Showing posts with label Legislation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Legislation. Show all posts

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Citizenship - Better Late than Never - March 1828

New-Orleans Argus; Date: 03-10-1828 
NATURALIZATION.

            The new naturalization bill, reported to Congress from the Judiciary committee, provides—
            "any alien being a free white, who was residing within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States between 14th April, 1802, and 18th June, 1812, and who has continued to reside within the same, may be admitted to become a citizen of the U. States, without having made any previous declaration to become a citizen: Provided that whenever any person, without a certificate of such declaration of intention shall make application to be admitted a citizen of the U. States, it shall be proved to the satisfaction of the court, that the applicant was residing within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the. U. States before 18th June, 1812, and had continued to reside within the same, or he shall not he admitted. And the residence of the applicant within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for at least five years immediately preceding the time of such application shall be proved by the oath or affirmation of citizens of the U. States, which citizen shall be named in the record as witnesses.— And such continued residence within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the U. States, when satisfactorily proved, and place or places where the applicant has resided for at least five years as aforesaid, shall be stated and set forth, together with the names of such citizens, and the record of the court, admitting the applicant; otherwise the same shall not entitle him to be considered and deemed to citizen of the. U. States.[1]




[1]  New-Orleans Argus; Date: 03-10-1828; Page: 2; Location: New Orleans, Louisiana
 Transcribed by John Peter Thompson. 6th July 2014.

Friday, July 4, 2014

Not paying debt results in prison time, Prince George's County, Maryland July 4, 1814

Prince George's County Court,
April Term, 1814.[1]

            ON the application, by petition in writing, of Charles L Gantt, of Prince George's county, to the Court for the benefit of the Act of Assembly, passed at November session, eighteen hundred and five, entitled "A Act for the relief of sundry insolvent debtors." And the several supplements thereto. — A schedule of his property and a list of his creditors on oath, as far as he can ascertain them, being and next to in said petition, and the court being satisfied by competent testimony, that the said prisoner is a citizen of the state of Maryland, and that he had resided therein but to last years preceding is application, and they also satisfied that the said Charles L. Gantt is now in actual confinement for debt, and the said petitioner having entered into bond with security for his appearance in this court, on the first Monday in September next, and then and there to answer such allegations as may be exhibited against him by his creditors. It is thereupon ordered and adjudged by the said court, that the said petitioner be discharged from imprisonment, and the said first Monday in September next is appointed for the said petitioner to deliver up his property and to have a trustee appointed for the benefit of his creditors. And it is ordered, that the said Charles L Gantt, by causing a copy of the foregoing to be published once a week for three months successfully in the National Intelligencer before the said first Monday in September next, give notice to his creditors that they be and appear before the court on the said day to recommend a trustee for their benefit.
            Test.
                                    JOHN READ MAGRUDER, Clerk
                                                of Prince George's County Court.

June 8 -v3m


[1] Daily National Intelligencer; Date: 07-04-1814; Page: [1]; Washington (DC), District of Columbia.

Transcribed by john Peter Thompson, July 4th, 2014.

n.b.: Incarceration of debtors was a common practice in the United States at this time

Monday, March 3, 2014

Notice to construct a Turnpike from Baltimore to Bladensburg, Maryland - 1814

NOTICE
            The President, Managers and Company of the Washington and Baltimore Turnpike Road hereby give Notice —

            That Plants of the said Road have been lodged as the law directs, in the County Clerk's Office of Baltimore, Ann , and Prince George's; and it is intended to commence making said Road from Baltimore on the first day of April next.  This toad will run from Pratt-street [Baltimore] across Gwynn's falls, a little below Mrs. Carroll's Mill, and continue in a straight a line as the nature of the ground will permit, (keeping always to the left of the old road to Norwood's Ferry; from thence to McCoy;s Tavern to Vansville [Beltsville, Prince George's County] , and to Bladensburg.

            This is to require all persons over whose lands the said road may pass, to make known to the said President and Managers, whether they intend to claim any damages on account of the road passing over their lands, in order that a jury (if necessary) may be called to adjust the same as the law directs.
           
                     March 21                                            2aw8t [1]



[1] American & Commercial Daily Advertiser; Date: 03-25-1814; Volume: XXIX; Issue: 4632; Page: [4]; Location: Baltimore, Maryland.

