Judge Custis, with his great popularity, did not escape censure; he was
said to have winked at the surrender of his child for money and
ambition, and to have broken the heart of his estimable wife after he
had lost her fortune in an iron furnace.
Senator Clayton, whose mother had originated near Annapolis, made a
visit there from Washington, and was entrapped into saying that Delaware
would furnish all needful railway facilities for the Eastern Shore, and
that two railways there would never pay.
Finally, Judge Custis wrote to his son-in-law to come to Annapolis and
meet these misstatements in person.
Milburn came, and his pride being irritated by the nature of the
opposition, he wore to the scene of the combat his ancestral hat.
He became at once the most marked figure in Maryland.
In one end of the state he was caricatured in drawings and verses as the
generic Eastern-Shore man, wearing such a hat because he had not heard
of any later styles.
The connection of a man of last century's hat with such a progressive
thing as a railroad, seemed to excite everybody's risibilities. His
railroad was called the Hat Line, even in the debates, and coarse people
and negroes were hired by wits in the lobby to attend the Legislature
with petitions for the Eastern Shore railroad, the whole delegation
wearing antique and preposterous hats, gathered up from all the old
counties and from the slop-shops of Baltimore; and in that day queer
hats were very common, as animal skins of great endurance were still
used to manufacture them.
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