Scope and Content Note
The papers of the family of John Leeds Bozman date from 1688 to 1883, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1784-1841. The focus is on the correspondence of three men from Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland: John Leeds Bozman (1757-1823), a lawyer and minor public official who wrote poetry and a history of Maryland after his retirement from public life; his nephew, John Leeds Kerr, a Whig who served in the House and Senate in the Twentieth, Twenty-first, Twenty-third, and Twenty-seventh Congresses; and his son, John Bozman Kerr, a Whig House member in the Thirty-first Congress who served as charge d’affaires in Nicaragua under President Millard Fillmore. The papers relate chiefly to political, legal, and financial developments in the early history of Maryland and particularly to the Eastern Shore. The collection is organized by type of material.
The collection contains correspondence and other papers dating back to 1688 of the allied Bozman, Goldsborough, Kerr, Leeds, and Richardson families, including correspondence in bound volumes annotated by John Bozman Kerr (circa 1850). The documents probably were held by the David Kerr family (late eighteenth century) but cover a wide range of materials, from family accounts to the will of Daniel Carroll (1730-1796) of Rock Creek.
John Leeds Kerr was a friend of the prominent Goldsborough family of Maryland, and married Mary Elizabeth Goldsborough Greenbury in 1828. The collection includes correspondence with Robert and Charles Goldsborough, Goldsborough family letters from 1799 to 1834, a family history, and related material.
Present are poetry of John Leeds Bozman and letters written while he studied in England, circa 1785; political notebooks and a scrapbook of John Leeds Kerr; and John Bozman Kerr’s unpublished biography of Daniel Carroll. Also included are mercantile and estate papers of Daniel Richardson and his wife, Ruth Richardson, pertaining chiefly to trade with William Fishbourne, Ennion Williams, and other merchants of Philadelphia and London; manuscript copies of speeches delivered by Luther Martin and James McHenry in the Maryland legislature about the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of 1787; and two volumes on Central America annotated by John Bozman Kerr. One of the volumes concerns preliminary surveys for an isthmian canal, circa 1850.
Correspondents include Edward Johnson Coale, Arnold Elzey, Charles Goldborough, Nicholas Goldsborough, Robert Henry Goldsborough, Isaac Appleton Jewett, John Lloyd, Isaac Edward Morse, William Vans Murray, Benjamin Richardson, Charles S. Storrow, and William Tudor.