Thomas Bacon (192)

Elected to the revived American Philosophical Society.

Thomas Bacon (c. 1700–24 May 1768) was a customs manager, printer, and Anglican priest, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election. Bacon was probably born on the Isle of Man, and little is known of his life before his employ first managing a coal depot and then the Dublin Customs House in the 1730s. He found his greatest success as a printer publishing the semi-weekly Dublin Mercury and then the official records of the Irish government (as the Dublin Gazette) during the early 1740s. After the loss of that contract, Bacon read theology, became a priest in 1745, and sailed for Maryland, landing at St. Peter’s in White Marsh. Erudite and affable, Bacon won quick acceptance to Annapolis’s literary Tuesday Club, in the Masonic lodge, and as a clever and talented poet, violinist and cellist, offering verse and minuets in small venues and grander concerts for charitable benefit. His concern for Maryland’s enslaved population was both genuine but also emblematic for its limits. Sermons to masters and slaves highlighted mutual obligations: masters and mistresses should encourage Christianity among their enslaved and treat them humanely; the enslaved should remain obedient. He founded a short-lived charity school for the orphaned, poor, and enslaved, which would instruct them in preparation for apprenticeship, but construction costs and the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War shortened its life. He labored a decade on a six-volume abridged collection of the laws of Maryland. His 1758 appointment to All Saints in Frederick sustained these labors with an annual income of £400, a quarter of which he used to hire a curate to lighten his pastoral load. Problems in his personal life, including being libeled for the rape of a mixed-race woman (victor in the suit) and a strangely lax attitude for canon rules when it came to his own remarriage (quietly forgotten) damaged his political connections, but he was broadly respected as a pastor until the end of his days. (PI)