By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
This is the story of how they left, what they left behind, and what it cost to build the family back up on the other side of that departure.
George W. Bush turns 80 years old today. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, raised in Midland and Houston, Texas, and became the 43rd president of the United States. His father, George H.W. Bush, was born in Milton, Massachusetts, and raised on the Connecticut and Maine coasts before becoming the 41st. Neither man ever lived in Maryland. But if a single wedding in Earleville had gone differently in the fall of 1838, the family that produced two American presidents might never have left Cecil County at all — and the fortune, the Connecticut pedigree, and the political dynasty that followed might never have existed in the form they did.
This is the story of how they left, what they left behind, and what it cost to build the family back up on the other side of that departure.
If a single wedding in Earleville had gone differently in the fall of 1838, the family that produced two American presidents might never have left Cecil County at all.
A Cecil County Inheritance
Harriet Mercer was born in 1802, the youngest of six children of John and Rebecca (Davis) Mercer, in St. Stephen’s Parish in Earleville. The Mercer family’s presence in Cecil County stretched back roughly 130 years by the time Harriet was born — family history traces to Thomas Mercer, who arrived in eastern Maryland around 1671, with the line documented at St. Stephen’s Parish from that date forward. The Davis family, Harriet’s mother’s side, had been established in Maryland for six generations by 1815 and owned a tobacco plantation near Warwick known as The Rounds, a brick Georgian manor house dating to 1780 that still stands today.
By any measure available in the historical record, this was a family of means — and a family already marked by loss by the time Harriet was born on June 30, 1802. Two of her brothers, John and James, died within weeks of her birth, and her mother, Rebecca Davis Mercer, died that same November, reportedly of dysentery — leaving John Mercer a widower raising three surviving children: William, Ann, and infant Harriet.
Before Texas, before Connecticut, before the White House, there was Cecil County.
Sources disagree on what happened to the estate after that. Genealogical research by Roger Hughes, published in the Illinois Times, states that when John Mercer died in 1820, Harriet inherited a 321-acre farm in Cecil County called Chew’s Resurvey. The Cecil Whig’s local history account, however, describes a different sequence: that John Mercer wrote a will in 1818 dividing his property among all three surviving children, then changed it on October 13 of that year to leave everything to his eldest, William, instructing only that Harriet be educated and receive $400 a year in support — meaning her path to any share of the estate ran through one condition alone: William dying without heirs of his own. The two accounts cannot both be complete as written, and neither this article nor the underlying research resolves which version is correct.
Somewhere along the way, Harriet met George Walker, a New Jersey-born son of English immigrants. They married in Baltimore on May 22, 1821, and settled onto the Mercer and Davis family properties at Sassafras Neck, the narrow strip of land between the Bohemia and Sassafras rivers where they empty into the Chesapeake Bay.
Harriet’s older brother, William, never married and was in poor health for years — and as long as that remained true, Harriet and George Walker stood positioned to inherit the bulk of the family’s Cecil County estate. Cecil County tax records from this period show no land recorded in the Walkers’ own name — only two enslaved people, valued at $100, registered to the household. William, by contrast, was actively buying and selling both land and enslaved people during these same years. A surviving April 1829 property record shows William already deep in debt and too ill to conduct his own business in person, granting a neighbor power of attorney to act on his behalf — evidence, historians suspect, of tuberculosis.
The Wedding That Changed Everything
By 1838, William was still unmarried and in declining health. If he died without an heir, Harriet and her husband stood to inherit the entire remaining family estate. But in November 1838, at age 44, William married Margaret Savin Biddle. With that marriage, Harriet and George Walker’s claim on the family property vanished, and by the fall of that same year, they were gone — pioneering by boat and wagon to McLean County, Illinois, where they set up a 64-acre farmstead a few miles southeast of Bloomington, in a settlement then called Blooming Grove.
Family tradition holds that the Mercer daughters had been raised in fine taffeta dresses befitting their station — and that Harriet had to give hers away before the move, because there was no room for it in the wagon. It is a small detail, but it marks the actual scale of the family’s fall: a household that had expected to inherit a Chesapeake tobacco plantation left Maryland with what would fit under a wagon seat.
The family’s fall can be measured by one small detail: Harriet gave away her fine taffeta dress because there was no room for it in the wagon.