Transcribed by John Peter  Thompson. March 2nd, 2014.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

A Partial Bibliography - Agricultural and Political Life in Bladensburg, Maryland - 1814

Anon, 1836. A General History of the Tobacco Plant: Intended as an Authoritative Reference to Its Discovery, Dissemination, and Reception as a Luxury, Newcastle upon Tyne: Pattison and Ross. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=W-UWAAAAYAAJ.

Biddle, J.F., 1953. Bladensburg: An Early Trade Center. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., 53/56, pp.309–326. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40067682.

Bozman, J.L., 1837. The history of Maryland: from its first settlement, in 1633, to the restoration, in 1660 ; with a copious introduction, and notes and illustrations, J. Lucas & E.K. Deaver.

Buchholz, H.E., 1908. Governors of Maryland: from the revolution to the year 1908, Williams & Wilkins company.

Calvert, R.S., 1992. Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795-1821 illustrate. M. L. Callcott, ed., Johns Hopkins University Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=m9rxARyL5hcC.
Abstract: he book features letters from Rosalie Stier Calvert, a wealthy Belgian woman who married in to one of Maryland’s most prominent families after emigrating to America in the late 18th century. Her family ultimately returns home while she stays with her new husband, affording her the opportunity to write many letters detailing life in early America. ~ Book Review: Mistress of Riversdale By Brian. 


Carr, L.G. et al., 1991. Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland, Institute of Early American History and Culture. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=0eFwYcDLQigC.

Abstract: In 1652 Robert Cole, an English Catholic, moved with his family and servants to St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Using this family's story as a case study, the authors of Robert Cole's World provide an intimate portrait of the social and economic life of a middling planter in the seveneenth-century Chesapeake, including work routines and agricultural techniques, the upbringing of children, neighborhood relationships and community formation, and the role of religion. The Cole Plantation account, a record that details what the plantation produced, consumed, purchased, and sold over a twelve-year period, is the only known surviving document of its kind for seventeenth-century British America. Along with Cole's will, it serves as the framework around which the authors build their analysis. Drawing on these and other records, they present Cole as an exemplar of the ordinary planter whose success created the capital base for the slave-based plantation society of the eighteenth century.

Fields, B.J., 1985. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century, Yale University Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=DNd5_LRxjt8C.
Abstract: Probing the relationships among Maryland’s slaves and free blacks, its slaveholders, and its non-slaveholders, Fields shows how centrist moderation turned into centrist immoderation under the stress of the Civil War and how social channels formed by slavery established the course of struggle over the shape of free society. In so doing, she offers historical reflections on the underlying character both of slave society and of the society that replaced it.

Gottschalk, L.C., 1945. Effects of Soil Erosion on Navigation in Upper Chesapeake Bay. Geographical Review, 35(2), pp.219–238. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/211476.
Abstract: Alfred M. Rives, engineer in charge of a survey of bridges across the Potomac, who wrote, in 1857:13 Examination of old charts, as well as reflections upon the necessary operations of nature, convince me that these flats date from a period long antecedent to the erection of the cause? way. That they have increased rapidly during the past fifty years is but natural, when we consider what vast deposits must result from the freshet waters of the Potomac, now rendered doubly turbid from washing the shores of a highly cultivated region. It must be evident that ploughed hill sides furnish more alluvial deposit than unbroken forests or grassy slopes. By the operation of these and similar causes, many ports, formerly deep and accessible, now scarcely exist, of which Bladensburg, in our immediate vicinity, and others on our rivers of the Atlantic seaboard, are familiar examples.

Heidler, D.S. & Heidler, J.T., 2004. Encyclopedia of the war of 1812, Annapolis: U S NAVAL INST Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=_c09EJgek50C.

Holmes, O.W., 1948. Stagecoach Days in the District of Columbia. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., 50, pp.1–42. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40067314.
Abstract: The stages met and exchanged passengers at a tavern in the vicinity of the present town of Laurel that was then kept by Thomas Rose.3 Here the passengers also dined. For the first few years the Potomac crossing was at Alexandria, not at Georgetown. From the Maryland side of the ferry the stage travelled up to Bladensburg on the road that ran east of the Anacostia River.4 The fare between Baltimore and Alexandria was $3.00. The proprietors “presumed this commodious and speedy method of travelling will meet with due encouragement,” but the trip apparently consumed the entire day.

