to agree to contribute to the publication fund, but it is worth noting that twelve
of the nineteen may also have known Bacon through the Tuesday Club. The funds received from
the subscribers went to pay the publication expenses – paper, type, printing, and binding – with
the understanding that they would be repaid from sales receipts.
Working from
original records in the office of the Provincial Secretary and from the
manuscript journals of the Lower House, Bacon gathered together all the acts passed by the
General Assembly for a period of one hundred and twenty-six years (with, according to Wroth,
only one possible omission). These included laws that received mention only in the Lower
House journals or whose titles were known only from subsequent repealing or continuing acts.
Those laws still in force (including, of course, the Tonnage Act of 1704) Bacon generally printed
in full and noted all continuations; for those no longer in force, he documented their expiration or
abrogation. The abridgement of laws, with which his project began, Bacon now used as the basis
for a comprehensive index. By the winter of 1762, according to Sharpe, Bacon had reached the
point of journeying to Annapolis for the task of comparing his manuscript with the original
records.
Delivery of the
Completed Manuscript
Thus, on 24 July
1762, Bacon and Reverdy Ghiselin, clerk of the Provincial Court,
appeared before two of its justices – subscribers John Brice and George Steuart – with six
manuscript volumes in folio, “containing a Transcript of the Acts of Assembly of this Province,
now in Force or Use from the Year 1637, to the Year 1762.” They swore under oath “That they
had carefully and diligently Examined and Compared all the several Acts ..... with the Original
Acts which Passed the Great Seal of this Province ..... or to be found in the Secretary’s Office of
this Province ..... And that the said several Acts ..... are true Copies of the Original Acts, or
Records respectively, ..... to the best of their Knowledge, Skill and Belief.”
Printing the Manuscript
Although the
title page of Bacon’s work bears a publication date of 1765, it was just a
few days short of four years later that Sharpe wrote Hugh Hamersly, now the Principal Secretary,
that he was about to ship the first two bound volumes to England. In a letter of 4 June 1763,
Sharpe explained to the Board of Trade, in response to a renewal of their request for a copy of
Maryland’s laws, that there had been delays in shipping the necessary paper, which Lancelot
Jacques had ordered from Bacon’s brother Anthony. Nine months more elapsed before Sharpe
sent Cecilius Calvert the first thirty-four sheets of printed laws. On 13 November 1764 and
26 February 1765, Sharpe dispatched additional sheets, whose printing, he explained, carried the
publication through the laws of 1745. On 10 July 1765, he wrote that the “Acts are at length all
printed & I now send you copies of the last of them, & as soon as some Copies of the Index &
Preface can be printed the Books will be bound & exposed to Sale.” But it was another year
before Sharpe wrote to Hamersly on 21 July 1766 to say that “I shall by a Ship of Mr. John
Buchanan ... transmit you two bound Copies one of them for the Lords of Trade to be presented
with the inclosed Letter & the other for the use of the Council Office ..... , the next Ship Capt.
Richardson in Groves’s Employ will bring you another Copy or two.” Sharpe’s letter to the
Board of Trade informed them that “a compleat Collection of the Acts of Assembly which have
been made in this Province & are now in force having been just printed here after many
obstructions & Delays I embrace the first opportunity to transmit Your Ldps a Copy in obedience
to your Commands some time ago signified to[.] Your Ldps most obedt. humb. servt.”
Testimonials to Bacon’s Work
Bacon’s
monumental task had ended, thirteen years after he first requested permission to
use the Talbot County records to prepare an abridgement of the colony’s laws. The £100 sterling
contribution that Lord Baltimore had pledged for underwriting the project was converted to an
outright gift to Bacon in appreciation of his work, for which he also received from the proprietor
a small gold box – undoubtedly the gold snuff box that he left as a legacy to his wife when he
died.