William and Margaret had two children, Martha and Annie, both of whom died in childhood and are buried at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church Cemetery in Earleville. William himself died December 16, 1844, at age 50, without a will — it took years to sort out his affairs, and The Rounds estate was ultimately placed up for sale in 1850.
William Mercer’s estate, once settled, passed to his widow, Margaret Savin Biddle, who went on to outlive two more husbands and died in Elkton in 1896, seventeen years after burying her third — a Cecil County life lived out entirely on the inheritance the Walkers had once expected to receive.
Harriet and George Walker’s departure from Cecil County wasn’t born of ambition—it was born of losing the inheritance they expected.
Not every branch of the family went west empty-handed in spirit, either. Harriet’s older sister Ann had married Dr. David Davis in 1811 and was widowed young, in 1814, with an infant son. That son, David Davis Jr., grew up largely in boarding schools and went on to become an aide to Abraham Lincoln, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and a United States senator from Illinois — a Cecil County-born cousin who would, decades later, personally shape the fortunes of the Walker family he’d left behind in Maryland.
What the Family Carried West
The Walkers arrived in Illinois carrying more than lost land. Her husband’s own family had a considerably darker history than a lost Chesapeake inheritance: his father was a slave trader.
George Walker’s father was Thomas “Beau” Walker, a Bristol, England-based sea captain who worked the Atlantic trade route between the English port and the West Indies. Genealogical and historical research published by retired newspaper editor Roger Hughes and Sierra Leone historian Joseph Opala — and reported by Slate in 2013 — identified Thomas Walker as captain, master, or investor in at least 11 slave-trading voyages to West Africa between 1784 and 1792, transporting captive people from Bunce Island, a notorious British slave-trading fort roughly 20 miles upriver from Freetown in present-day Sierra Leone, to the Americas. That same research found that at least five Walker family households — George W. Bush’s ancestors by his father’s mother — owned enslaved people in Maryland’s Cecil County during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, extending the pattern well beyond the single household George and Harriet Walker kept at Sassafras Neck.
The identification was not circumstantial. Researchers had located two men named Thomas Walker in the historical record — one the documented Bush ancestor who emigrated to America and settled in New Jersey, the other a slave-ship captain tied to Bunce Island — and suspected they were the same person. To test the theory, they sent signature samples from both records to Maija Jansson, a handwriting analyst at Yale University, without telling her why. She concluded the signatures belonged to the same man, a finding independently corroborated by two additional handwriting experts, including Keith McClelland of University College London’s Legacies of British Slave Ownership Project. Gary Boyd Roberts, the genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society who compiles official ancestries of American presidents, told Slate that the discovery was the only documented case of definite slave-dealer ancestry among U.S. presidents other than Thomas Jefferson, whose father-in-law was a Virginia slave trader.
Thomas Walker’s own end was violent: British House of Lords sessional papers and an abolitionist’s journal indicate his crew mutinied against him at sea in 1797, and a boy at the helm shot him after an initial attack failed to kill him — the same year his son, George Walker, was born on American soil in Burlington, New Jersey.
That son — the Bush ancestor who would go on to marry Harriet Mercer in Cecil County twenty-four years later — was raised, by the genealogical record, in comparative respectability: educated in a Jesuit school before the family’s fortunes and faith diverged from his father’s maritime trade entirely. Whatever wealth or connections came down through Thomas Walker’s Atlantic trading, though, the Cecil County branch of the family did not carry forward into the marriage with Harriet — the Walkers’ Maryland household, tax records show, held no land of its own, only the two enslaved people valued at $100.
Illinois, and the Cousin Who Rebuilt the Family
David Davis Walker, George and Harriet’s son, was born January 19, 1840, on the family’s new farm near Bloomington. Most sources — Wikipedia, WikiTree, and two separate genealogical accounts by Roger Hughes — agree that the Walkers had ten children in total, eight sons and two daughters, and describe David Davis Walker as the eighth-born; only the Cecil Whig’s local history account gives a different count, nine children with Walker as the seventh son.
Without Judge David Davis, there is a real case that the Walker family’s fortunes—and everything built on top of them—simply do not happen.