Johnson, W., 1999. Soul by Soul, Harvard University Press. Available at: .
Abstract: The focus of this book is on nineteenth-century New Orleans and the slave market that emerged then and there. More than other workings of slavery, slave markets reduced humans to commodities with prices. In particular, this book is interested in the story of slave showrooms, which held up to 100 slaves and where appraisals, accountings, back-room dealings, and other activities took place. The book attributes the slave trade to mercantilism whereby colonial imports serviced and stocked metropolitan centers and generated profits secured for both state-sponsored companies and the monopoly-granting state itself. Companies with well-connected leaders and government ties could gain state privileges and favors and receive special monopoly licenses to dominate trade, first in goods such as tobacco, indigo, rice, cotton, coffee, and so on, and later in human beings. The ban of the international slave trade in 1808 did not lead to the reduction or softening of slavery, but rather to new shapes and manifestations of slavery, especially as slave populations moved increasingly from the upper to the lower South. The ban led, more importantly for the purposes of this book, to the domestic slave trade. The domestic slave trade intensified during the rise of the cotton kingdom. The price of slaves changed with the price of cotton until the 1850s.

King, J.A., 1997. Tobacco, Innovation, and Economic Persistence in Nineteenth-Century Southern Maryland. Agricultural History, 71(2), pp.207–236. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3744247.

Kulikoff, A., 1986. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800, University of North Carolina Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=NCvU9_bj-1QC.
Abstract: A major reinterpretation of the economic and political transformation of Chesapeake society from 1680 to 1800. Building upon massive archival research in Maryland and Virginia, Allan Kulikoff provides the most comprehensive study to date of changing social relations?among both blacks and whites?in the eighteenth-century South. He links his arguments about class, gender, and race to the later social history of the South and to larger patterns of American development.

McWilliams, J.W., 2011. Annapolis, City on the Severn: A History, Johns Hopkins University Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=9NJzbC_mlpkC.
Abstract: The story of Annapolis resonates in every century of American history. Annapolis has been home to tobacco plantations, political intrigue, international commerce, the U.S. Naval Academy, ballooning population growth, and colonial, state, and national government. Jane Wilson McWilliams’s captivating history explores Annapolis from its settlement in 1650 to its historic preservation campaign of the late twentieth century. McWilliams brings alive the people of Annapolis as she recounts their fortunes and foibles. Be they black or white, slave or master, woman or man, each has a place in this book. With unsurpassed detail and graceful prose, she describes the innermost workings of Maryland’s capital city—its social, civic, and religious institutions; its powerful political leaders; and its art, architecture, and neighborhoods.

Morgan, P.D. & Culture, O.I. of E.A.H. and, 1998. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
Abstract: Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks?their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.

Morse, J. & Webber, S., 1802. The American Universal Geography: Or, A View of the Present State of All the Empires, Kingdoms, States, and Republics in the Known World, and of the United States in Particular. In Two Parts ..., Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews; sold at their bookstore; by said Thomas in Worcester; by Thomas, Andrews & Butler in Baltimore, and by other booksellers.

Renzulli, L.M., 1973. Maryland: The Federalist Years, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=MsVZW6DJqpoC.
Abstract: The rise and fall of the Federalist Party in Maryland is detailed in this solid, traditional, narrative. Carefully documented, it examines the nature and voting patterns of the Federalist electorate in Maryland during the pre-Jacksonian era.

Riggs, J.B., 1946. Certain Early Maryland Landowners in the Vicinity of Washington. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., 48/49, pp.249–263 CR  – Copyright © 1946 Historical Soc. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40064099.

Riley, E.S., 1906. A history of the General Assembly of Maryland, 1635-1904, Baltimore: Nunn & Co.

Sarson, S., 2000. Landlessness and Tenancy in Early National Prince George’s County, Maryland. The William and Mary Quarterly, 57(3), pp.569–598. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2674266.
Abstract: In the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, the landless component of the free population in the tidewater Chesapeake grew from a third to more than half, and that trend continued after Independence.6 In Prince George’s County, the proportion of landlessness was almost 70 percent in i8oo, 67 percent in i8io, and 75 percent in i820 (see Tables I, III, and V).

Sarson, S., 2009. Yeoman Farmers in a Planters’ Republic: Socioeconomic Conditions and Relations in Early National Prince George's County, Maryland. Journal of the Early Republic, 29(1), pp.63–99. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40208239.

