Representative John Tolley Hood Worthington

John Tolley Hood Worthington (November 1, 1788 – April 27, 1849) was a U.S. Representative from Maryland, a member of the Democratic Party, and a slaveholder. He was born on November 1, 1788, at the family estate known as “Shawan,” near Baltimore, in Baltimore County, Maryland. He was the son of Walter Tolley Worthington (1765–1843) and Sarah Hood (ca. 1767–1850), the daughter of John Hood, Jr. (1745–1794) and Hannah Barnes (ca. 1745–1772). Raised in a prominent Maryland family, Worthington received only a limited formal schooling, a common circumstance among rural landowning families of the period, and from an early age he engaged in agricultural pursuits on and around the family property.

Worthington’s early adult life was centered on agriculture and the management of his lands in Baltimore County. His position as a landowner in a slaveholding state shaped both his economic interests and his social standing. By the 1840 U.S. census he owned 29 enslaved people, reflecting his participation in and benefit from the system of chattel slavery that underpinned much of Maryland’s plantation agriculture. Contemporary accounts by James Watkins, a fugitive slave from Maryland, allege that Worthington fathered two daughters out of wedlock by one or two enslaved women. Watkins does not provide the names of these daughters but reports that he knew both personally. He describes the first as “a white slave,” stating that she remained enslaved until he himself assisted in her escape to the free states. According to Watkins, the second enslaved daughter was sold by her father for $1,800 for the purpose of breeding enslaved children; when she refused to submit to this role on grounds of Christian chastity, she was so severely flogged that she died in Watkins’s presence. These accounts underscore the brutality and exploitation inherent in the slave system in which Worthington participated.

Worthington married his cousin Mary Tolley Worthington (1790–1840), the daughter of John Worthington (ca. 1760–1834) and Mary Beale Worthington (1768–1839). Together they had several children who continued the family’s social and political connections in Maryland. Their son Samuel Worthington (d. 1860) survived into the mid-nineteenth century. Another son, John Tolley Worthington (1813–1892), married Mary Govane Hood (1813–1892), daughter of James Hood of Hood’s Mill and Sarah Howard, thereby linking the Worthingtons to other established Maryland families. Their daughter Ann Maria Worthington (1821–1873) married Charles Grosvenor Hanson (1815/6–1880), son of Alexander Contee Hanson (1786–1819), extending the family’s ties into another prominent Maryland political lineage. Another daughter, Comfort Mary Worthington (1823–1894), married William B. Nelson, Jr. These marriages reflected and reinforced the Worthington family’s position within the regional elite.

Worthington’s political career developed out of this background of landownership and local prominence. Initially engaged primarily in agricultural pursuits, he entered national politics during a period of significant realignment in American party life. He was first elected as a Jacksonian to the Twenty-second Congress, serving from March 4, 1831, to March 3, 1833. His affiliation as a Jacksonian placed him within the political movement that supported President Andrew Jackson, emphasizing expanded white male suffrage, opposition to the national bank, and a limited federal government, while at the same time defending slavery and states’ rights in the South. As a member of the Democratic Party representing Maryland, Worthington contributed to the legislative process during three terms in office, participating in the democratic process and representing the interests of his constituents in a period marked by debates over economic policy, internal improvements, and the evolving sectional tensions over slavery.

After his first term, Worthington sought to continue his service in Congress but faced electoral setbacks. He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1832 to the Twenty-third Congress and again an unsuccessful candidate in 1834 for election to the Twenty-fourth Congress. These defeats occurred amid shifting political alliances and the consolidation of opposition to Jacksonian policies. Nonetheless, Worthington remained active in public life and retained sufficient local support to return to national office a few years later.

Worthington reentered Congress as a member of the Democratic Party, which had by then emerged as the institutional heir to Jacksonian politics. He was elected as a Democrat to the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Congresses and served from March 4, 1837, to March 3, 1841. During these later terms he sat in the House of Representatives through the financial turmoil of the Panic of 1837 and the ensuing economic depression, as well as the contentious politics of the Van Buren and early Harrison–Tyler years. Over the course of his three terms in Congress—one as a Jacksonian and two as a Democrat—Worthington took part in the legislative deliberations of a nation grappling with rapid expansion, economic instability, and intensifying disputes over slavery, though the surviving record does not associate him with any single landmark measure.

At the conclusion of his final term in Congress in 1841, Worthington returned to Maryland and resumed his agricultural pursuits at “Shawan.” He continued to live as a planter and local notable in Baltimore County during the last years of his life. His activities in this period remained rooted in the management of his estate and the enslaved labor upon which it depended, reflecting the persistence of the slaveholding plantation economy in Maryland on the eve of the Civil War era.

John Tolley Hood Worthington died at “Shawan” in Baltimore County, Maryland, on April 27, 1849. He was originally interred in a private cemetery on his farm, in keeping with the practice of many rural landowning families. His remains were later reinterred in St. John’s Episcopal Churchyard in Worthington Valley, Maryland, a burial ground associated with the community that bore his family’s name and reflected the longstanding presence and influence of the Worthingtons in the region.