Edward Lloyd (Governor of Maryland)

Life and career

Born in 1779 at "Wye House", Talbot County, Maryland, he was a member of a prominent Eastern Shore family, "the Lloyds of Wye," which had lived in Talbot County since the mid-17th century. His father Edward Lloyd IV was a member of the Continental Congress and his mother Elizabeth Tayloe was the daughter of John Tayloe II of Mount Airy. He received early education from private tutors.

Lloyd served in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1800 to 1805. He was elected to the Ninth Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Joseph H. Nicholson and was reelected to the Tenth Congress, serving from December 3, 1806, to March 3, 1809. In 1808, Lloyd was elected as Governor of Maryland, a position he served in from 1809 to 1811.

During this period Lloyd traded a Merino ram for "Sailor," a male Newfoundland that had a reputation for spectacularly enthusiastic water dog retrieving of ducks. The dog was bred with other retrievers at Lloyd's estate on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. Sailor is now considered the "father" of the Chesapeake Bay Retriever line.

Lloyd was commissioned a lieutenant colonel of the Ninth Regiment of Maryland Militia and also served as a member of the Maryland State Senate from 1811 to 1815. He was elected as a Democratic Republican (later Crawford Republican, then Jacksonian) to the United States Senate in 1819, was reelected in 1825, and served from March 4, 1819, until his resignation on January 14, 1826. In the Senate, Lloyd served as chairman of the Committee on the District of Columbia (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Congresses).

Later in life, Lloyd served as member of the Maryland State Senate from 1826 to 1831, and as President of the Senate in 1826. He died in Annapolis, Maryland, and is interred in the family burying ground at Wye House near Easton, Maryland.

Description by Frederick Douglass

Lloyd was an important slaveholder and vocal defender of the institution of slavery throughout his political career. He owned 468 people in 1832.

The African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had grown up as a slave on one of Lloyd's plantations, discussed Lloyd in his 1845 autobiography The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The book describes the acts of cruelty committed by Lloyd's overseers, and dwells at length on Lloyd's own despotic treatment, including whippings of two slaves caring for his horses:

To all these complaints no matter how unjust, the slave must answer never a word. Colonel Lloyd could not brook any contradiction from a slave. When he spoke, a slave must stand, listen, and tremble; and such was literally the case. I have seen Colonel Lloyd make old Barney, a man between fifty and sixty years of age, uncover his bald head, kneel down upon the cold, damp ground, and receive upon his naked and toil-worn shoulders more than thirty lashes at the time.

References

• Edward Lloyd (V) The Governor 1779–1834, from "The Worthies of Talbot," Talbot County Free Library, Md.

References

1. [http://www.amchessieclub.org/Sailor.html – The Story – amchessieclub.org – Retrieved November 15, 2007] {{webarchive. link. (October 12, 2007)
2. (17 January 2022). "Report Finds Over 1,700 Elected Officials Were Once Slaveholders, One Senator Owned a Plantation with Over 400 Enslaved Africans". [[Yahoo News]].
3. [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23/23-h/23-h.htm The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave] Full copy at Project Gutenberg