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Being an Essay of Conjecture on the

Times, Triumphs, Travails and Adventures

of a Noble House

Shirley Calvert-Faoro, Editor & Peter Faoro, Scribe ©2005 All rights reserved.

 Reproduction or adaptation of this page and its contents for other than private and noncommercial use is prohibited without prior written permission.

 

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments & DISCLAIMER

Introduction & DIRECT FAMILY GENEALOGY

1 .Positioning For Power - Up to the year 1625

2. The Flourishing of Power - The critical years between 1625 and 1632

3. Cecil & Leonard - The adventure begins: 1632 to 1675

4. Peerage and Pioneers - Making their own rules: 1675 to 1782

5. Frontiersmen, Farmers and Families - The Bluegrass: 1782 to 1890

6. Denouement - The end of the Calvert aristocracy: 1732 to 1771


Acknowledgments

The errors and real or perceived lapses in judgment in these pages are mine. The rest of the project wouldn’t have been possible without the kindness and generosity of volunteer genealogy research groups. As just one example, we were at one point contacted by one of the participants in these groups, who, along with her husband, spent a full day climbing through an obscure church cemetery in rural Kentucky poring through the church’s faded handwritten records of a century ago in search of William Baltimore Calvert.

Particular thanks are extended to Barbara Mullendore Calvert in New Jersey and Jean T. Gillett in California, and to Mike Gallafent of Reading, England for making the trek to the Oxford library, providing copies of period articles on the last Lord Baltimore, and for reviewing sections of the manuscript for accuracy in the portrayal of Elizabethan and Georgian English society.

Special mention and appreciation is extended to Sandi Gorin, who was kind enough to dig through her archives at our request and retrieve gems of Kentuckiana which have been woven into the text to help give depth and flavor to this project. I never met any of these people, yet consider them friends as well as colleagues. Two people I happily have met are Uncle (Albert) Earl Calvert, whose exceptional retention of oral tradition provided the foundation of our work, and Shirley Jean Calvert, advisor, the reason behind this effort, and the patient editor of my drafts. Happiness is indeed being married to your best friend.

Disclaimer
The Calvert Chronicles is an essay intended solely for private distribution among family, friends and colleagues interested in the subject matter. Some parts are compilations of commentary by others more familiar with certain aspects of the topic. Sources and authors have been cited when possible, but much of the material was gathered from the public domain or otherwise acquired well before the present project was envisioned. In some instances, sources which would have been noted were simply lost. In addition to those mentioned above, in writing The Calvert Chronicles we’ve looked to material from That Dark and Bloody River, by Allen W. Eckert, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s theses, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Other sources include: Descendants of the Virginia Calverts, by Ella Foy O’Gorman; a series of articles published in The Maryland Genealogies by John Bailey Calvert Nicklin; The Flowering of the Maryland Palatinate, privately published by Harry Wright Newman; various issues of Maryland Historical Magazine published by the Maryland Historical Society; and The Calvert Papers held by the Maryland Historical Society and the State of Maryland. If copyrighted material is contained herein for which credit is not given, or for which payment would have been demanded by the author, the transgression was unintentional, and my apologies are sincerely extended.

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”

- William Shakespeare

2 KING HENRY VI, Act 4, Scene 2

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Introduction

The following essay isn’t intended to be a history of the Calvert family, but rather a social account of their times. The historical record has been amply mined, and has proven to be abundantly clear in some places, but in most other places too scanty, contradictory and poorly documented for any further attempt to rise above the level of mere speculation: very shortly after Sir George’s death gaps covering years and decades begin appearing in the family records, and the chances of finding reliable material to fill in those voids after the passage of centuries are slight at best.

Though every effort has been made at accuracy, some relationships and observations may, in fact, be wrong, again due to the absence of records: in many instances we can’t be absolutely certain that one particular Calvert fathered another, but our objective has been to create a reliable sense of the places and periods in which we know the Calverts were present, and keep our assumptions about specific Calverts as informed as possible

There has been no attempt made in the following pages to include the names and birth and death dates of each and every Calvert down through the ages. Such material, primarily of interest to genealogists, is usually tedious in the extreme and lends little “color” to the story itself.

There is a difference, though, between speculation about individual lives, and reasonable assumptions drawn from our understanding of how societies functioned in the past. What drew the ships “Ark” and “Dove” from the Isle of Wight to these shores with their “company of Adventurers” (1), and what kept the Calverts here after their American wealth was gone?

 

Commemorative postage stamp issued in 1934

This is an effort to take what is known (or probably known) about the line extending from Sir George Calvert, through his second son Leonard, down to Omer Triplett Calvert, with side trips to the world of Sir George’s eldest son Cecil and his descendants, and place them in context. In short, these are descriptions of the stage and not the actors; a picture of the backdrop to add perspective to the chronicle of a family’s journey.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some of what follows will represent arrogance and unacceptable conduct to modern observers. Even by the general social standards of their times the aristocratic Calverts operated under a code of behavior that was - to them and their social peers - assumed, even considered laudable, while dramatically at odds with the standards of behavior expected of the general population both then and now. As the tale extends into adolescent America and the Kentucky frontier we find instances that would only a few years later be condemned by public opinion, perhaps even punishable under law.

We are unfair in making judgments about yesterday by the assumptions of today. The laws, as well as the arguments devoutly held by various societies down through the years concerning the standing of women, slaves, religious freedom, censorship, and so on, are but the most obvious examples of changing values. Aside from such large issues, however, most of a culture’s values evolve in an almost imperceptible series of small, seemingly innocuous steps, as illustrated by an example from a most surprising source.

George Washington, a Calvert relative by marriage through Cecil’s line, appears to have been every bit the man his reputation describes, to the point of being absolute and unbending in his judgments of right and wrong. Apparently he wasn't a particularly fun guy to hang around with, though; poor sense of humor and all that, although he was reportedly an enthusiastic dancer, and a devoted card player. (2) Without a doubt he is deserving of the place in history accorded him. But consider:

Abundant documents confirm that from early adulthood the Father of our Country unabashedly used his position, wealth, and influence to acquire extensive land holdings in the Ohio and kan-tuck-kee regions of the frontier for his private and personal gain. “Conflict of interest” was an unknown concept; unknown because the practice was accepted. The New York Times would be boiling at such a state of affairs, yet in the 1700’s no impropriety was attached to the very same actions. By some calculations Washington was one of the wealthiest men in the Colonies when the Revolution erupted, and was outraged when one of the King’s edicts voided some of his huge claims. Some of his enmity toward the Crown conceivably derived from the experience of his losses.

The historical Calverts would in many ways be strangers to us today, but in the context of their times they were, with one notable exception, upright and honorable men and women, representative of the society from which they arose. That society, however, was often harsh, uncouth, largely illiterate and unlearned, frequently violent and, in a style still finding expression on today’s Wall Street, it could be a cynical, calculating age.

Having said as much, let us start at the middle of the beginning.

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I

 POSITIONING FOR POWER

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George Calvert, 1579 - 1632

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Rather than start with George Calvert himself, let us take a quick look at Anne Mynne, who would become his wife on November 22, 1604. Anne’s ancestry was a distinguished one indeed, including:

Henry I, King of England (son of William the Conqueror)

Henri I, King of France

William de Vernon, 5th Earl of Devon

Henry Grey, 1st Baron Grey of Codnor

Richard Grey, 2nd Baron Grey of Codnor

Baron FitzPayn

Richard Poynings, 3rd Baron Poynings

....and a lengthy list of Knights and Ladies

The tradition of strategically adept marriages would continue into following generations as successive Lords Baltimore would marry into (or otherwise dally, with resulting offspring) families claiming the hereditary power and influence of monarchs and nobility, including Charles II, King of England, and later George I, King of Great Britain (the title changed as the empire grew). How did George Calvert gain sufficient access and acceptance to the upper classes to marry into that rarefied society and thereby secure his own family’s rightful place at Court?

Of George’s own parentage very little has been recorded beyond their names; Leonard Calvert, an obscure Yorkshire gentleman, being George’s father, after whom his second son and direct ancestor of the Kentucky Calverts was named, Alicia Crossland his mother, John Calvert and Marjorie (of unknown maiden name) being his paternal grandparents, and even less being known about George’s maternal grandparents other than a dispute over whether Alicia’s father was Thomas or John Crossland. And yet both of George’s parents were of high enough standing to boast a family Coat-of-Arms, and George himself was formally educated.

The fact of George’s education is itself an indication of relative wealth (perhaps “upper middle class” in 20th Century terms) for in the last quarter of the 1500’s when he was a boy relatively few people could even read or write, and monarchs themselves were often only moderately educated. Formal education had only recently ceased to be the exclusive province of the clergy, scholars (often one and the same), and those who supported the clergy or the Crown with donations of land or gold.

Although schools for the poor and deserving began in this era, the family’s right to a Coat-of-Arms probably indicates that George’s attendance at such a school was not an option. (One was not normally granted a Coat-of-Arms unless there was either land which one, at least in theory, had a right to protect or as an honor bestowed by the Crown in return for political or monetary support). Moreover, the education received at such an institution would not have been sufficient preparation for admittance to the University. Had Leonard and Alicia been of the merchant class, their son would have been apprenticed rather than being sent to a university at considerable expense.

The near absence of information about George’s forebears, in combination with the fact of his schooling, also tells us a great deal about him. His parents were quite possibly unlettered, but at the very least tithed their estate to the established church, probably more than the requisite 10% as a sign of both devotion and an overt attempt to acquire influence in this world or the next - probably both. That they were able to do so suggests that George’s father was a successful landowner who accumulated his modest wealth through a combination of the beef and cattle trade (as indicated by the word calvert itself) and sub-renting portions of the family’s land.

Presumably then, young George grew up in a home where he saw first-hand the benefits of hard work, and must have been informed in unmistakable terms that education and hard work combined were a route to success. By inference and observation he learned that society’s institutions were tools to be used to one’s own advantage when possible.

