John Crompton Weems

John Crompton Weems (August 11, 1777 – January 20, 1862) was an American politician and planter from Maryland who served two terms in the United States House of Representatives during the 1820s. A member of a prominent Maryland family, he was active in the political life of his state in the early national period and is particularly noted for his defense of the interstate slave trade while in Congress.

Weems was born on August 11, 1777, in Calvert County, Maryland, during the closing years of the American Revolutionary era. He was raised in the Tidewater plantation society of southern Maryland, an area dominated by tobacco cultivation and enslaved labor. Little is recorded in contemporary sources about his parents or early childhood, but his later career as a planter and his access to higher education indicate that he came from a family of some means and local standing.

Weems pursued formal education at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States and a principal training ground for Maryland’s professional and political elite. His attendance there placed him within the social and intellectual circles that produced many of the state’s lawyers, legislators, and officeholders in the early nineteenth century. After his studies, he returned to the countryside and devoted himself to agricultural pursuits.

Before and after his time in Congress, Weems engaged in planting, managing a plantation in the Chesapeake region. As a planter in Maryland during this period, his livelihood was closely tied to the cultivation of staple crops, particularly tobacco, and to the system of slavery that underpinned the state’s agrarian economy. His later public positions and speeches in Congress reflected the economic and social interests of this planter class.

Weems entered national politics in the mid-1820s. He was elected as a representative from Maryland to the Nineteenth Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Joseph Kent, who left the House after being elected governor of Maryland. Weems took his seat on February 1, 1826. He was subsequently reelected to the Twentieth Congress and served continuously until March 3, 1829. During this period, national politics were marked by the transition from the Era of Good Feelings to the rise of the Second Party System, with growing sectional tensions over economic policy and slavery. Within this context, Weems became particularly remembered for a speech in which he defended the interstate slave trade, aligning himself with the pro-slavery interests of many of his constituents and fellow planters in Maryland and the broader South.

After leaving Congress at the close of his second term in March 1829, Weems did not return to national office but instead resumed his agricultural pursuits. He continued to live as a planter, overseeing his estate and remaining part of the local gentry in Maryland. His later years were spent on his plantation, known as “Loch Eden,” located in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, not far from Annapolis and the Chesapeake Bay.

John Crompton Weems died on January 20, 1862, at his “Loch Eden” plantation in Anne Arundel County, during the early years of the American Civil War, a conflict rooted in the very system of slavery he had defended in Congress. He was interred in a private cemetery on his estate. His life and career are documented in part through the Weems family papers held at the University of Maryland Libraries and through his entry in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, which together preserve the record of his service and his role in Maryland’s political and plantation society.