—Halleck.
The Huttons, proprietors by pre-emption right of St. Clara’s town, bay, and isle for more than two hundred years, had settled among the islets of the bay many years previous to the date of that patent by which James I. granted the province of Maryland to George Calvert.
At the commencement of the American Revolution a certain Captain Hugh Hutton, the then representative and head of the family, fired with an enthusiastic passion for liberty, or—fighting! sold a great portion of his patrimony, and purchased, fitted out, and manned a privateer, and sailed against the British flag.
He served gallantly and with various success during the whole period of the war.
At the glorious close of the revolutionary struggle, ruined in fortune and riddled with wounds, Captain Hugh Hutton, the sailor-patriot and martyr, retired to the last foothold of his once kingly estate, to the little island of St. Clara’s, otherwise called Hutton’s Island—there to die in obscurity.
A few days previous to his death he called his only son, Hugh, to his bedside, and enjoined him never to demand—never even to accept compensation from Congress for his services and his losses during the war.
“My fortune, my labor, my life-blood were not sold, but given to the cause of liberty and of my country,” he said, and these were the last words of the sailor-patriot.
Hugh Hutton, the son, and now the sole representative of the family, was at this time about eighteen years old. Having lost his mother at an early age he had been taken by his father as a companion in all his sea voyages.
He had sailed with him in his first privateering expedition against the British ships. At first as a childish and innocent spectator, afterward as a youthful and enthusiastic actor, he had figured in all the sea-fights in which his father’s ships had been engaged during the whole course of the war.
Thus all education, except that exclusively of the sailor and soldier, had been denied him. And thus Hugh Hutton, though tall, strong, handsome, and gallant, like all his race, was yet rude, unschooled, and unpolished.