In an age when childhood ended rather abruptly at 10 or 12 (early adulthood when the median life span was 35) these ideas must have been very fresh and pronounced in the boy’s mind when he was sent to Trinity College, Oxford, from which he received his Bachelor’s degree at age 17 in 1596/7, and his Master’s degree in 1605.(3) Education at the time was limited in scope to put it mildly: two centuries after George was born the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published. That first edition consisted of three volumes, each about the thickness of a big-city telephone directory, and claimed - without argument - to summarize all knowledge. Of those three volumes, fully one-third of the whole was devoted to Astronomy, Arithmetick (sic), Anatomy and Medicine and their subsections, with a substantial portion of the rest given over to navigation, geography, and the various arts of war and fortification.

Another inference can be made by the fact of George’s admittance to Trinity, and that is that whatever the schooling he received previously, his teachers were accomplished and their student receptive. In reading and in arithmetic he was clearly quite good or he wouldn’t have survived Trinity and gone on to amass a fortune. His writing, however, was another matter. King Charles I would later tease him that he “writ as fair a hand to look upon from afar off, as any man in England; but that when any one came near it, they were not able to read a word.”

It is unlikely that the marriage of George Calvert and Anne Mynne was a matter of the heart, although affection may well have grown out of the union. Romance would not be considered an important element of matrimony for nearly two centuries. That George was sharp enough to recognize the possibilities of such a marriage is certainly plausible, but it would have been the parents who first broached the subject as a practical matter for both families.

Wanting to improve his son’s station in a society governed by class and connections certainly was in Leonard Calvert’s mind, and George Mynne knew that his daughter’s family affiliations were valuable assets, not to be handed away frivolously. But what did the Mynne family stand to gain from the agreement? The man Anne Mynne married when she and her husband were both 25 was of a good family, wealthy if not rich, educated, and of an “acceptable” class of landowners. (Merchants, however successful they might have been, were still looked down upon). He had probably been identified as an up-and-coming individual in that small society.

It was a sensible match. While the Calverts stood to gain in what we would today call “upward mobility”, the Mynne’s agreement to the marriage addressed a much more basic reality. In an age when women of any class were of secondary standing, the union of their daughter to the promising son of a prominent family represented significant assurance that Anne would be able to continue living in a manner appropriate to her inherited station in life. The concern was not unfounded, for society held many examples of titled ladies in threadbare gowns.

It was, of course, a gamble of sorts for the Mynnes to betroth their daughter to anyone, but there were likely strong indications already that young George was not a man to take undue risks with his own station in life. Ella Foy O’Gorman has described George Calvert this way:

"George Calvert was not a man of brilliant talent and boundless confidence in his own abilities, nor was he one of those who found the most attractive fishing in troubled waters. His talents were solid: he was cautious, laborious, exact, of unimpeachable integrity, and a true lover of his country."

George found a great deal of sense and utility in his improved circumstances.

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II

THE FLOURISHING OF POWER

George Calvert, 1579 - 1632

First Lord Baltimore

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(1585 - first English colony in America at Roanoke Island, NC * 1588 - Defeat of the Spanish Armada * 1607 - English settle at Jamestown, VA * 1610 - Galileo publishes his telescopic findings on planetary movement)

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Then, as now, access to the halls of power was a source of power itself provided, of course, that the person having access remembers that his is a derived power secure only so long as he is viewed favorably by the higher authority. George Calvert knew that well.

By his marriage to Anne Mynne, George was able to combine his own personal attributes of relative affluence and education with the implied right, derived from his wife, of access to the company of nobles and the royal household itself. O’Gorman’s description of his cautious, meticulous nature fits the recorded progress of his career. He didn’t immediately gain - or probably even seek - access to the King himself, but rather those quite close to the King and took advantage of successive opportunities to increasingly demonstrate his capabilities.

One year following his marriage to Anne, and eight years after he had taken his Bachelor’s Degree, George received his Master’s degree from Trinity, Oxford, in 1605. That year can be marked as the beginning of his ascension to a position of influence.

The same year he became a Member of Parliament (in which he was to serve three non-consecutive terms over twenty years) and was appointed Private Secretary to the Earl of Salisbury. Salisbury himself was to leave a prominent mark on British history and George’s association with the Earl clearly provided the foundation of his own involvement in matters of state, for within months he was further appointed Clerk of the Crown (analogous to our modern District Attorney) for County Claire, Ireland.

Official record of Sir George Calvert’s election to Parliament on Sept. 28, 1624 (Courtesy University of Oxford Archives)

It would be another eight years before his major entry onto the stage of British history would occur, but his progress then would be steady: at the age of 34 (in 1613) he became a member of the Privy Council - similar to combined membership in the US President’s Cabinet and the Supreme Court. Four years later he was knighted; a year following that he was appointed one of the King’s Secretaries of State (becoming Principal Secretary of State in 1619). Only a few months before Anne died in 1621, the King granted him an estate of 2300 acres in County Longford, Ireland from which he would take the title Baron Baltimore in 1625, thus becoming, finally, Sir George Calvert, Lord Baron of Baltimore.

As a basis for measuring his growing wealth during this part of his career, the position of a lesser Secretary of State, as opposed to his subsequent appointment as Principal Secretary, had carried with it a lifetime pension of £1000 Sterling per year - a sizable sum in itself when measured against the cost of the eventual “Adventure to Maryland” which was £550 - but during two months in 1627 he spent no less than £25,000 for what he described as “a little pain and care” for some improvements to his holdings in Newfoundland. Those are the words of a man accustomed to wealth.)

During this span of 20 years he became involved in the New World as a minor investor in the Virginia Company, where he nonetheless served on what we would recognize as the Board of Directors, remaining in that capacity until the organization’s eventual dissolution. His relationship with the Crown and Court must have played a role in his appointment to such a senior position: The potential financial risk was quite high, and the project eventually failed, but cautious George put very little money into it, having only two shares in the venture which couldn’t have carried much weight with the principals.

In looking at George’s involvement with the Virginia Company, and his later career path, some conclusions can be drawn about his diplomatic skills in and around the King’s Court. George Calvert was not only able to openly profess Catholicism to a Protestant King, but managed to have his grant of baronial title omit the usual obligation that he be “conformable in point of religion”, i.e., that his religion and the King’s be identical. Something more than loyalty, intelligence, and access were at work here. The most probable explanation for the King’s forbearance on such matters, and his evident assistance in furthering Calvert’s interests can be found in the power of political reality.

James I understood politics, and though George Calvert’s religious leanings might not be “politically correct” the King was free to overlook them. With a freedom denied to later monarchs by enactment of legislation ordered by Parliament, James was able to view George’s religion as little more than an inconvenience rather than a significant obstacle to the elevation of a skilled, wealthy and loyal supporter. After the Reformation, which was not universally welcomed, there were many in England who still adhered to the Faith of Rome. It would have been a foolish King who did not recognize the depth and breadth of Catholicism within the kingdom and in an age when the Royal Court was indeed the active seat of power James demonstrably gave great weight to ability, usefulness, and experience when making royal appointments. George Calvert met those tests with ease.

The Americas were old news by the time George was a young man, having been rediscovered by the Spanish more than a century previous. With primitive technology however, the vast continent was still largely unknown, unmapped or badly mapped, and enveloped in all manner of misconceptions. More than a few of those misconceptions were planted or fed deliberately by speculators. The more exotic locales were allegedly overflowing with gold and spices (4), claims often made by men who had never been there. Even explorers who had visited these far-off continents sent home reports of lands of milk and honey bearing little resemblance to the squalid settlements and marginal crops the first settlers were actually raising.

The Seventeenth and the Twentieth Centuries shared a desire for get-rich-quick schemes, but George Calvert doesn’t appear to have been a man taken in by such dreams. His dreams had a decidedly more practical flavor. While probably hoping to find gold, George would never have spent £25,000 on improvements to real estate had his primary objective been mining or the spice trade. George wanted developed land, real estate itself, pure and simple. Towns, villages, farms, shipping, self-sustaining economic communities generally in which he would have a vested interest were his chosen vehicles. (5)

In 1623 Sir George, Lord Baltimore, a Member of Parliament, Principal Secretary of State to the King, and a Royal relative, successfully prevailed upon the King for a grant of lands in Newfoundland, to be called Avalon. Newfoundland was not a propitious choice, but the New World was for Baron Baltimore an investment only and not the central thrust of his cautious life. He only visited Newfoundland twice, in the fourth and fifth years after the grant had been made. Of the first visit, William Hand Brown has remarked,

..He came at the most favorable season and remained but for a month or two, so that he could scarcely have had time to visit the interior of the island [and] we cannot but think that when he compared the reality with Whitbourne’s glowing descriptions and the fancy pictures he built upon them, his disappointment must have been deep.

The second Lady Baltimore, Joan, accompanied Sir George on his second visit, and remained about a year, at which time having had enough of the harsh climate and surroundings; she packed her bags and sailed for Virginia. George wasn’t far behind, and when his religion proved objectionable to the Virginians, he promptly sailed for England to ask the King for a better grant in a more favorable locale.

Lady Baltimore, and her younger children by George, remained in Virginia for a while following George’s departure, sailing for England when he summoned them. Their ship, the St. Claude, was wrecked at sea, though within sight of the English coast. Marginal notes in the British Museum collection include the following: “His Lady, who together with her children that were left with her, were unfortunately cast away on their return; in which ship his lordship lost a great deal of plate and other goods of great value.”(6)

The processes of government were as slow in the 1600’s as today, and Sir George’s petition for a grant of new lands in America, submitted in 1629 or 1630, was not acted upon until 1632, shortly after he died.