Taylor, J., 1814. Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical & Political, in Sixty One Numbers 2nd ed., Gerogetown, District of Columbia: J.M. Carter. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=YFVHAAAAYAAJ. 

Friday, May 24, 2013

Edward Suit of Bladensburg: 1809 - 1850


Edward Suit of Bladensburg

Edward Suit lived in Bladensburg from circa 1820 until his death in 1850; the recorded activities of Suit and his family offer some interesting details about life in Bladensburg in the early 19th century.  Born in 1788 and married in 1809 to Catharine Tolbert/Talbert, Suit served in the Maryland Militia in the War of 1812, in Captain James Veitch’s Company of Infantry.  After the war, Suite farmed land that adjoined the town of Bladensburg on the east - several parcels of the large tract, Columbia, that had been amassed by the Lowndes’ family in the late 18th century.  He also purchased several lots in the town of Bladensburg, including Lots  #21, and #22, and it was in his house in town that he died in August, 1850. [1]

Archival records give us tantalizing bits of information about Edward Suit’s activities in the 1840s.  On 7 March 1844, Suit purchased all of the “goods, wares and merchandise” in the store operated by Joshua Selby in the village of Bladensburg, as well as all of Selby’s household furniture from the same building.  The following week Suit entered into a contract to take on a young African-American boy as an apprentice; this contract gives us information on the apprentice process.  William Beckett and Thomas Clements, both Justices of the Peace and neighbors of Edward Suit, drew up the contract, which bound Suit and young James Galloway, according to the Act of the General Assembly passed in 1839 “for the better regulation of the free negro and mulatto children in this state.”  James, who was not quite six years of age, was the son of a free Negro woman, Sarah Galloway, recently deceased.  By this contract, it was the responsibility of Edward Suit that the boy “learn to labor and all habits of industry after the manner of an apprentice.” And young James was to “dwell with and serve the said Edward Suit . . . until the first day of May A.D. 1859 when . . . . [he]   . . . . shall attain the age of twenty-one years.” During all of this time, James was to faithfully serve his master in all lawful business set to him by Suit, and to behave himself in an orderly and honest fashion toward Mr. Suit and his family.  Suit covenanted to faithfully provide good and sufficient meat, drink and clothing, lodging and other necessaries “fit and convenient for such an apprentice.”   At the expiration of his term Suit was to give to his apprentice “two suits of wearing apparel, one suitable for Sundays and the other for working days.”[2]

Edward Suit did not live to provide the two sets of clothing to James Galloway – he died at age 62 in 1850.   The 1860 census shows that James Galloway, well after his 21st birthday, continued to live in Bladensburg with Suit’s family - the widow Catharine Suit, and her adult son, George Washington Suit.  What happened to James Galloway after this has not yet been discovered – he is not listed in the Bladensburg household of George W. and Catharine Suit in the 1870 census, and a search of Civil War troops is beginning.[3]

One more interesting fact about Edward Suit is that he served as Inspector of Plaster of Paris for the Bladensburg District.  Plaster of Paris was an important item in construction and architectural trim, as well as medical treatment (casts for broken bones), and concern that it “be of good quality, accurately weighted, and well coopered”  occasioned Acts of the General Assembly in 1833 and 1834 to appoint an Inspector of Plaster of Paris in Baltimore.  The following year, the Assembly provided for inspection in Bladensburg, and Edward Suit was appointed to this post in 1847.[4]

.
 By Susan Pearl, May 22, 2013.



[1]  Prince George’s County Land Records AB#2:447, AB#10:483, AB#11:138; Prince George’s County Tax Assessments, 1820-1850;  Brown, Helen W., Index of Marriage Licenses, Prince George’s County, Maryland 1777-1886, Genealogical Publishing, Co. Inc., Baltimore 1973; War of 1812 Pension Records.

[2]  Acts of General Assembly Chapter CLV, 1827;  Prince George’s County Deed JBB#3:378; Federal Census 1850, 1860.

[3] Prince George’s County Will PC#1:438; Federal Census 1850, 1860;  Alexandria Gazette, 26 August 1850. Obituary.

[4] Acts of the General Assembly 1832-1834,  Journal of the Proceedings of the House of Delegates of the State of Maryland.