The proprietor
was not alone is his appreciation of Bacon’s efforts. “In scholarly and
systematic arrangement as well as in accuracy and completeness it excelled any of the former
bodies of law which the Province had possessed....... [U]ntil the publication of the Archives of
Maryland was begun in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it remained to the historian
and the antiquarian the most useful single source on the past of the Province of Maryland,”
according to Wroth. “To possess a collection of works on Maryland history from which a copy
of Bacon has been omitted is to have a house built upon sand, while a collection of colonial laws
or of works illustrative of American printing which does not include that work, by this omission
confesses itself incomplete.” It is fitting, therefore, that Bacon’s Laws of Maryland now
becomes part of the Archives of Maryland.
The Bacon Family in
Maryland
All three of
William Bacon’s children lived in Maryland for part of their lives although
only Thomas died in the colony. Anthony Bacon, as Henry Callister noted, arrived in Maryland
by 1733 and remained in the colony through the 1740s. By July 1751, he had returned to London
where he continued his mercantile business. At some point prior to 1785 he moved to the barony
of Cyfarthsa in the county of Glamorgan, selling his Worcestershire County land to his brother
William at that time. When Anthony Bacon wrote his will in June 1785 (proved in London in
February 1786), his survivors included his wife Elizabeth, the three daughters of his brother
Thomas, and his brother William, to whom Anthony left responsibility for settlement of his
estate in Virginia. That Anthony, then 67 years old, assigned this task to William is perhaps the
strongest argument for William being the youngest, rather than oldest, of William Sr.’s three
children.
No written record
documents the intersection of Thomas’s life with William’s after
Thomas left England for Maryland. But shortly after Thomas’s death, in 1762, William Bacon of
Somerset County assumed the office of riding surveyor for the Wicomico River and Monie Bay.
This was a customs office, charged with patrolling the two waterways to deter or capture
smugglers. Twelve years later, in November 1774, Bacon was commissioned collector for the
Pocomoke naval district as part of the naval office’s colonial bureaucracy. Bacon posted a bond
of £1000 sterling for “truly executing the office of Collector of Duties at Pocomoke to which he
had been appointed by Gov. Robert Eden.”
Bacon’s
enjoyment of his more senior office was relatively short-lived, however, as the
outbreak of war between the colonies and England challenged his allegiances. In March 1777,
William Smallwood, then a brigadier general in the 1st Maryland Regiment, wrote from Snow
Hill, on the Eastern Shore in Worcester County, to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, president of the
Council of Safety in Annapolis, that “Bacon refuses to take the oath of allegiance; what is to be
done with such persons?” Smallwood reported that Bacon also actively advised others to accept
the British General Howe’s proclamation. Bacon was ordered to attend the governor and council
on 30 June 1777 and await their further orders. On 1 July “William Bacon appeared according to
the Condition of his Bond, is hereby Discharged from Confinement, and he afterwards
voluntarily took the Oath of Allegiance and Fidelity to the State prescribed by the form of
Government.” William did not come to the notice of the council again until 27 May 1780 when
“Permission is hereby given to William Bacon to solicit Leave of Genl Washington or the
Commanding Officer at Elizabeth Town to go to New York for the Purpose of obtaining a
Passage to Great Britain agreeably to a Resolve of the House of Delegates of the 10th of April
last.” Bacon’s two customs offices terminated on the same date.
During his time in Maryland,
William married Hannah Handy (b.1747), the daughter of
Thomas Handy of Annamessex, Somerset County. The Handys were a large and prominent
family living on the Eastern Shore. William and Hannah had seven childen. According to The
Handy Family Annals, Anthony, the second son, was sent to England as a young boy and died there
at about age seven. The remaining children and their mother may have left with William or
joined him in England after the war ended. The eldest son, Thomas, died before his father but
Hannah and the five younger children still lived when William died in 1796. All members of
William’s family, with the possible exception of the sixth son, a second Anthony, as well as their
mother were in England at that time, but all apparently returned to Maryland at some time after
William’s death as Hannah was buried in Naassawadux, James died unmarried in Worcester
County, survived by his three brothers and sisters, all of whom married in Maryland.