The Charter of Maryland was therefore issued to his eldest son, Cecil, Second Lord Baltimore. At the time of his passing, Sir George Calvert bequeathed an appreciable estate of developed land (in Ireland, from which both rent and a significant income from the sale of crops and / or livestock would have also flowed) as well as the untold benefits of the lands granted in Maryland. Perhaps more importantly, he left title and social position. By the standards of his time, and ours, he was rich. It would be left to Cecil, his heir, to create true wealth and this Cecil accomplished to no small measure through the skills of his brother Leonard, George’s second son.

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III

CECIL & LEONARD

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Cecil Calvert, 1605 - 1675, Second Lord Baltimore

Leonard Calvert, 1606 - 1647

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(1611- King James Version of the Bible published * 1619 - first slaves brought to America 1635 House of Delegates is formed in Maryland * 1640 - Estimated colonial population is 27,947 * 1649 Maryland Religious Toleration Act passed.)

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Cecil, like his father before him, realized the benefits of a politically adroit marriage, and with the advantages of an established title and existing access to the Royal household that his father had made possible by marrying Anne Mynne, Cecil also entered a marriage to a woman of a lineage at least as distinguished as that which his own mother had brought to the family. Anne Arundel, who would marry Cecil, on March 20, 1627/8 was a political power in her own right, with or without Cecil, and included among her ancestors:

Edward III, King of England

John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster

Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmoreland

Richard Neville, 1st Earl of Salisbury

William Bonville, Baron Harington & Bonville

Cecily Bonville, Baroness Harington & Bonville

Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset

Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset

Thomas Arundel, 1st Baron Arundel of Wardour

Anne’s ancestry might have been “noble”, but it wasn’t necessarily illustrious. The royal families, nobility, and aristocracy so firmly established in the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries had established their power during the Middle Ages through the sheer force of arms. Anne’s family was no better or any worse than others in this regard and only slightly unusual in that some of the incidents of an earlier time were recorded. In A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, a study of the 14th Century, the following report is found:

"[In the winter of 1379/80] delayed by winds and the threat of a French raid, [Sir John] Arundel took part of his force to Southampton to guard against an enemy landing and, while there, to conduct himself indistinguishably from the enemy. Besides robbing the countryside, he quartered his men-at-arms and archers in a convent, allowing them to violate the nuns and a number of poor widows who lived there, and carry them off to the ships when ready to sail. Arundel was the man who had demanded money in hand before he would defend the south-coast towns against earlier French raids.... Sailing in December, his convoy was caught by a violent storm during which he ordered the kidnapped women thrown overboard to lighten the ships."

Maryland came very quickly to have counties named after both Cecil and his Lady, the only husband-and-wife political subdivisions in what would become the United States. Significantly, since this Lady Baltimore’s family spawned quite a few prominent personalities in British history, the Maryland political entity bears her full and family name, Anne Arundel County, rather than simply her patronymic.

From left: Leonard Calvert, Anne Arundel, Cecil Calvert

Under the law of primogeniture (7), second son Leonard, although he came into reasonable circumstances with George’s passing, inherited no title or particular riches from his father. Primogeniture was the legal method by which estates and wealth passed intact from generation to generation through the firstborn son. George Calvert’s Will specified a bequest of £900 for Leonard. Two years after George’s death Leonard personally put up three-quarters of the total cost of the expedition to Maryland (£550), so he must have had other resources - probably land - beyond the relatively small amount left by his father’s final wishes. Nevertheless, as Governor of Maryland after Sir George’s death, he would write to his brother the Baron complaining that he could not afford the £30 (in hard cash) needed for the purchase of arms and supplies in a particular transaction he had been directed to undertake.

In some instances primogeniture was also a tool by which second children and beyond were effectively disinherited, but the Calvert family engaged in no such fratricide. The law was the law: Cecil was the Baron, Leonard wasn’t. Minorities and disenfranchised groups of all sorts have accepted such laws without question from the beginning of history and the Calverts were no different. Moreover, Cecil clearly recognized certain executive qualities in his younger brother and called upon his sibling to help run the family business --- as Governor of Maryland. That Leonard didn’t object to the concept of primogeniture, at least not too vociferously, can be inferred by his introduction of a similar law in Maryland, enacted in 1638, which gave the Calverts the right to create manors and baronies within the colony, just as the King was entitled to do in England.

Second son or not, Leonard, too, married well, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he probably married prestigiously since there are no surviving records of the marriage. The woman credited with being his wife, Anne Brent, claimed Royal ancestry but primarily Spanish and despised French rather than English and therefore somewhat less “clout” than the Ladies Baltimore. Anne’s forebears included no less than:

Alfonso V of Leon

Alfonso VI of Leon

Sancho II of Castile

Alfonso VII of Leon

Alfonso IX of Leon

Louis VIII of France

Louis IX of France

Edward I of England

Cecil, though the official founder of Maryland, never visited his American property. The press of other matters and the difficulties of travel would seem to be the likely reason in view of letters he wrote to Leonard and others which confirm that he took a most active interest in the project. Cecil’s heirs for another four generations would husband their good fortune, making prudent investments and acquisitions as suitable opportunities presented themselves; blue-chip stocks so to speak, risking little and receiving a comfortable return for their efforts. But it is to Leonard that much of the credit is due for the expansion of the Calvert holdings, and therefore the family’s power on both sides of the Atlantic

Leonard was given substantial leeway in achieving the objectives set for him by his older brother. Leonard carved a society out of the rough woods and swamps of the new world amidst the almost constant hostility of the Virginians. Where there were forests before he arrived, there were communities and farms and estates when he died, leaving as his executrix his sister-in-law (and attorney) Margaret Brent (8), a powerful colonial landowner who, because of her remarkable business and legal acumen, has been called North America's first feminist.

Margaret Brent – National Geographic Society

True, the society from which Leonard departed was still rough, still violent and somewhat dangerous, but it was on a solid footing and subsequent Governors of Maryland were only to build upon and refine what Leonard had created. It is not inappropriate that the Maryland flag is the only one of the 50 state flags to honor its founders by name through the use of the family crest, and one of the very few to commemorate its pre-colonial past at all. Only Hawaii, discovered by English explorer Captain Cook, displays the Union Jack in full on its flag, and few in the states of the Old South whose flags still display the bars of the Confederacy are aware that those bars had their origin in the flag of Great Britain. (9).

Maryland State Flag

The Maryland to which Leonard came in March of 1634 was a more hospitable place than earlier English colonists had found in Virginia and New England. Settlers in Virginia had been slaughtered, and New England was yet to undergo the terror of King Philip’s War (“King Philip” being a Shawmut chief of outstanding organizational skills and master of battlefield strategy who ran circles around the British Army until sheer force of numbers brought about his defeat.)

The natives in Maryland were part of the great Iroquois Confederation, consisting of tribes controlling territory extending from the modern Canadian Maritime provinces, south to Virginia, and west to the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania, with disputed claims extending even further; all told, a territory larger than that controlled by Rome at the height of her Empire. But thirty years of interaction between coastal native Americans and the Europeans had led to some manner of understanding between the two cultures. The frictions had evolved into a generally more civil standoff, with Indians recognizing they were no match for gunpowder and the colonists being more interested in establishing their crops and fortunes than killing heathens.

In Maryland hostile conflicts between white and red were few and far between. The Susquehannas of southeastern Pennsylvania made occasional raids which raised the colonists’ anxiety levels but never presented a major threat. More to the point, the local tribes had decided enough was enough. They were already in the process of moving to new lands by the time Leonard and his “Gentlemen of Fashion” arrived. The Indians remained long enough to show the newcomers around, and then they were gone. Later Indian attacks in western Maryland served primarily to stiffen colonial resolve to rid the land of this nuisance completely.

To a far greater degree than the other colonies, Maryland’s history was that of transplanting a European culture rather than conquest and conflict with the natives. The settlement first established by the expedition, St. Mary’s, was fortified with a stockade as protection against the natives when it was built, but the stockade was quickly dismantled when it became clear it wasn’t needed. One of the few peace treaties with the Indians to actually hold was the one signed between Governor Calvert and the local tribes. The two sides met while standing under a mulberry tree, and a bit of this tree was placed in the cornerstone of the National Cathedral built in Washington, DC nearly three centuries later.

While Leonard and Cecil agreed in principle on most things, it was Leonard who was able to add a sense of pragmatism to the directions he had received, particularly in the realm of religion-as-politics. English Catholics of the time were primarily landowners and otherwise drawn from the class of gentry. Maryland was conceived as a haven for Catholics, but Catholics were never in the majority and their class background did not give them all the skills needed to build a colony in the wilderness: blacksmiths, cobblers, boatwrights and the like were Protestants.

When Cecil directed his brother that the subject of religion was not to be discussed at sea during the voyage to the new colony, his intention was obviously to prevent disaster and keep the peace, for Catholics were a minority even on their own ships. It was Leonard who translated this concept into a greater principle. Even though Maryland was to remain officially Catholic it was the first colony to guarantee by law complete religious freedom to all residents, thus encouraging emigration and the growing population the Calverts wanted. Strikingly, when the Jesuits built a church at a site chosen because of its proximity to the Indians - and in complete disregard for the sensitivities of the local Protestant settlers - Catholic Leonard had it torn down. This tolerant stance by the colonial government played an important motivating role in the Maryland victory when Protestant Virginia attacked during the “Puritan Rebellion” of 1644-1646, and further skirmishes lasting another decade.

The practical reality of the situation was that Cecil had inherited the full weight of managing his father’s holdings and participating in the affairs of state appropriate to one of his station. Maryland was only one of those matters; promising, but not yet realized and therefore of secondary concern to the Lord Baron.

Beyond that, it is highly probable that Cecil was not fully aware of the completely pristine circumstances in which he had set Leonard to work. While Cecil made references to the natives in his letters (demanding, for instance, that they “surrender their rights to me this year”), his primary goal was to establish the colony as a Calvert mini-kingdom, mirroring England’s manors, estates, and nobility. That would come in time, but first Leonard had to direct his attention to clearing forest, building roads, and preparing for winter. Of these mundane subjects Cecil’s letters make no mention and it seems he imagined Maryland to be an extension of the English countryside.

