Charles Benedict Calvert was born on August 23, 1808, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to George Calvert and Rosalie Stier. His father was a wealthy planter and a descendent of the Lords Baltimore, who ruled Maryland during the colonial era. Growing up, Calvert attended Bladensburg Academy before enrolling at the University of Virginia on February 1, 1826. He spent the next two academic sessions studying math, modern languages, and ancient languages. In the fall of 1826, Professor George Blaettermann chastised him in front of his classmates for failing a French translation. When Blaettermann observed that Calvert “ought to be ashamed of himself for not understanding [the] lesson,” Calvert replied, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Calvert later “admitted the impropriety of his conduct,” insisting that he “did not think what he was saying.” In response, the faculty formally reprimanded him, but they voted “not to punish him more severely.”

Calvert left UVA in July 1827 and returned to Riversdale, the family’s Maryland plantation. He took over its management after his father’s death in January 1838. The following year, on June 6, 1839, Calvert married Charlotte Augusta Norris in Baltimore, Maryland. They had at least six children together: Ella Spence (1840), George Henry (1841), Charles Baltimore (1843), William Norris (1845), Eugene Stier (1846), and Jules Van Havre (1848), the last of whom died in infancy. The family owned at least 46 slaves, and by 1860, their estate was worth roughly $240,000.

Calvert joined the Whig Party in the 1830s and quickly assumed an active role in county politics. He served on party committees and conventions and acted as president of at least one local Independence Day celebration. Beginning in 1839, he served three terms in the Maryland General Assembly, and he acted as vice president of the Whig Party’s state convention in 1848. He also helped found the Maryland Agricultural Society and served as its president from 1848 to 1854. He helped persuade Maryland legislators to establish a state agricultural college, and he petitioned Congress to establish a federal Department of Agriculture.

In 1856, with his political party dissolving, Calvert attended Maryland’s “Old Line Whig Convention” and urged voters to support Know Nothing candidate Millard Fillmore for president. Four years later, in August 1860, Calvert urged voters to reject all “sectional parties in order to preserve the Union.” He endorsed Constitution Union candidate John Bell, and he denounced pro-slavery radicals for seeking to “overthrow the best Government…that ever was or ever can be established.” Calvert joined Maryland’s Union Party during the secession crisis, and in June 1861, voters elected him to Congress over Southern Rights candidate Benjamin G. Harris.

Calvert was a pro-slavery Unionist, and in the summer of 1862, he signed a public letter to President Abraham Lincoln rejecting emancipation. He vowed to stay loyal to the Union “as long as we have a Constitution to defend and a Government to protect us.” He viewed emancipation, however, as a “radical change of our social system,” and he refused to support the policy. In a letter to his constituents, Calvert claimed that the federal government had no “power or control” over slavery, and he viewed the recent law abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C., as a “breach of faith to the State of Maryland.” Nonetheless, he refused to renounce the Union. He declared himself an Unconditional Unionist fighting to restore the “Union as it was and the Constitution as it is.” Maryland voters, he observed, “must look to the future to do us justice,” and “until the rebellion is suppressed and the Constitution and laws enforced…we have no future to look to.”

Calvert’s attitude toward emancipation subtly evolved. In July 1863, he expressed his support for Lincoln, whom he viewed as a sectional moderate striving to restore the old Union. He decried Radical Republicans and declared their anti-slavery policies a “gross violation of the rights of the Border States.” Even so, he explained, he was “not so wedded to the institution [of slavery] that I would sacrifice the public will or welfare of my State on [its] shrine.” He held out the hope that states would voluntarily abolish slavery, and he prayed that all Americans—North and South—would “unite under the Constitution” and restore harmony to the fractured country.

Calvert ran for reelection in 1863, but he placed a distant third behind Benjamin Harris and Unconditional Unionist John C. Holland. That winter, he drafted a public letter to the Conservative Union National Convention, a coalition of “old line Whigs, War Democrats, and conservative men” that sought to “preserve the Union and the Constitution unimpaired.” On May 10, 1864, while working in his garden, he fell “suddenly ill of paralysis, and became at once unconscious.” He died two days later, on the afternoon of May 12, and he was buried in the family’s private cemetery at Riversdale.

Image: Charles Benedict Calvert (courtesy Library of Congress).

Documents:

Charles B. Calvert and John W. Menzies, Border State Congressmen to Abraham Lincoln, July 14, 1862

Address of Charles B. Calvert to His Constituents, August 19, 1862