It is well known that the issue of the poet became extinct in 1754, unless
they survived in the descendants of Caleb Clarke, the only son of Milton's
third daughter, Deborah. Caleb Clarke went out to Madras, and was parish
clerk at Fort St. George from 1717 to 1719. In addition to a daughter, who
died in infancy, he had two sons, Abraham and Isaac; of neither of whom is
anything known, except that the former married a person of the same surname
as himself; and had a daughter Mary, baptised in 1727. Sir James Mackintosh
made some ineffectual attempts to trace them, and came to the conclusion
that they had migrated to some other part of India.
I am perhaps catching at a straw: but it is possible there may be something
more than a coincidence in the name of _Milton Clark_, who is spoken of in
the fourth chapter of the _Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as brother to Lewis
Clark, the original of the character of George Harris. Perhaps some of your
transatlantic friends can inform us:
1st. Whether there is, or has been, in use any system of assigning names to
slaves, which would account for their bearing the Christian and surname of
their owners or other free men, and thus lead to the inference that there
has been some free man of the name of Milton Clark.
2nd. Whether there is any family in America of the name of Clark, in which
Milton, or even Abraham or Isaac, is known to have been adopted as a
Christian name; and, if so, whether there is any tradition in the family of
migration from India.