An excellent example exists today of the communities Leonard caused to be established in early Maryland. Only twelve years prior to the founding of Maryland another hardy group of Englishmen and women, the Pilgrims, had established a foothold in New England at Plimouth (Plymouth). Though the original buildings have long since vanished the Plimouth Plantation Foundation has scrupulously recreated the settlement with considerable effort not to sanitize or beautify those early days.

St. Mary’s and Plimouth would have resembled each other closely in technology and architecture. The roads were muddy when wet, dusty when dry, and pigs and chickens roamed almost at will. Homes, constructed of wood, stone and earth, were more often than not only a single room often occupied by large families. Both Chesapeake and Massachusetts Bays are renowned for sudden storms, particularly unpleasant in winter, and settlers quickly learned the advantages of digging three or four feet into the ground to set the floor level of the house, thereby warding off some of the chill blowing from the water. Fruit and game not eaten when gathered was dried, salted or smoked as appropriate, and often enough rotted anyway. Grain was stored in earthen pits, hearth fires sent most of their heat through a hole in the roof, and supplies of anything that couldn’t be taken from the ground or the forest had to be requested at least four to six months in advance - the time required for a ship to make the round trip to England and back.

As Dorothy might have said in a different Oz, "We're not in London anymore, Cecil". Fine and elegant structures such as the Governor's Mansion in Williamsburg, Virginia would still be a few years in the future.

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IV

PEERAGE & PIONEERS

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Cecil’s line:

Charles Calvert, 1637 - 1715, Third Lord Baltimore

Benedict Leonard Calvert, 1679 - 1715, Fourth Lord Baltimore

Charles Calvert, 1699 - 1751, Fifth Lord Baltimore

Frederick Calvert, 1732 - 1771, Sixth Lord Baltimore

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Leonard’s line:

William Calvert, (died 1682)

George Calvert (dates unknown)

George Calvert, 1700 - 1782

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(1656 * Harvard College accepts concept of sun-centered universe * 1664 - British seize New Netherland (New York) from the Dutch * 1670 - Estimated colonial population is 114,500 * 1677 - Peace treaty conference held between  Maryland, Virginia, New York and the Seneca Indians at Albany * 1687 - Isaac Newton publishes his Principals of Natural Mathematics * 1705 - Idea of declaring  independence from England first shows up in print * 1707 - Scotland  united with England * 1740 - Estimated colonial population is 889,000 * 1750 - Benjamin Franklin flies a kite in a thunderstorm and isn’t electrocuted * 1760 - George III becomes King of Great Britain. * 1769 - Daniel Boone leaves North Carolina on first journey to Kentucky)

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The developments in Calvert history during the period noted above are best explained by an event that happened when it was all over. That descriptive event took place in 1781 when the Governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, commissioned one George Calvert, age 70, a descendant of Leonard’s line and cousin to a Omer T’s great-great grandfather, as a Captain in the Virginia Militia. The Governor’s action is significant for a number of reasons and points up the differences that had evolved between the titled Calverts of England and those who settled in America.

Cecil’s descendants remained primarily British and aristocratic in outlook and upbringing, their numbers multiplying while the wealth remained the property of whomever was the current Lord Baltimore. Portraits of the successive Lords, often as children, show the offspring of class and position often in settings of comfort and opulence.

Although several of Cecil’s descendants had been dispatched to the colony where they served as Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of the Province, and other lofty positions, they held those positions as subjects of the Crown and on behalf of the Baron and the King. These families continued to move - and marry - in the upper circles of society as it had developed on this side of the Atlantic. The most prominent instances of Calvert marriages to the American aristocracy would include another of Cecil’s descendants, Eleanor, marrying Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage, and Eleanor’s granddaughter later marrying a scion of the prominent Lees of Virginia, Robert E. Lee, himself the grandson of Revolutionary War hero Harry “Lighthorse” Lee. Other Calvert marriages in Cecil’s line were often to individuals whose names and positions were prominent at the time, if no longer household names today.

Several years earlier, in 1771, Frederick Calvert, the Sixth Lord Baltimore, had died in Naples, Italy leaving no legitimate heirs. At the time of Frederick’s death the Revolution had not yet broken out, although tensions were already high, and the thought of a formal break with the Crown was not yet a topic often discussed. As the eldest male direct descendant of the original Lord Baltimore, this George was next in line for the title and with it the Calvert holdings in Europe and America.

George Calvert, proprietor of Deep Hole Farm in Prince William County Virginia, born and raised in the colonies, declined to accept the title of Seventh Lord Baltimore. By this act, the title was deemed by the Crown to have expired with Frederick. There would be no more Lords Baltimore.

Whatever else this George may have done, Jefferson was also an astute politician and must have recognized the importance of this appointment in the midst of the Revolution then in progress. Governor Jefferson himself was a substantial landowner and his democratic leanings notwithstanding, under normal circumstances would probably not have offered a commission to a citizen of lesser standing, particularly one of such advanced years. The commission was partially a gesture of respect to a “pillar of the community”. And partially, it wasn’t.

Jefferson must have understood that offering the old man a commission in the militia would be taken as it was intended: a deliberate slap at the King, a sign of encouragement for Virginians who had not had much good news from the battlefield, and many of whom were not as favorably disposed toward independence as was Jefferson himself.

The American Revolution was only part of a truly world war. The major powers of Europe were battling wherever they came in contact around the globe. Had the French not intervened on the side of the rebellious colonies (not out of love of liberty so much as a means of harassing the British whom they were fighting on several fronts), and had the British not been preoccupied with other pressing military challenges elsewhere, the prospects for American victory against the British behemoth were by no means a foregone conclusion. Washington’s reputation as a General rests as much on his tenacity as on his tactics: throughout the war the Continental Army lost more battles than they won...but they kept coming back. (10)

In such an environment public opinion could not be expected to be cohesive, and it wasn’t. Later studies of publications, court records and other barometers of contemporary sentiment have shown that the population at large was about evenly divided into thirds over the subject of independence. The actively pro-independence faction was balanced by an equal number who wished to remain part of the British Empire (many of whom fled to Canada during hostilities and immediately following the American victory) and a similar proportion of the population who didn’t care one way or the other so long as they were allowed to get on with their lives. War or not, life continued for the average colonist and many saw the war as an opportunity to head for kan-tuck-kee. (11)

How did George Calvert, at age 70, find himself possessed of strong enough sentiments to renounce his inheritance? The most likely answer is to be found in de Tocqueville’s observations about the contrast of family structure in democratic and aristocratic societies. From Volume Two of his Democracy in America, written in the 1830’s, he is worth quoting at length:

In America the family, if one takes the word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, no longer exists. One only finds scattered traces thereof in the first years following the birth of children. The father then does, without opposition, exercise the domestic dictatorship which his son’s weakness makes necessary and which is justified by both their weakness and his own unquestionable superiority. But as soon as the young American begins to approach man’s estate, the reins of filial obedience are daily slackened. Master of his thoughts, he soon becomes responsible for his own behavior.

In Americas there is in truth no adolescence. At the close of boyhood he is a man and begins to trace out his own path. It would be wrong to suppose that this results from some sort of domestic struggle, in which, by some kind of moral violence, the son had won the freedom which his father refused. The same habits and principles which lead the former to grasp at independence dispose the latter to consider its enjoyment as an incontestable right....The father has long anticipated the moment when his authority must come to an end, and when that time does come near, he abdicates without fuss. The son has known in advance when he will be his own master and wins his liberty without haste or effort, as a possession which is his due and which no one seeks to snatch from him.

In countries organized on the basis of an aristocratic hierarchy...men confine themselves to controlling those next on the chain [and] society is, in truth, only concerned with the father. It only controls the father; it rules him and he rules his sons....He is the author and support of the family; he is also its magistrate. He is given a political right to command.

In democracies, where the long arm of government reaches each man among the crowd separately to bend him to obedience to the common laws, there is no need for such an intermediary. In the eyes of the law the father is only a fellow citizen older and richer than his sons.

When conditions generally are very unequal and this inequality is permanent, the concept of superiority works on the imagination of men. But when men are little different from one another and such differences are not permanent, the general conception of superiority becomes weakened and less defined.

When men {in aristocratic societies} are more concerned with what their ancestors thought than to think for themselves, the father is heard with deference, he is always addressed with respect, and the affection felt for him is ever mingled with fear. In democratic societies father and son live together in the same place and carry on the same work. Habit and necessity bring them together and force them to communicate.

In democratic society a son addresses his father with freedom, familiarity and tenderness all at once. Under democratic laws the members of a family are perfectly equal, and consequently independent; nothing forcibly brings them together, but also nothing drives them apart as in aristocratic societies where age and gender irrevocably fix the rank for each. Democracy overthrows or lowers all these barriers. Perhaps the division of patrimonies which follows from democracy does more than all the rest to alter the relations between father and children......

The “division of patrimonies” to which de Tocqueville refers is the breakup of estates made inevitable by the elimination of primogeniture within the American colonies.

Simply put, George Calvert, along with most of Leonard’s descendants, had decided, perhaps without realizing it, that he was American and not British. Cecil’s descendants might see themselves as superior by birthright, but on this side of the Atlantic, the aged Captain Calvert probably saw himself as no more and no less than another landowner. His frame of reference was American; his sense of class distinctions was less ingrained than his English kin. At the time of the American Revolution, residents of these shores had been making their own decisions for nearly 300 years, almost always on the basis of self-interest and not often influenced by “tradition”.

George wouldn’t have felt particularly superior to his fellow citizens, nor that he was giving up all that much by declining the honor of title. He may also have been influenced by the knowledge that his deceased cousin Frederick (of whom more in a separate section) had squandered much of the family estate and irreparably damaged the family’s social and political standing in aristocratic circles.

