28

656 HISTORICAL ANNOTATION

land holdings. Despite his success as a farmer and grocer, Robert's estate was
encumbered with debt upon his death, and his stepson, widow, and son sought new
opportunity in Baltimore County after extinguishing the debt. As land was cheaper
there, they began investing heavily in it, and its value soon increased and laid the
foundation for the family 's prosperity. The Pacas became affluent planters in
Baltimore and Harford Counties and often served in official positions in the government,
church, and militia. The most famous Paca in the eighteenth century was
William (1740-99), who by the 1760s was a very successful attorney in Annapolis.
William, however, became a leading opponent of British colonial policy from the time
the Stamp Act was imposed in 1765. He later became a signer of the Declaration of
Independence. He contributed much of his own money to the patriot cause and during
the Revolution and afterward held numerous important governmental and judicial
positions. In l 770 his wife inherited half of Wye Island in Queen Anne's County, and
he died there in 1799. Pacas continued to live there at elegant Wye Hall in the nineteenth
century and to socialize with the nearby Lloyds and Tilghmans. Gregory A.
Stiverson and Phebe R. Jacobsen, William Paca: A Biography (Baltimore, 1976);
ACAB, 4:618; DAB, 14:123-24.
31.34 Skinners] The Skinner Family was spread throughout the Eastern Shore
but had been in Talbot County since the 1660s, when Andrew Skinner I purchased a
large plantation on a small peninsula in the Miles River Neck district of the county;
this plantation was the principal Skinner residence in Talbot County throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Skinners farmed tobacco there until after
the Revolution, when they made the conversion with many others tn the region to
wheat and corn cultivation. Richard Skinner was very active in county affairs at the
time of the Revolution, serving as its clerk of court (1777-85) and as a select member
of the local Committee of Observation in 1775. Prominent members of the family in
the early nineteenth century included the prosperous Andrew Skinner, who in 1830
owned forty-one slaves; Elizabeth Skinner, who held twenty-nine in the same year;
and Mordechai Skinner, who owned twenty-seven in 1820. The history of Frederick
Douglass and his ancestors, the Baileys, is bound up with that of the Skinners. In 1746
an inventory of the estate of the recently deceased Richard Skinner indicated his
ownership of Douglass's great-grandmother, Jenny Bailey. In 1797, when Ann
Catherine Skinner married Aaron Anthony, she brought into his possession her slaves,
Betsey Bailey and her daughters, Harriet and Milly. At this time Anthony removed
them to his Tuckahoe farm. 1820 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 18; 1830
U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 18, 39; Tilghman, Talbot County 1:21, 46, 65,
69; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 3-7, 16-17, 214; Preston and Harrington,
Talbot County, 115.
31.34 Gibsons] Jacob Gibson (1759-1818), a slave owner locally feared for his
volatile temper, resided at Marengo, a plantation bordering the Lloyd property.
Appointed an associate judge for Talbot County in 1802, Gibson won election to the
legislature in 1806. Residents remembered him because of his numerous vitriolic