William Bacon, Sr. (brother of
Thomas Bacon) lived at Maryland Point in the county of
Essex at the time of his death. His real and personal estate he devised to his widow Hannah
during her life, with the land then to be divided equally among his four sons. Harriett received
one-third of his personal property and her brothers shared the remaining two-thirds equally after
the death of their mother. Bacon authorized his executors, one of his Richardson kin and a
Whitehaven friend, to “advance such sums of money to my son Anthony if he shall be in England
at the time of my deceased as they shall think necessary for his voyage to America.” There is no
evidence to indicate whether Anthony went alone prior to his father’s death, as an advance scout
for the rest of the family, or with his mother and siblings, but like the others settled on the lower
Eastern Shore.
When James Bacon wrote his will
in 1800, he identified himself as his father’s eldest
(living) son. Hannah, in her early 50s, was still alive as were James’s siblings. James
relinquished to his siblings his own rights to various bequests of property in London and in the
Dismal Swamp as well debts due to his father and his uncle Anthony to disentangle potentially
competing or ambiguous claims. James’s will is of particular interest for his description of the
property in Maryland still belonging to his father: a personal estate that included a library,
household and kitchen furniture, prints, plate, negroes, horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs, all of
which James left to his sister Harriett along with his own books—distinguished from his father’s
by having his name written in them—and his bay mare and colt. John received his gun, silver
stock and shoe buckles, and gold watch seal with “our coat of arms.” Harriett inherited a second
watch; William, gold sleeve buttons; and Anthony, a new saddle and plated bridle. The
executors, James’s three brothers, he instructed to pay sixteen shillings each to eight members of
the Handy family and to William Whittington for mourning rings. After James’s death in late
1803, his executors posted an administration bond in the amount of $10,000, further evidence by
its size of the success that this branch of the Bacon family had enjoyed during their time in
Maryland.
James Bacon had been a merchant
at Snow Hill, described in the Annals as “shrewd and
active.” He died at the house of his brother Anthony, another “distinguished merchant” of Snow
Hill, after a very short illness. All of James’s siblings married and left descendants among the
resident of Worcester County, as further documented in the Handy Family Annals.
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Barnes, Robert W. British Roots of Maryland Families. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing
Co., Inc., 1999.
Barker, Charles Albro. The Background of the
Revolution in Maryland. New Haven: Yale
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Boucher, Jonathan. Biographia Cumb[riensis] in
Hutchinson, William. The Historie of the
County of Cumberland…. Vol. II. Carlisle, UK: F. Jollie, 1794.
Breslaw, Elaine G., ed. Records of the Tuesday
Club of Annapolis, 1745-56. Urbana, Ill.:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Hamilton, Alexander. The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club. Robert
Micklus, ed. Three volumes. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for
the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1990.
Handy, Isaac W. K. Annals and Memorials of the Handys and Their Kindred. Ann Arbor, MI:
William L. Clements Library, 1992.
Johnson, Allen, ed. “Thomas Bacon.” Dictionary of American Biography. Vol. 1. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928.
LeMay, J. A. Leo. Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland. Knoxville, TE: University of Tennessee
Press, 1972.
Owings, Donnell M. His Lordship’s Patronage:
Offices of Profit in Colonial Maryland.
Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1953.
Papenfuse, Edward C., et al. A Biographical
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1789. Two volumes. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979, 1985.
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I am particularly indebted to
Angus McDonald, whose interest in Anthony Bacon led him to this
introduction, for drawing my attention to the varied descriptions of Thomas’s life in Dublin and
to the uncertainty about the birth order of the three brothers, as well as for providing pdf copies
of the wills of Thomas’s brothers Anthony and William Bacon.
I am grateful to R. Jerry
Keiser (Director, Seaford Public Library and Cultural Center) for
directing me to the account of John Bacon’s death during the French and Indian War. Sources on
which I relied for the first draft of Bacon’s biography stated that John had drowned at sea. Jerry
knew better from his own Bacon research and generously shared the correct information with me.
Revised February 2015
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