{"id":15249,"date":"2018-08-22T11:39:12","date_gmt":"2018-08-22T15:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=15249"},"modified":"2020-04-24T15:05:06","modified_gmt":"2020-04-24T19:05:06","slug":"my-maine-no-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/my-maine-no-23\/","title":{"rendered":"My Maine: No. 23"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maine statehood <\/span>and the consequences<\/b> of compromise<\/b>.<\/span><\/h3>\n

By Dr. Brian Purnell<\/p>\n

Maine owes its statehood to slavery. Remember this when, in two years, we celebrate Maine\u2019s two hundredth anniversary. In the midst of the platitudes and sales that will accompany the state\u2019s bicentennial, remember the context that created Maine. Freedom for Mainers exacerbated slavery for black people, and strengthened slaveholders\u2019 power. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"Missouri-Compromise-smaller\"The Missouri Compromise enabled Maine to become a state. In 1818, Missouri applied to become a slave state. If Missouri permitted slavery, the South would control twelve states to North\u2019s eleven and disrupt a tenuous balance of power.<\/span><\/p>\n

Slavery was only one difference between the regions. Northerners favored strong central government, cities, high tariffs, infrastructure, farming, manufacturing, and banking. Southerners desired weak central government (except when prosecuting fugitive slaves and securing land), low taxes, and profits from slavery funneled back into plantations. By the 1820s, the North\u2019s economy no longer needed slave labor, although northern shipping, fishing, farming, and finance profited mightily from the South\u2019s slave society. Few Northerners wanted to abolish slavery; most wanted slavery, and black people, to remain in the South.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maine provided a solution for the dilemma Missouri caused. Congress declared in 1819 that Maine\u2019s admission as a free state would be tied directly to Missouri\u2019s entrance as a slave state. Congress should have called the compromise it passed in 1820 the Missouri-Maine Compromise. Without Maine, the balance between slave and non-slave states could not have been achieved. A rule also emerged for slavery\u2019s future. For roughly thirty years, Missouri\u2019s southern border marked the wall that separated slaveholding from non-slaveholding states. Maine\u2019s independence strengthened slavery elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

As slaveholders\u2019 power grew, so did an abolitionist movement. A party opposed to slavery\u2019s spread arose in the North. The South, foreseeing slavery\u2019s demise, attempted to dissolve the Union. Civil War ensued. Hundreds of thousands died. Much of the South smoldered in defeat. Slavery fell in blood and ash. Its death nearly cost the nation its life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mainers rightly celebrate their role in keeping the nation together, especially during the Civil War. Maine takes pride in that terrible event\u2019s creation of what Abraham Lincoln called the nation\u2019s \u201cnew birth of freedom.\u201d Mainers fought and died to save the Union. After Gettysburg, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the professor from Bowdoin College, emerged an unlikely war hero. Hannibal Hamlin, an anti-slavery Democrat from Maine, was Lincoln\u2019s first Vice President. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the anti-slavery sensation Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> while living in Brunswick in 1852. Maine served as a terminus of the Underground Railroad, a series of safe houses that enabled untold numbers of black people to escape the United States and find freedom in Canada. In 2020, these important people and events of Maine\u2019s history deserve honor and remembrance.<\/span><\/p>\n

If not honor and pride, then honesty and integrity require that, alongside the expressions of jubilee, Mainers recognize how their independence came with a cost. After 1820, slavery spread. In the 1830s alone, 300,000 black men, women, and children were forced to move south, and between 1800 and 1860, more than one million black people, slave and free, were forced to move as the South\u2019s demand for labor in cotton and sugar fields grew. This internal migration and domestic slave trade destroyed black families, inflating prices for black men in their prime working years and black women in their prime birthing years. The domestic slave market placed a premium on black women as breeders of slaves. The spread of slavery in the U.S. perpetuated rape and sexual violence, separated babies from parents, and promoted citizenship based on white racial purity.<\/span><\/p>\n

These are not the topics a state usually includes when it recognizes its origins, but Maine is in a unique position to signal to the nation an important lesson: compromising on evil has incalculable costs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Five of Maine\u2019s seven Congressmen\u2014Martin Kinsley, Joshua Cushman, Ezekiel Whitman, Enoch Lincoln, and James Parker\u2014wanted to prohibit slavery\u2019s spread into new territories. In 1820, they voted against the Missouri Compromise and against Maine\u2019s independence. In their defense, they wrote that, if the North, and the nation, embarked upon this Compromise\u2014and ignored what experiences proved, namely that southern slave holders were determined to dominate the nation through ironclad unity and perpetual pressure to demand more land, and more slaves\u2014then these five Mainers declared Americans \u201cshall deserve to be considered a besotted and stupid race, fit, only, to be led blindfold; and worthy, only, to be treated with sovereign contempt.\u201d As we approach the bicentennial of Maine\u2019s statehood, Mainers should celebrate the leaders who voted against Maine statehood, because they refused to support the spread of slavery. <\/span><\/p>\n

Maine occupies a unique position in the nation\u2019s history. It can name as heroes in a bicentennial celebration legislators who stood against its independence. They knew that freedom that promoted slavery was not freedom at all, and not worth the price. In commemorating them, we can build the courage to follow their lead on current issues of consequence. One hundred years from now, when a new generation of Mainers gathers to mark statehood, it will look back on 2020, the year we remembered those who stood against independence, and for freedom.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Brian Purnell is a professor of Africana Studies and U.S. history at Bowdoin College.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maine owes its statehood to the The Missouri Compromise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,15],"tags":[953,952,951],"class_list":["post-15249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-classic-maine-stories","tag-953","tag-maine-statehood","tag-missouri-compromise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15249"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17998,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15249\/revisions\/17998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}