More and more distanced from power and position, their property divided by succeeding generations, surrounded by a population which largely didn’t care who your grandfather was, Leonard’s descendants probably didn’t experience their evolution of social status as anything but normal and natural. Rather than mourning the loss of the Calvert fortune, which they never held, Leonard’s descendants most probably saw an opportunity to rise - on their own merits - in this new and unbridled land.

The Maryland legislature’s seizure, in October of 1780, of all British property within the state was of far greater consequence to Cecil’s line than Leonard’s, possibly affecting Leonard’s family very little at all. It was, in a sense, a moot point anyway; a legislative stamp of approval on an established political and economic reality. To invert a metaphor, the legislature merely opened the barn door after the herd had already kicked through it.

The exodus from Europe, from England, and from the 13 Colonies themselves had begun, and efforts to stem it were pointless. Edmund Burke, in urging a sensible policy toward North America would say to Parliament:

If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You can not station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry n their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian Mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with their habits of life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counselors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time must, be the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil the command and blessing of Providence, "Increase and multiply." Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.

In America the Calverts didn’t undergo a “fall from power”. They were part of a historical process, a process which they had themselves had played a pivotal role in shaping, and in which, as citizens of the new republic, they continued to participate, no longer as Lord and Ladies and soon not as colonial gentry, but as landowners and farmers, husbands, wives, and children in an experiment the world had never seen.

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V

FRONTIERSMEN, FARMERS & FAMILIES

William Calvert, 1732 - 1812

Gerrard Calvert, 1765 - 1840

William B. Calvert, 1799 - 1864

Burgess Durury Calvert, 1832 - 1923

William Burgess Calvert, 1863 - 1955

Omer Triplett Calvert, 1890 - 1974

 

(1775 - Battle of Lexington and Concord * 1781 - British surrender at Yorktown, VA *1803 - Louisiana Purchase * 1790 - United States population is 3,929,214 * 1792 - Kentucky becomes 15th state * 1807 - Fulton’s steamboat makes it from New York to Albany without blowing up * 1836 - photography invented * 1846 - US extends from Atlantic to Pacific * 1869 - Union & Central Pacific Railroad across the US completed *1876 - Telephone invented * 1903 - Wright Brothers first flight)

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By 1797 Leonard’s great-great-grandson William had packed up the family and moved from Virginia, where many of Sir George’s descendants had settled over the years, to Mason County, Kentucky (12) where he joined two sons who had moved there earlier. More than likely, the family was among the thousands who came by wagon, clogging the only two roads through the mountains with genuine traffic jams, literally horn to bumper during muddy periods, and probably followed either the Louisville Trace or the Warrior’s Path into north central Kentucky, perhaps a generation later. In the Lexington area Louisville Trace remains heavily traveled in places today as Versailles Road and Route 60. In it’s heyday, which began around 1790, it consisted of a web of trails criss-crossing the Bluegrass region between Ohio and Tennessee, intersecting with the trails leading to and from the coastal states. The Warrior’s Path, which Daniel Boone followed on his early journeys into the Bluegrass likewise remains in use today as Harrodsburg Road, Broadway, and Route 68.
 
Until 1744, when the first white explorers set foot in the region, the settlement of the North American continent was restricted to the Atlantic coast. As late as the 1760’s there were still only small, widely separated settled areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. Then the dam burst. The speed and magnitude of growth in the area beyond the Alleghenies from the 1760’s on was nothing short of stunning, and caused considerable concern back along the coast in the continuous settled area of the United States. The original meaning of kan-tuck-kee, when the white settlers first heard it, is unknown. “That dark and bloody ground” is the meaning the word came to have as the area became the most hotly contested real estate in the new nation. In the states that later evolved west of the Mississippi the fight for territory was more one of conflict between the tribes and the US Army than by Indian raids against individual homes and settlements.
 
The settlement of Kentucky and the Ohio River region was quite different. The Continental Army, as it came into being, was preoccupied with fighting the British in the established Atlantic states, paying little attention to the hostile tribes allied with the Crown in the sparsely settled “over-mountain” areas. Though it was seen quite differently by the settlers who actually lived there, both the English and American governments understood that these tribal alliances were little more than harassing diversions from the real subject of Independence. In one of its first acts following the Revolution, Congress, with bitter memories of British military occupation and abuses fresh in mind, quickly acknowledged the need to have an Army of some sort but limited its size to 5000 soldiers which, in a nation of roughly 4 million, was one step short of having no Army at all. That is exactly what the Congress intended.

 

The settlers were pretty much on their own until the demand for land became a political issue in Congress and President Washington dispatched General “Mad Anthony” Wayne with a trained force of 1500 regulars and militia to overwhelm the tribes and finally establish “peace”. In the decades between the discovery of the Cumberland Gap and Gen. Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers thousands of natives and settlers alike were killed, almost entirely in small skirmishes involving less than 20 people and often only individuals.

 Allen W. Eckert notes that prior to the arrival of the settlers kan-tuck-kee had been recognized by all the tribes of the region as such a valuable hunting ground, able to serve them all, that no tribe lived there permanently, and all were free to hunt there unchallenged. So strong was this peace by common consent that members of tribes that would have attacked each other on sight anywhere else could pass each other in these forests without a single arrow being shot or tomahawk thrown.

Indian raids and full-scale battles (not to mention unscrupulous land speculators and the general riffraff that follows any migration) were major concerns for the entire period from 1744, when the first whites entered Kentucky, until the early 1800’s when the Iroquois, Cherokee, Delaware, Wyandot, Kaskaskia, Chippewa and Shawnee who vigorously and aggressively resisted the settlers’ encroachment on their lands, had been driven off or killed and Kentucky emerged from “frontier” status to join the rest of the states as a settled community.

By the early 1800’s Lexington, one of the earliest permanent settlements (known as Masterson’s Station until 1775) had already been transformed from a crude enclave of 38 cabins into a center of business, agriculture and the arts with a population of 6,000. When William arrived, Transylvania University, the first college chartered west of the Alleghenies was well established and the first newspaper west of the Alleghenies, The Kentucky Gazette, had been in publication in Lexington since 1787 and the first American performance of a Beethoven Symphony was given there in 1817. Another gristly sign of “urban” settlement was a cholera epidemic in 1833 that killed six hundred men, women, and children - 10 percent of the city’s residents.

The success and early rapid growth of the city can be attributed to the fact that Lexington was at a sort of crossroads for explorers and travelers. Most Kentucky trails and roads passed near or through the city and, therefore, so did most of the commerce until Louisville and Cincinnati gradually replaced Lexington after the invention of the steam engine and the heightened importance of riverboat commerce with the South. In 1817 William’s son Basil (“Zeal”) was able to receive a bond to establish a tavern in Mason County (13). The tavern is an indicator of the Calvert’s economic stability, for taverns of the time were social centers for the surrounding area, shelters in the wilderness (required by law to admit all travelers as a matter of public safety), as well as community meeting places, which resulted in their being important businesses in their own right and more closely regulated than many contemporary enterprises. Tavern bonds were not given lightly, nor to men of doubtful standing and character.

This part of the family history is open to speculation, but it is significant that several of William’s descendants are recorded as having married Tripletts, prominent Kentucky landowners themselves. These marriages were important in establishing the family lineage back to the first Lord Baltimore. Prior to this William the lineage is fairly well confirmed, but after William, and until we reach a time that living Calverts can recall their own forebears, the record is scanty at best. The genealogical “theory of significant names”, which refers to the habit common among families of naming their children after members of previous generations provided the first reliable link supporting the oral tradition that Omer T. and the first Lord Baltimore were related.

Democracy and aristocracy notwithstanding, families of similar social station then, as now, tend to familiarity. Accordingly, the marriages to Tripletts are additional “clues” that the Calverts didn’t arrive in Kentucky as poor farmers, but as a family of reasonable substance already owning land purchased while living in Virginia ($60.00 per 100 acres for first rate land; $40 for other lands of "inferior quality"), rather than claimed as no-cost “tomahawk improvements” when they arrived.

Though opposition from local tribes had diminished substantially by the time William arrived, the hazard was far from gone. Indian attacks - and white provocations - would continue for decades yet (14). Due to conditions that were initially as primitive and much more dangerous than Leonard had encountered in settling Maryland, little if any significance should attach to Basil’s marrying the daughter of large landowners while his brother Gerrard (Omer T’s great-great- grandfather) married a woman for whom we have not found any particularly notable social standing.

Such considerations didn’t matter. What would have mattered was that Rosanna McIlvane was a strong and resilient woman who could hold her own in the Kentucky wilderness, assisted by the family of slaves Gerrard inherited upon William’s death in 1812 - a circumstance that led to some unpleasant litigation among siblings. William was apparently a kindly old man who owned a small family of slaves who constituted the bulk of his estate. His will directed that one of the slaves, “Old Jim” be set free, and wanting to keep the rest of them as a family unit, he bequeathed the rest to Gerrard. Court documents record that the other children demanded equal division of the estate and filed a lawsuit trying to break the will by claiming their father had become “an imbecile” in his old age.

Following the initial exploration by Boone, Findlay, Harrod and others, people like William Calvert found an unsettled and raw land on which they built their log cabins. Those cabins were rarely intended to be permanent and usually, after a year or two, they were replaced with at least split-board, clapboard or brick homes. (In the 1960’s and 70’s several apparently modern homes in Athens, Ohio, in the southeastern part of the state, were discovered to be original log cabins from this period. Siding, paneling, additional rooms, insulation, wallpaper, paint, then electricity, and so on, had been added to the structures as time passed until the original buildings had been forgotten, completely encased in the “skin” of much later construction.)

