Matthew Tilghman was born February 17, 1718, at the Hermitage, near Centreville in Queen Anne's County, youngest of nine children of Richard Tilghman and Anna Maria Lloyd. The grandfather, another Richard, had been a surgeon in the British navy and one of the early seated men of the Shore. The grandson's life was Talbot's.

In 1733 he went to live with his cousin Matthew Tilghman Ward. When Ward died in 1741, the younger Matthew came into the working plantations, the store, more than a hundred enslaved people, and Great Choptank Island, the tract granted in 1659 to Seth Foster, who never lived on it. From that inheritance the island has been Tilghman Island. For a hundred years after, it remained a family farm. The villages, the packing houses, and the skipjacks belong to a later century.

He married his cousin Anne Lloyd on April 6, 1741, and settled at Rich Neck Manor, on the Bay Hundred peninsula above Claiborne. They had five children. Margaret married Charles Carroll, Barrister. Anna Maria, the youngest, married her cousin Tench Tilghman of Fausley. At his death the land ran to some 7,900 acres in Talbot and Queen Anne's.

He sat for Talbot in the lower house from 1751, for Queen Anne's in 1760–61, and again for Talbot until the old assembly died. He was speaker in 1773–75. When Governor Eden dismissed the legislature, the conventions at Annapolis became the government of the province. Tilghman chaired seven of the nine meetings between 1774 and 1776, including the last, which wrote Maryland's first state constitution. He headed the committee of correspondence, the Council of Safety on the Eastern Shore, and the Maryland delegation to the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776.

The scene that made the rest possible is a summons.

In June 1776 he was called out of Philadelphia and back to Annapolis to preside. Independence was coming. Maryland still had to decide how to enter it without tearing the province apart. He left the Congress floor for the convention chair. He was not in the room for the July vote. What he did instead was keep the home government standing — conventions in order, a declaration of rights, a plan of government — while the larger argument finished in another city. Later sketches that have him supporting the Declaration on the floor of Congress outrun the attendance record. The Archives note no evidence he sat in Congress after December 1776. He went into the new Maryland Senate, served as its president from 1780 to 1783, and then went home to Rich Neck.

Later writers called him the father of the Revolution in Maryland. He did not wear the title. What the record will bear is simpler. For three years he was the man who kept Maryland's break with Britain orderly. He died of a stroke at Rich Neck on May 4, 1790, and is buried in the family ground there. The obituary called him an advocate of civil and religious liberties.

The island has his name. The house was never in the village that uses the 21671 post office.

Sources: Maryland State Archives life of Matthew Tilghman (SC 3520-1267); Biographical Directory of Congress. Born February 17, 1717/18 in the old calendar the Archives still print.