Mayo is credited with influencing the location of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and is noted for his controversial resignation and Presidential dismissal from the service at the start of the Civil War.
The plantation had previously been owned by the pirate William Cotter and wife Jane Gassaway, who purchased it two years after the death of Jane's father Colonel Nicholas Gassaway (Mysteriously, the Colonel's and his son's gravestones were both found there in different centuries, though both had lived and died at the Love's Neck residence while Gresham house was still owned and occupied by Greshams on rented land).
[6] Commodore Mayo died of a gunshot wound at Gresham house on or before the morning of May 18, 1861,[1] the same day on which he was dismissed from the Navy by order of President Abraham Lincoln for his eloquent but aggressive letter of resignation.
[1] A letter dated May 1, 1810, written by 16-year-old Mayo aboard the USS Wasp, contains the first extant mention of the term "Uncle Sam" as a reference to the United States.
[14] In the 1840s as US General Scott advanced on Veracruz, he requested artillery support from Commodore Matthew C. Perry and the United States Naval forces nearby.
[16] The naval battery deployed consisted of three 68-pound shell guns and three thirty-two pounders firing solid shot, and over 200 seamen and others attached to each in order to transport the massive weapons through knee-deep mud.
Thomas Crabbe, whose orders were extensive in the detailing of the intent and desire of the United States to thereby suppress the slave trade and prevent any vessel flying the US flag from engaging in it.
In June, the 61-year-old officer was granted three months leave after two and a half years at sea on an 18th-century frigate, before returning to the examination of midshipmen at the academy.
[19] Following the outbreak of hostilities between the Confederacy and the United States, Commodore Mayo was the oldest and longest-serving of the some 300 Navy officers who chose not to support the union, some 100 of whom resigned their commissions.