The abundant game that made the region such prime hunting ground for the native population fled before the massive influx of white men but that was not a problem of major consequence. Farmers do not have the time to hunt for food as a regular activity. Almost all of the settlers arrived with, or quickly acquired, hogs and chickens and often cattle, only using wild game as a sporadic supplement and even recreational variation to these domesticated staples. (One notable transformation from 19th to 20th Century domestic life, quite aside from implements and appliances, took place at the breakfast table. In an article on the economic battle that took place between Post and Kellogg when cold cereal was invented at the start of this century we learn that prior to the Age of Corn Flakes the typical American breakfast for farmers and city dwellers alike included ample portions of greasy bacon, fresh buttered home made bread, three or four eggs, often fried, pancakes in syrup, whole or buttermilk ....and whiskey (15). Coffee was restricted to the adults.)

The original settlement of British America had been driven by British politics, including religious discontent, and the British economy. The objective, certainly shared by Sir George himself, had been to construct an extension of England across the Atlantic. To have settlers crossing out of the control of the Crown was decidedly not a desirable development in the eyes of the legal authorities, and the King had attempted to arrest the advance with a proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlement beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic (the Alleghenies and Appalachians).

George Washington desired to settle a State at a time in the Northwest, and a few years later Jefferson wanted to reserve settlement of his Louisiana Purchase to north of the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer the balance of it to the Indians in exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. "When we shall be full on this side," he writes, "we may lay off a range of States on the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply."

It didn’t work. As old and well settled as it was, even the “idea” of “Virginia” itself was not at all clearly defined: the term included some or all of modern Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The European-based concept of boundaries as clear lines, often running through dense populations, simply had no meaning in a land that hadn’t even been decently mapped. And even if boundaries had held some meaning the settlers were not of a mind to comply. The early settlers had been tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comfort. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs, tobacco and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack trains to the coast each year according to the seasonal rhythms of their respective occupations. This was important since it was almost the only way in which the pioneer learned what was going on in the East.

When discovery was finally made of salt springs beyond the Alleghenies the region was freed from dependence on the coast, enabling settlement by the Calverts and thousands of other families willing to cross the mountains. The West and the East began to get out of touch of each other. The settlements from the sea to the mountains had a certain solidarity. But the over-mountain men grew more independent. The settlers’ and trader's "traces” widened into trails, the trails were widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were often transformed into railroads. These paths led West, away from the coast. The second steam locomotive built in the US was constructed in Lexington in 1838.

The differences between the Atlantic seaboard states and the new “Western” states were more than simply a difference in opinion as to what constituted a responsible approach to expansion. Virginia, and Maryland, and their coastal neighbors were sincerely worried that the independently minded over-mountain populations might get out of hand entirely to the detriment of the Union. An interesting (and amusing) illustration of the opinion of frontier democracy held by the established East comes from the debates in the Virginia constitutional convention of 1830 when a representative from western Virginia declared:

But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants. They are regenerated, politically I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians; and the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician is immense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home, or when they return from Congress, they have Negroes to fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure and uncontaminated.

Churches, for believers and skeptics alike, were the anchor of these early communities and played an important role by serving up a blend of morality, civility and heavy- handed social control. Settlers who didn’t give a whit what Congress, or even the state legislature had to say, were reluctant to challenge the secular authority of their local church. The result was a rapid stabilization of society to a degree conspicuously (and murderously) absent from the later settlement of the American West. The churches’ role in social control was exercised through not only peer pressure, but the formal procedure of Exclusions. This meant being kicked out of the church, and therefore the social life of the community. Until the individual made their peace with the church, the membership (and, by the way, with God) they were excluded. Infractions that might result in exclusion were therefore taken very seriously.

Normally the process of exclusion began after one church member complained about another member by reporting the problem at a regular business meeting. The church appointed a committee to talk to the individual and try to persuade them to confess and ask forgiveness. If the first step didn't work, the church would send out letters through the clerk to other churches in the area inviting them to come and help them. There was no appeal of their decision.

Tobacco, hemp (for the baling and bagging of tobacco) and horses quickly established themselves as the dominant economic forces in Kentucky. Corn, also a major crop in Kentucky, but difficult to transport in dried form, was transported more easily when distilled. Virginia plantations were largely self-sufficient, and the distance from the tobacco barns to the docks where ships heading for England were waiting for commercial cargo was relatively short, so a barter economy dominated for a long period. Such practices had a certain utility when making bulk purchases for an otherwise self-contained plantation, but in Kentucky, plantations were not the dominant form of social organization and family farms were unable to produce all their own needs for very long. Tobacco bales and walking livestock are an impractical form of exchange when thousands of consumers on an individual basis only want to purchase needles, a few yards of cloth, dishware or a plow. Accordingly, money replaced barter rapidly.

William’s son Gerrard and his siblings were not settlers, as their father had been. Rather, they were among the builders of Kentucky. They added field to field, made roads out of trails, threw bridges over the streams, put up houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, planted orchards, built mills, schoolhouses, courthouses, etc., and lived the forms of plain, frugal, but eminently civilized life. They were a far cry from the people whom Governor Spotswood of Virginia, with his thoroughly British outlook, had caricatured in 1717 when he wrote, "The inhabitants of our frontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as of their time, settle themselves where land is to be taken and that will produce the necessarys of life with little labour."

The wheels kept turning. Hardly had Kentucky become a state than it became a starting place for adventures even further into the West. By December 1816, a year before Zeal opened his tavern, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, and seven year old Abraham, had already left Elizabethtown, Kentucky for the Indiana Territory, remaining there for fourteen years before moving to Illinois in 1830. In Peck's New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837, occurs this passage:

Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the "range," and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a "truck patch." The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corn-crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or "deadened," and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the "lord of the manor." With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he "breaks for the high timber," "clears out for the New Purchase," or migrates to work the same process over.

A generation later, Burgess Durury Calvert was among those who headed on. O’Gorman reports that sometime between 1868 and 1870 he took the family into Missouri but returned to Fleming County, KY in 1876 only to find that most of the people he had known had either died or moved on themselves. Of the return trip to Kentucky, Burgess Durury's granddaughter Willie Ruth Calvert Bates has recounted that her father many times told of driving the covered wagon on that trip, when he was only 13 years old. Grund, writing in 1836, had declared:

It appears the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, an actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress.

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Other considerations and circumstances common to the settlement of Kentucky were taken as a matter of course although to modern sensibilities they would be seen, at best, as odd and perhaps even abominable. The institutions of education and marriage themselves were quite different institutions in Kentucky’s early years. It appears that for the most part the Calverts in Kentucky were in the minority with respect to education. Following the Revolution, literacy in America declined dramatically (except in New England) to the point that just prior to the Civil War less than a quarter of the population could read or write. The schools mandated by law were scarce and rudimentary on the frontier (the first public schools in Lexington began opening only in the 1830’s; schools in the rural areas came slowly and much later) but indications are that the Calverts have been able to read and write throughout most of their history.

Reading and writing were taught as very separate disciplines until nearly the 20th Century, when they were taught at all. Even girls were taught to read because social sentiment approved of everybody being able to read the Bible. Writing and “ciphering”, however, were not necessary skills in an agricultural society except for doctors, lawyers and other professionals. They were, in fact, abilities often scorned as a sign of unjustifiable pretension in an environment where reading the seasons was far more valuable, and individuals who were quite capable of writing were known to have signed documents with their “mark” as a means of concealing their education.

Although the 1850 Fleming County census includes a column labeled "persons over 20 years of age who cannot read and write” which lists his parents, William B. and Hettie Calvert, Burgess Calvert’s signature on his discharge from the Union Army shows a floral style indicating that he had, in fact, been educated at home if not in a school. In this regard a newcomer to the society of Calverts, having a certain interest in history, is struck by the reminiscences of family members who have recalled William Burgess Calvert in anecdotes. William Burgess is invariably described as a formal, reserved and proper gentleman, ramrod straight, whom one is led to believe always wore a suit. Pretentious? The Kentucky Calverts don’t seem the sort who would tolerate or encourage pretension. That is a family value judgment passed from generation to generation, not easily dismissed or abandoned. Esteem for knowledge falls in a similar category of values and Burgess Calvert’s apparent education, still evident in a son who lived into the Atomic Age, gives credence to a family tradition of pride and bearing first exemplified by Sir George Calvert.

On the subject of marriage, the oddities reign though they become fully understandable when placed in context. Most important to understanding that context is that the proportion of men to women on the Kentucky frontier was 6-to-1, and that women were largely deprived of property rights.

Farming at the time, and long after, required large families. In this, William B. (16) appears to be the Calvert family record-holder, fathering at least sixteen children by two wives. Child mortality rates were high and eligible women were as scarce as eligible husbands were abundant. Death at an early age was not uncommon. The result was that not only the Calverts, but very many of the families who were in the Kentucky (and Tennessee) territories not uncommonly have in their history first cousin marriages, extremely early marriages, and marriages between widows or widowers and their former in-laws as a means of keeping property within the family.

These practices were legal, accepted, and an unavoidable product of the numerical imbalance between the sexes. The risks associated with close unions were known if not understood, and another accepted by-product of the period is that it was not uncommon for a couple to postpone a formal marriage for a suitable period of time, to see if the children were “all right”. If a child was found to be “lacking”, papa was free to head down the road unencumbered, for an unmarried mother had little recourse.

Under these confusing circumstances, the attempt to trace the descendants of George Calvert which by definition usually involved following the male line carrying the family name sometimes required trying to explore the maternal lines in order to determine which Calvert fathered which later Calvert. Too often, however, the mother’s married name rather than her maiden name was all that was available, and that was usually no help at all. It was under these circumstances that we made the acquaintance of Constance Calvert.

There is debate over William B. Calvert’s parentage owing to a ten-year discrepancy in his reported birth date, variously reported as 1790 and 1799, the error probably deriving from a confusion of handwritten “zero’s” and “nine’s” which were often difficult to distinguish. Depending on the birth date chosen and the ages of the available mothers possible and living in the vicinity (a key consideration for obvious reasons), the choices among Calvert parents narrows down to either Zeal’s brother Gerrard Calvert and his wife Rosanna McIlvane, toward whom the most convincing evidence points, or Gerrard’s twin sister Constance (also recorded as “Connie”) Calvert who married her first cousin Jesse Calvert.

