Edward Lloyd (Governor of Maryland)

Edward Lloyd V (July 22, 1779 – June 2, 1834) served as the 13th Governor of Maryland from 1809 to 1811, and as a United States Senator from Maryland between 1819 and 1826. He also served as a U.S. Congressman from the seventh district of Maryland from 1807 to 1809.

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. 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 (dog) that had a reputation for spectuaclarly 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.^[1]

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.

Lloyd was an important slaveholder and vocal defender of the institution of slavery throughout his political career. 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 Frederick Douglass. The book describes the acts of cruelty committed by Lloyd's overseers, and dwells at length on Lloyd's own despotic treatment of two slaves caring for his horses.

References

• Edward Lloyd at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Edward Lloyd (V) The Governor 1779–1834, from "The Worthies of Talbot," Talbot County Free Library, Md.