It was David Davis Walker’s first cousin — the same David Davis Jr. born to Harriet’s widowed sister Ann back in Cecil County — who effectively rebuilt the family’s fortunes from nothing. By the 1850s, David Davis was an established circuit-riding Illinois lawyer and judge, a friend and colleague of a fellow circuit lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, and he took a direct hand in his younger cousin’s future. Surviving correspondence in the Illinois State Historical Library’s David Davis Papers shows Davis personally arranging for young David Davis Walker’s education at Beloit Preparatory Academy in Wisconsin in 1854, writing that the boy “needs different influences from what he has received and needs to be among good people.”
Three years later, in 1857, Davis’s connections helped place his 17-year-old cousin in an entry-level position at Crow, McCreery & Co., then the largest wholesale dry goods house in St. Louis. Walker worked his way up from office boy to partner within eight years. In 1880, after a two-year recovery from illness brought on by his own workaholic habits, he co-founded Ely, Walker & Co. with Frank Ely, incorporated in 1883 as the Ely & Walker Dry Goods Company — a firm that grew into one of the largest dry goods wholesalers in the country and made Walker one of roughly 7,300 American millionaires by 1914. The Ely & Walker name survives today as a Western-wear clothing brand.
David Davis changed the course of two American dynasties: Lincoln’s presidency and the Bush family’s rise.
Judge David Davis, meanwhile, was Abraham Lincoln’s campaign manager for his 1860 presidential run, and then was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by his old circuit-riding friend in 1862. He later served as administrator of Lincoln’s estate after the assassination, and then went on to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate. Not bad for a man from Cacil County. Without his intervention, there is a real case that the Walker family’s fortunes — and everything built on top of them — simply do not happen.
David Davis Walker died in 1918 at Walker’s Point, a seaside property in Kennebunkport, Maine, acquired by his son, George Herbert Walker. It remains the Bush family compound today.
From St. Louis to the Presidency
David Davis Walker’s son, George Herbert “Bert” Walker, was born in St. Louis in 1875 and built on his father’s fortune as a banker — eventually serving as president of the W.A. Harriman & Co. investment firm starting in 1920, working alongside Averell Harriman before the firm’s 1931 merger into Brown Brothers Harriman, where Bert Walker’s son-in-law, a young Prescott Bush, was also employed.
That son-in-law connection is the hinge to the presidency. Bert Walker’s daughter, Dorothy Wear Walker, married Prescott Bush — the Connecticut senator — in 1921. Their son was George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president, named for his maternal grandfather. And George H.W. Bush’s son, born in New Haven on July 6, 1946, was George Walker Bush — turning 80 years old today, as the 43rd president.
What a Wedding in Earleville Set in Motion
If William Mercer had never married, American political history might have unfolded very differently.
None of this — the St. Louis dry-goods fortune, the Harriman and Brown Brothers banking dynasty, the Kennebunkport compound, two American presidencies — happens on the trajectory it did if William Mercer stays unmarried a while longer, or if he dies before finding a wife. Harriet and George Walker’s departure from Cecil County wasn’t a choice born of ambition; it was the direct result of losing an inheritance they had spent years expecting, tied to family land worked by enslaved people and financed, one generation further back, by a family history in the Atlantic slave trade.
Cecil County’s connection to the Bush family has surfaced occasionally in local historical accounts over the years — a plantation house near Warwick still standing, a family plot connection, a distant cousin’s name attached to Lincoln’s Supreme Court. But the fuller record, drawn from probate and tax documents, forensic handwriting analysis, and a genealogist’s decade of archival digging, describes something more specific than a curious footnote: a Maryland inheritance dispute, an Atlantic slave-trading fortune two generations removed, and a Supreme Court justice’s intervention on behalf of a struggling cousin, threading together to produce, eventually, two American presidents — neither of whom ever set foot in Cecil County as anything but an ancestral memory.
One marriage, one inheritance dispute, and one decision to leave Maryland ultimately helped shape the path to two American presidencies.
This account draws on historical research published by the Cecil Whig’s local history series (Jo Ann Gardner, 2018); genealogical research by Roger Hughes, originally published in the Bloomington Pantagraph (2004) and expanded in a multi-part series on the Quixotic Joust research blog; Slate’s 2013 investigative report on Thomas Walker’s documented slave-trading history, based on research by Roger Hughes and Sierra Leone historian Joseph Opala; and public genealogical and biographical records including Wikipedia, WikiTree, and the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
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