As regards a lineage back to Leonard, this distinction is unimportant since both lines, whichever choice of parents one supports, extend back from William B. to the first Governor of Maryland. The confusion created by the conflicting accounts of William B.’s birth is symptomatic of the marriage predicament early settlers faced. In another instance from this period, Calvert step-siblings - not half-siblings - married. Or perhaps a married couple became step-siblings after their parents married; the dates are uncertain, but very close. William B. Calvert, son of Gerrard Calvert, married Elizabeth Evans following the death of his first wife Hester Rigdon in 1851 or 1852. William and Elizabeth had their first child, Isaac, in May of 1853. (William and Hester are the direct ancestors of the Kentucky Calverts of Georgetown and vicinity.)

Elizabeth Evans had previously been married to Houston Jackson, with whom she had a daughter named Louisa. In 1853, around the same time that her mother married William B., Louisa married Burgess Durury Calvert, “a kind hearted man with a jovial disposition” who was William B.’s eighth child by Hester Rigdon. Between the death of Hester, and his marriage to Elizabeth, William - finding himself with two very small children - struck an agreement with his daughter Nancy and her husband William Hardeman in which the Hardemans cared for the little ones and lived on William's land in exchange

William Calvert was the last “colonial” Calvert. The environment he left behind in Virginia was still in many ways English in outlook and organization. It is possible, simply from the norms of Virginian society, to assume that William’s marriage to Hanna (Harrison?) was still either an arranged one, or at least required parental approval His son Gerrard undoubtedly chose his own wife.

Gerrard, then William B., Burgess Durury, and then William Burgess after him, would see the birth of the modern United States. The Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, doubled the size of the new United States, truly making it a global power. The country grew from 13 to 48 states. William B. would be the last member of the family to hear first-hand of Indian attacks within the Commonwealth (17).

Burgess Durury Calvert and Louisa Jackson

He, and his sons and grandsons, would see the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, made possible by a federal land grant in 1865, grow into the University of Kentucky. Around the same period, back in Maryland, another of Leonard's descendants, Congressman Charles Benedict Calvert (who had introduced the original legislation creating the U.S. Department of Agriculture) personally provided the land for the Maryland Agricultural College, which grew into the University of Maryland.

The generations after Gerrard saw America and the Europeans move from dependence on the world as they found it, however creative their efforts might have been, to the beginnings of mankind’s mastery over much of the world in which it lived. Pasteur peered into his microscope and found life teeming in a single drop of water; Robert Fulton turned steam into transportation and Edison used it to turn night into day. Samuel Morse’s telegraph was made obsolete by Alexander Graham Bell. And there was more to come.

The impact of what these generations of Calverts saw must have been stunning, and perhaps not altogether welcomed. The Annual Calvert Family Reunions, still going strong as the 20th century draws to a close, are in many ways the embodiment of American history. When Burgess Durury, whose arm would be permanently crippled by a shot through the wrist while fighting for the Union with Kentucky’s 124th Infantry, was born in 1832 covered wagons were carrying families to the Great Plains, and further. When he died men were flying, women were voting and Einstein had already published the theories that would be dropped on Hiroshima. His son, William Burgess, saw communications evolve from Pony Express to the nightly television news (and lived to attend the first annual reunion of his own and Hester's direct descendants on October 2, 1953 - his 90th birthday). William Burgess’s son, Omer T., already a teenager when the Wright brothers of Dayton first struggled into the air, lived to see another Ohio boy step on the moon.

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VI

Denouement

 The End of The Aristocracy

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Frederick Calvert, 1732 - 1771

Sixth Lord Baltimore

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The last Lord Baltimore exemplifies the depths of self- indulgence to which the nobility of his time often sank (18). He was himself a contributing factor in Maryland’s willingness to join the rest of the colonies in throwing off British rule and provided ample justification for the Crown not to make a serious effort to find a successor to carry on the title of Lord Baltimore after George, of Deep Hole Farm in Virginia, declined the honor.

George of Virginia and the British government quite possibly acted from the same assessment of the circumstances: the titular head of the Barony of Baltimore, and therefore the Barony itself, had become a very public embarrassment to all with whom he was associated. The embarrassment, however, was not because of conduct considered to be depraved by the standards of a later age, but that the conduct, hardly unheard-of amongst the privileged elite, became a topic of public scandal and ridicule.

The early 1700’s in Europe and England were a lusty, ribald age, and Frederick was simply one of the more wealthy participants. As public awareness of these private “excesses” grew, public tolerance for such flagrancies decreased. It was from seeds such as those sown by the public outrage over Frederick’s lifestyle that the restraint and decorum of the Victorian Age sprouted, though it can be argued that the excesses of the French nobility accelerated the process of outward moral reformation even more than that of their English counterparts.

By the time Frederick was born in 1732 the Calverts had been recognized members of the privileged British elite for a century, and the sixth Lord Baltimore was accustomed to the privileges of rank and social position in a society centered on aristocratic prerogatives. In a manner quite opposite to Leonard’s descendants who came to maturity in an American society based on personal accomplishments and attributes, Frederick was instructed - and expected - that, simply because his name was Calvert a life of leisure and indulgence was his birthright.

He had attended Eton and moved in circles in which he had many influential friends. He and pioneering herpetologist Carl Linnaeus dedicated published works to each other. Indeed, Frederick was named in honor of his father’s patron, Frederick, Prince of Wales, whom Charles, Fifth Lord Baltimore, served as cofferer (treasurer and chief accountant). Charles’ relationship with the Prince of Wales was very close: the Prince died in his arms.

No less an authority than Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell recorded that in January of 1764 the Principal Secretary of Maryland, Frederick’s uncle Cecilius, urged his nephew’s early return from his travels in order to attend to pressing business of the colony. Lord Baltimore determined that it was more important that he remain several months longer in Constantinople where he was “living as a Turk”. Continues Boswell in a very obvious reference to the opium problem with which he was himself unfortunately familiar:

He [Frederick] lived luxuriously and inflamed his blood, then he grew melancholy and timorous and was constantly taking medicines. In short, (in Constantinople) he is leading a strange, wild life, useless to his country, uneasy to himself, except when raised to a delirium, and must soon destroy his constitution.

Frederick and his immediate forebears lived in the same general period in which Charles Dickens wrote of the miseries of the English lower classes in Oliver Twist and other works. Education and the basic necessities of decent life were denied to the mass of the King’s subjects. Child labor and the conditions under which it occurred were nothing less than atrocious. Early death from malnutrition and from diseases that were preventable even then was common for those who held no rank or position in society. The role of His Majesty’s average subject, as every member of society understood, was no less and certainly no more than to keep the upper classes living in the manner to which they were entitled while the lower classes often lived their daily lives in filth. Sir George’s heirs were not bothered by such mundane inconveniences in their own lives.

While very little of Frederick remains from which a complete assessment of the man can be made, the available commentaries, both contemporary and made at the distance of two centuries are consistent with letters in the Calvert Papers held by the Maryland Historical Society. Their tone is shrill, selfish, demanding, and (in letters relating to his decision to separate from his wife) completely lacking in any acknowledgment that he might - just might - be to some degree responsible for the events of his own life.

Others who have researched the life of the last Lord Baltimore have written of him as being “infinitely conceited”, “selfish and extravagant”, and a “disreputable and dissolute degenerate”. Richard Cox, of the Maryland Historical Society, states,

...His management of Maryland...displayed anything but concern or interest. He enjoyed the aristocratic lifestyle, touring Europe and Asia, writing ephemeral travel accounts, breeding fine race horses, and, in toto, was more concerned with spending his money than knowing from whence or how it came. Certainly his qualifications for the proprietorship went no farther than his birth.

In 1768 Frederick went on trial for his life. Accusations of rape, a capital offense, by one Sarah Woodcock, a milliner, resulted in the trial of Lord Baltimore and two accused female accessories, a Mrs. Griffinburgh and a Mrs. Hervey.

Frederick Calvert and his accuser Sarah Woodcock

The public controversy and condemnation resulting from the trial, comparable in its time to the Lindbergh kidnapping trial in the 1930’s or the O.J. Simpson trials of the 1990’s, was so pervasive that following his acquittal Frederick felt compelled to abandon England forever, giving away his home and furnishings and dying in Naples, Italy as a near recluse only a few years later. He was 39 and without legal heirs, though there were a number of children who could call him “Father”. Some, though likely not all, have been documented in his will and elsewhere.

Two centuries after the scandal surrounding Frederick Calvert has died down one can look at the circumstances with a bit of detachment. Repeating the caveat that His Lordship and his accused accomplices were acquitted, and noting that defendants in criminal cases were prohibited from speaking in their own defense (on the grounds that they were biased), an understanding of the milieu in which the trial took place seems appropriate.

On one hand, the concept of trial and judgment by one’s peers was already a part of British jurisprudence: Justice was dispensed by generally honest men who were consciously attempting to uphold the law. A system of juries and a method of recourse to law for infringements, even minor ones, was firmly established although the decision of the court was made by a jury of men only, who would not be expected to be sympathetic to the plaintiff. Yet for a presumed gentleman of such rank to be accused with sufficient credibility by a commoner that a trial was required, itself speaks volumes. Under normal circumstances in Georgian England, which included not only the nobility’s tacit exemption from common standards of conduct, but also the lowly legal status of commoners generally and all women in particular, the notion of a rape trial would have been out of the question unless Frederick was living in penury and beset by debts, which was hardly the situation.

For gentlemen of means the usual procedure would have been to settle the matter privately. Ironically, Frederick’s baronial title was not an advantage. The Barony of Baltimore was Irish rather than British, and as such he was tried as a commoner: the men of the jury were not themselves drawn from the nobility as they would have been if Lord Baltimore had been an English Lord.

