Benjamin Chew - Marriage and Family

Marriage and Family

Chew wed Mary Galloway (1729–1755), his mother's niece, on June 13, 1747, at West River, Maryland. They had five daughters (Mary (1748–1788), Anna Marie (1749–1812), Elizabeth (1751–1815), Sarah (1753–1810), and Henrietta (1755–1756)) before Mary died. From 1754 to 1771, Chew and his family lived on Front Street in Philadelphia.

He married again on September 12, 1757, to the young widow Elizabeth Allen Oswald (1732–1819), daughter of William and Margaret (Hamilton) Allen, and granddaughter of Andrew Hamilton. Elizabeth was the niece and heir to the estate of Captain Joseph Turner. Together with her father, William Allen, she owned the Union Forge Ironworks in High Bridge, Hunterdon County, New Jersey, which produced cannonballs for the American Army.

Benjamin and Elizabeth had seven more daughters (Margaret (1760–1824), Juliana (1765–1845), Henrietta (1767–1848), Sophia (1769–1841), Maria (1771–1840), Harriet (1775–1861), and Catherine (1779–1831), and two sons (Benjamin Jr. (1758–1844) and Joseph (1763–1764)).

In 1758, Chew left the Quakers permanently and joined the Church of England; he and his wife had their son Benjamin baptized that year at Christ Church. They worshipped there with their growing family, and later at St. Peter's Church when they moved out to Germantown. This was part of a process of Anglicization that had begun when he was studying law at the Middle Temple in London.

Chew greatly increased both wealth and property holdings when he married Elizabeth Oswald. They held numerous slaves to care for the properties and cultivate their commodity crops. In 1760, on the Chew's property "Whitehall" in Delaware, Richard Allen, was born into slavery. In 1768, recognizing the boy's early genius, Chew sold Allen, then eight years old, and all members of his immediate family to Stokley Sturgis, a known abolitionist and owner of a neighboring property in Delaware. Richard Allen later became a preacher in the Methodist Church in Philadelphia, co-founder of the Free African Society, and the founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first African-American denomination in the United States.