Benjamin Chambers (1749-1816)
MSA SC 3520-14992
Notes on sources:
1. This Chambers family had a strong tradition of military and civic leadership that predated the Revolution. Benjamin Chambers’s great-uncle [?], the more famous Colonel Benjamin Chambers (1708-1788), founded the town of Chambersburg, Pa.; his son, Colonel James Chambers (1744-1805), commanded the noted First Pennsylvania Regiment. Adding to the genealogical confusion, the James’s son Benjamin Chambers (born 1762) also fought in the Revolution, and there was yet another member of the family named Benjamin (James’s half-brother) who served as a captain with the Pennsylvania forces.
2. William D. Chambers, Chambers History: Trails of the Centuries (Muncie, IN, 1925), Ch. 3, accessed online at http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/s/t/r/Sheila-Strunk/FILE/0002text.txt.
3. John Chambers, “Autobiography of John Chambers,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, Vol. 6 (1908), pp. 247-286.
4. Rowland served on the local Committee of Correspondence and briefly commanded a New Jersey militia regiment, but had to resign due to ill health. He continued to support the cause by providing grain to the army.
5. Ezekiel Forman was a member of Kent County’s Committee of Correspondence, 1774; high sheriff of Kent County, 1776; Clerk of Kent County, 1777; paymaster to the Eastern Shore Marching Militia, 1777; commissioner of the Board of Treasury for the Continental Congress, 1779; possibly also member of the Council of Safety of Maryland, etc. Forman emigrated to Natchez, Mississippi, then under Spanish rule, around 1789-90, and died there.
6. Archives of Maryland, Vol. 18, p.5. Smallwood and Stone would go on to become two of Maryland’s most renowned Revolutionary officers, and would each serve as Governor of the state after the war – Smallwood from 1785 to 1788, Stone from 1794 to 1797. Stone’s brother Thomas was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
7. Maryland Council of Safety, April 18, 1776.
8. This type of episodic, even sporadic, service was typical of many Revolutionary soldiers, especially in the early years of the conflict.
9. James Thomas Scharf, History of Maryland from the Earliest Period to the Present Day (Baltimore, 1879), Vol. III, p. 770, includes a resume of Smallwood’s Battalion on January 18, 1777, apparently drawn from a muster roll of that date. It documents the reorganization of the Maryland Battalion after the campaign of 1776: “FIRST COMPANY. Captain John Hopkins [sic] Stone, [promoted to] lieutenant-colonel 1st battalion; First Lieutenant Kidd, resigned; Second Lieutenant Chambers, resigned; Ensign Fernandis, promoted second lieutenant 4th company.” [See also red books 12, no. 66]
10. David McCullough, 1776 (New York, 2006), p. 177. Washington’s comment was reported in the Maryland Gazette immediately after the battle, September 12, 1776.
11. “There was in this action a regiment of Maryland troops (volunteers), all young gentlemen,” recalled Joseph Plumb Martin, a private in a nearby Connecticut regiment. “When they came out of the water and mud to us, looking like water rats, it was a truly pitiful sight. Many of them were killed in the pond and many were drowned. Some of us went into the water after the fall of the tide, and took out some corpses and a great many arms that were sunk in the pond and creek.”
12. James McSherry and Bartlett Burleigh James, History of Maryland (Baltimore, 1904), p. 166.
13. Scharf, History of Maryland, Vol. III, p. 770; see above.
14. Chambers’s former captain (now Colonel), John Hoskins Stone, was seriously wounded at Germantown.
15. Archives of Maryland, Vol. 16, p. 426.
16. Although Ezekiel Forman himself does not seem to have served in the Revolutionary army, he was closely related to two famous officers. Ezekiel’s brother, Gen. David Forman (1745-1797), commanded the New Jersey militia at Germantown and other battles; he lived in Chestertown after the war, and Benjamin Chambers witnessed his will. Ezekiel’s son, Thomas Marsh Forman (1758-1845), served as a cadet in John Hoskins Stone’s company of Smallwood’s Regiment in the New York campaign of 1776 (possibly under Benjamin Chambers), in his uncle’s David’s New Jersey regiment during the campaign of 1777-8, and then became an aide-de-camp to Gen. Lord Stirling. He lived after the war at Rose Hill in Cecil County. (See his pension application, 1832, for details of his service.)
17. Anne Spottswood Dandridge, The Forman Genealogy (Cleveland, 1903), p. 109.
18. Ezekiel Forman Chambers (1788-1867), who followed his father’s path into the law and pubic service, would go on to serve as a U.S. Senator from Maryland (1826-34) and hold many other offices.
19. Republican Star and General Advertiser, January 24, 1816.
Return
to Benjamin Chambers' Introductory Page
|
Tell Us What You Think About the Maryland State Archives Website!
|