Class tensions in England were at the time quite strained and there are ample grounds for doubting the validity of Miss Woodcock’s allegations. Her social standing was such that her motivations might well have been motivated by political and social antagonisms. Medical testimony did not support her account of events, and she acknowledged in court that she several times had the opportunity to escape her alleged involuntary captivity, spanning a period of several days at Lord Baltimore’s country home near Epsom, during which time, by her own testimony, she had multiple occasions to communicate her predicament to numerous visitors, including men of high and formal judicial authority.

One physician who had examined Miss Woodcock said her account of escaping from her captors was highly implausible: his examination couldn't confirm her story, and had she suffered the indignities she claimed she "wouldn’t have been able to walk, let alone run," when an opportunity for freedom presented itself, he asserted.

Whether or not the specific incidents claimed by Miss Woodcock were true, there is no argument that they accurately described activities that were a routine element of Frederick’s lifestyle, as several witnesses confirmed. Mrs. Griffinburgh and Mrs. Hervey, his accused accessories, had among their duties as members of Lord Baltimore’s household staff the role of procurers for his Lordship’s constantly changing seraglio (19), and “educating” the young women involved in the often outlandish tastes and peculiarities preferred by the Baron. So blatant was Lord Baltimore that on occasion he invited his friends to participate in parties and lewd relaxations planned for their entertainment.

Although the colonial government in Maryland prohibited newspapers from printing the stories swirling around London, the press in neighboring Pennsylvania had no such scruples and the information crossed the border anyway. Residents of the colonies, who owed their formal allegiance and honor to whomever was Lord Baltimore at the time, gave their exalted Baron the decidedly rude nickname of “Lord Spindle”, the intended insult probably being heightened by the double pun on his accuser’s name and occupation.

Cox, writing in the Society’s official publication in 1975 again comments in his own voice as well as quoting Professor Clayton Hall: Some Marylanders could not understand why one man, Lord Baltimore, gained merely by birth such a lucrative possession as their colony. They were particularly angered by the hedonistic Frederick Calvert, who was only concerned with Maryland as a source of income for his dilettantish and even scandalous activities..... “News of Frederick’s rape trial ‘extinguished in the Maryland Province whatever vestige of regard or loyalty remained for the Proprietary” The trial was the final ingredient in a recipe for disaster: Frederick was financially irresponsible, wasting vast sums on his extravagant whims and toys while assuming his American revenues would continue indefinitely. His scandal - heightened by his arrogance - became a political and social Waterloo for the family.

None of the Lords Baltimore had clearer warning of what the future held or better opportunity to avoid disaster. And none failed the memory of Sir George more thoroughly. Deprived of honor as well as their American source of wealth, the House of Calvert quietly ceased upon Frederick’s passing.


The modern legacy of Sir George

FIN


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1 The term “Adventurer” as applied to the passengers on the “Ark” and “Dove” differs from the term as it is understood today. The original meaning of the word applied specifically to real estate speculators. The various encounters of the early explorers led to the word evolving to include anyone setting off in search of uncertain and possibly precarious results.

2 Washington didn’t like to be physically touched. The personal notes of a delegate to the Constitutional Convention record that during a break in the business of the Convention, Gouvenor Morris of New York accepted a “dare” to give the General a jovial slap on the back. Washington’s response was an icy stare that reportedly froze the room. Morris didn’t do it again.

3 In 1517, only 62 years before George’s birth, Martin Luther nailed his Theses against the Church’s selling of indulgences to the chapel door in Wittenberg. The Protestant Reformation, and the breakup of the Catholic’s Church’s power, had begun and the Middle Ages had come to an end. Only eight years later, in 1525, Germanic tribes sacked what remained of Rome. Thankfully, they didn’t clean up the mess.

4 Spices were the focus of such intense activity for reasons quite foreign to modern times. Though recognizable as an acknowledgment of the economic power of a mass consumer market, flavoring was far less important than the function of spices simply as food preservatives in an age before refrigeration. The term “spices” also included foundations for perfumes at a time when bathing was viewed as unhealthy. A crowded room on a hot summer night must have been a remarkable experience.

5 Capitalism was then in its early stages of development and most of society still functioned as an agricultural / barter economy. Many taxes, as well as commercial transactions could still be paid in livestock, produce, or commodities and contracts often went to great pains to establish fair terms of trade. Paper money was unknown and credit as a formal procedure was extremely rare. For men of substance, however, gold was the only acknowledged immutable repository of wealth, and for the Monarchy gold was the only means by which to pay for castles, courts and the raising of armies and navies. There was often not enough of it, and it is probable that George Calvert’s influence derived in part from loans made, on very favorable terms, to the King and his representatives. Today we would call it “buying influence and favor”; at the time it was done openly, honestly, and was recognized as a good business practice for those able to engage in it.

6 The modern sons, husbands, and in-laws, of today’s Kentucky Lady Calverts apologize profusely and in unison for a remark that would be life-threatening if uttered by anyone still living.

7 In Democracy in America, written in the early 1800’s, Alexis de Toqueville accurately noted that the abandonment of primogeniture in the new nation was a primary reason why the United States did not develop the vast chasms of wealth and poverty seen in the old European countries. Estates in America, however large they might be at the outset, were subdivided, and further subdivided as the generations passed, and sold off in parcels in a process resulting in a “leveling” of wealth among the population at large. Less than a century after Independence few fortunes in existence in 1776 remained. Other fortunes would, of course, had taken their place, themselves in turn to rise and repeat the process.

8 On January 21, 1648, Margaret had the audacity to march into the Maryland General Assembly and demand not one, but two votes: one for herself as a landowner and one as Lord Baltimore's attorney. The astonished legislators didn’t give it to her, but she is remembered as one of the most remarkable and unusual women of the 17th century. Contemporary accounts of Margaret tend to be unflattering for some reason

9 Probably not coincidentally. England had a considerable commercial interest in Southern cotton for her textile mills. Confederate strategy relied heavily on Great Britain eventually entering the war on the southern side, and there was considerable sentiment in London to do so. The political problem of supporting the South made His Majesty’s Government nervous, however, since the US was the only major nation that still had not banned slavery. Lincoln’s none-too-subtle threat to seize all British property in the North, where the English had invested heavily, probably settled the matter.

10 At the Battle of Bunker Hill, which the British won at a cost of several hundred troops, versus fewer than two dozen Minutemen casualties, the British commander is said to have remarked, “Another such victory and all is lost.”

11 So many did so that Kentucky was the only state that didn’t have to go completely through the required procedure of being admitted to the Union. The conditions of statehood established under the Northwest Ordinance included a period during which the population of the territory in question would grow to at least 60,000. Kentucky’s population was already larger than that when the law was enacted.

12 One of the arguments in favor of the nation adopting the Constitution was that the federal government would assume the considerable debts incurred by the individual states in supporting the War for Independence. Among the first acts of the new Congress were measures coercing the states to cede all lands west of the Alleghenies and Appalachians, which were largely unpopulated by white men, to the federal government. The government sold the property to pay the debts it had assumed. Some things never change.

13Mason County” doesn’t necessarily mean the Mason County existing today. At the time of Kentucky’s organization as a territory, the entire area was comprised of only nine huge counties. In 1817, when Zeal obtained his tavern bond, Mason County covered the entire eastern 20% of modern Kentucky.

14 The Indians of the area were not amenable to departing their lands, as their Chesapeake predecessors had been, and challenged the encroachment of white settlers. In Wilderness at Dawn, Ted Morgan writes of additional complications the tribes foisted on each other, using the settlers as pawns. “Kentucky was the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted, fought over by many tribes but never lived on. When white men came in, the Cherokees sold them land that belonged to the Shawnee, and vice versa, so the settlers were always buying land from the wrong tribe.” By this ruse, the presumed sellers would reap the benefits of the sale and at the same time entice the settlers to enter areas where they were certain to be attacked by another tribe with no risk of life to the tribe that “sold” the land in the first place. Morgan recounts other instances of local tribes beckoning settlers to the shores of a river from midstream on one friendly pretext or another, only to kill them when they came close enough.

15 In 1886 there were only two automobiles in the entire state of Iowa. They had a head-on collision. An argument can be made that the drivers had just finished breakfast.

16 We have been unable to find records directly confirming William Baltimore’s middle name. All surviving documents attached to him (known to friends as “Buck” and reportedly a formidable wrestler) show only the middle initial “B”. Only one of the major Calvert researchers, James Bailey Calvert Nicklin, who wrote in the 1940’s, asserts without hesitation that William’s middle name was Baltimore but fails to cite his sources, and has long since gone to discuss the matter with William personally. A number of other descendants of the William who brought the family to Kentucky also carry the name Baltimore, and it is unlikely that Nicklin fabricated the lot.

However, following Hester Rigdon's death, William's second wife Elizabeth Evans (Jackson) in 1879, filed a notarized affadavit applying for federal benefits as Willaim's widow. The notary transcribed the statement as both William and both wives were unlettered; and we have seen a photocopy of the original handwritten document.

In the affidavit Elizabeth specifically states that her late husband's middle initial "B" in fact stood for nothing at all. She never heard of him having any middle name and says that because he was known to all as "Buck" he had simply begun to acknowledge "B" as an initial signifying his nickname.

17 Although small skirmishes and raids would continue until 1813, the last major Indian confrontation in Kentucky occurred at the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782 near present-day Lexington, also referred to as the last battle of the American Revolution. Daniel Boone was a participant, as was his son Israel, who was killed.

18 The Kentucky Calverts are to be reassured before the tale unfolds, as delicately as possible, that this Lord Baltimore was not a direct ancestor, but even then a distant cousin several times removed, being a direct descendant of Cecil and not of Cecil’s brother Leonard.

19 A seraglio is defined as a harem, but the formal definition implies a far more sophisticated patina than the reality. It was his private traveling whorehouse. Under the circumstances, the derision and abuse heaped on Frederick only increased when he protested that he was physically incapable of the acts of which he was accused, making the seraglio a pointless extravagance, indeed.