Archives of Maryland
(Biographical Series)

John Chambers (b. circa 1796 - d. ?)
MSA SC 5496-001610
War of 1812 Fugitive Slave, Kent County, Maryland, 1814

Biography:

Eighteen-year-old John Chambers escaped from Arthur T. Jones' farm, Swan Point, around September 16, 1814. He escaped with seven other slaves: Jacob Murray, Abraham Lyles, Elijah Lyles, George Horner, Delilah Murray, Hannah Lyles, and Polly Chambers.1 They boarded a British vessel that “had just come down the Patapsico river after attacking Baltimore.”2 Swan Point stood directly across the Chesapeake Bay from the Baltimore Harbor.

Chambers served in the Second Company of the Colonial Marines.2 In December 1814, he participated in the British invasion of Cumberland Island in Georgia.3 Following the war, Chambers settled in Trinidad on land that the British provided the black recruits. By 1823, however, Chambers had moved to the Fourth Company's hospital for "mal d'estomac,"4 now understood as hookworm.5 Called mal d'estomac (stomachache) on Trinidad, doctors of the period ambiguously described it was "a complication of disorders inducing a cachectic habit and a broken constitution."6
 


1.     Claim of Arthur T. Jones, Case 731, Case Files, compiled ca. 1827 - ca. 1828, documenting the period ca. 1814 - ca. 1828, *ARC Identifier 1174160 / MLR Number PI 177 190,* National Archives, College Park.

2.     Ibid.

3.     John McNish Weiss, The Merikens: Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad 1815-1816 (London, UK: McNish & Weiss, 2002) 29.

4.     Claim of Arthur T. Jones.
        Mary R. Bullard, Cumberland Island: A History (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2005) 118.

5.     Weiss 29.

6.     B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1995) 297.

7.     Qtd. in James McCabe, "Account of a Preparation of a Heart, Obtained in a Fatal Case of Mal d'Estomac; Pathology of Cachexia," The Lancet 2 (1840): 91.
         Dr. Hennis Green and Dr. Streeten, eds., "Dr. Imray on the Mal D'Estomac." Provincial Medical Journal and Retrospect of the Medical Sciences, 7.150 (1843): 409.
 

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