Maine history X

Following the announcement that a national slave museum will be built, we look at Maine’s role in our nation’s most sordid legacy

By Noah Bruce

This month Joseph Riley, mayor of Charleston, South Carolina announced his plans to commit $35 million towards the building of a slavery museum.

For America, it’s about time. The fact that it has taken our nation so long to memorialize the tragedy of slavery is a sign of the state of our national denial.

If you go to Washington, DC, you can visit the Holocaust Museum. It’s an important museum that provides a powerful and sobering experience, but in truth, the Holocaust Museum would be more appropriate in Berlin. The mass crimes against humanity committed on American soil are slavery and the murder of the native American people and theft of their land. Yet, the United States has neither apologized for nor built a museum or monument to these crimes.

Charleston is an appropriate site for the slavery museum because more slaves who crossed the Atlantic,

crammed in the fetid hulls of sailing ships, landed in Charleston than any other American city.

There were certainly more slaves in South Carolina than there were in Maine, and many may not even be aware of Maine’s history of slavery. True, no Maine city was home to the slave markets that existed throughout the South and closer to home in northern cities like New York, Boston, or even Portsmouth. Yet Mainers owned slaves and took an active and profitable role in the slave trade. And in Portland, slavery is found at the very dawn of the city’s history.

At the time it was called Falmouth, and it included the land where presently sit the towns of Portland, Falmouth, Westbrook, Scarborough, and Cape Elizabeth. The city was founded by two men and their families, and one of these families, that headed by George Cleaves, owned a slave by the name of Oliver Weeks. Cleaves and his partner Richard Tucker were evicted from the island that is still named Richmond’s Island off the coast of present day Cape Elizabeth. From the island they sailed a few miles north and, with the help of their slave, founded Portland when they built a trading post near where the Casco Bay parking garage now stands.

Slavery was legal in Maine because Maine was a part of Massachusetts until 1820, and slavery was legal in Massachusetts until 1783.

According to the estimates of Randolph Stakeman, a Bowdoin history professor who wrote “Slavery in Colonial Maine” in the fall 1987 edition of the Maine Historical Quarterly, there were probably never more than 500 or 600 slaves in Maine at one time. The low slave population was partly due to the fact that not that many white colonialists lived in Maine either. Still, even back then, Maine was pretty white-bread: according to a 1764 census, blacks made up less than two percent of the population. Compared with southern states, this is extremely low.

The reason for this is that slaves in the South were integral to the business of the wealthiest five percent of people, the plantation owners. In Maine, on the other hand, slaves were more likely to be status symbols, part of the trappings of the rich who were simply aping their wealthy trading partners, the planters who lived on islands in the West Indies.

Stakeman writes of Sir William Pepperdell, a wealthy Kittery merchant, who “legend has it, would sail down the river on a barge reminiscent of ancient Egypt, attended by eight black servants.”

Maine might have had far less slaves than southern states, but many of its rich folk relied on slavery just as the southern planters did, if in a more roundabout way. One of the most profitable businesses to own in the north was a rum distillery. In Portland, for example, Fore Street, where many now go for a toddy or two, was once lined with rum distilleries.

The way the rum business worked, a distiller sent lumber known as shook — basically boards used to make casks and barrels — to islands in the West Indies like Antigua or Jamaica. In the islands, the lumber was traded either for sugar cane grown on large plantations worked by slaves or for molasses which is made from sugar cane. The molasses or cane was then shipped back to Northeastern cities like Portland and made into rum.

Were there enough Mainers to drink all that rum? Nope. Though rum was sold throughout the United States, the most profitable thing to do with the liquor was ship it to Africa where it was traded for human beings, who were then shipped and sold either in the islands in the West Indies or on the American continent. The trading strategy was known as triangulation — the islands, the northern part of the American continent, and Africa formed a triangle — and it made many New Englanders rich; rich off the labor and sale of human beings.

Slaves in Maine did not work on large plantations like those in the American South or on the islands. Instead, most worked as house servants, as agricultural workers on smaller farms, as artisans, or on the docks perhaps loading and unloading cargo such as lumber, molasses, and rum.

Unlike slaves in the South, slaves in Maine had the legal right to testify in court. Further, owners could be brought to trial for mistreatment of their slaves. The case has been made that this proves slave life was better in the North than the South. However, according to Stakeman, the only known case of a Massachusetts slaveowner being tried for mistreatment of a slave “ironically proves just the opposite.”

“In 1685,” he writes, “Nathaniel Keen was tried and convicted for beating his slave Rachel to death. He was fined five pounds for the offense plus five pounds and ten shillings for court costs. The value of a slave’s life in Maine may have been protected by law, but it was not valued very highly.”

While slaves in Maine served their owners differently than Southern slaves, the basic fact of slave existence remained the same — slaves were treated, and thought of, more as animals than humans. Slaves could be sold at any time, husbands could be taken from their wives, children could be ripped from their mothers. Slaves were subject to beatings if their owner was so inclined. Perhaps most basic, slaves could not steer the course of their own lives.

Some Maine slaves, however, did gain a measure of independence, and it is these slaves whose stories have been preserved. The details may be scant, but they are all that remain of their important legacy.

Records exist of several Maine slaves who gained their freedom either through, or after, fighting in the American Revolution. Thomas Smith, the first pastor of the First Parish Church on Congress Street, freed his slave to fight in the war in exchange for half his wages. “He was literally fighting for his liberty,” says local historian Herb Adams, “both his and his country’s.”

More detailed records exist for a slave named Prince McLellan who was born in what is today Cameroon. Prince was purchased by Captain Joseph McLellan of Portland for his Gorham relatives, William and Reb McLellan.

When the Revolution began, Prince saw an opportunity for a better life and ran away to enlist as a sailor aboard the frigate Deane, a 32-gun ship built in France on Ben Franklin’s orders. By 1781, the Deane was one of only two ships left in the US navy. Prince received an honorable discharge in 1783, but returned to Gorham a slave.

Fortunately, it was in this year that the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that a clause in the state constitution that regarded all men as “free and equal” made slavery illegal.

The McLellans gave Prince a house and ten acres of land. He married twice, lived out his life as a farmer in Gorham and died around the age of 90. His grave lies in Gorham’s Eastern Cemetery on Main Street.

“Part of Prince’s spirit,” writes Adams in a 1986 Maine Sunday Telegram article, “lives on in the character ‘Phyrrus Venture,’ the independent ex-slave in the novel of the same name by Portland authors Randolph Dominic and William D. Barry and published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1983.”

Lewis Shepard’s story is similar. Shepard was a Jamaican- born slave owned by the Libby family of Gorham and Scarborough. Unlike Prince, Shepard’s owners freely allowed him to join the 11th Regiment of the Massachusetts line. He fought at the Battle of Saratoga and the Battle of Monmouth, where, writes Adams, “George Washington himself halted the Americans’ retreat by charging down the line on horseback, hatless, swearing, and swinging his sword.” Shepard spent the famous and brutal winter of 1778 at Valley Forge under Washington’s command.

After the war, Shepard, like Prince, was given a house in Gorham by his owners, but later in life he appears in Portland records as living in the tightly knit black community of about 300 people near the docks and wharves at the foot of Munjoy Hill. In 1818, Shepard applied for a federal pension, the first ever offered by the government. Adams writes that, in his old age, Shepard was a popular local figure around the docks, who was especially fond of children.

Shepard lived to 82, and is buried in the Eastern Cemetery in Portland. His grave lies in what was the black section of the cemetery where Congress Street meets Mountfort Street.

Nearby to Shepard’s aged headstone lie the graves of three other black Revolutionary War veterans who settled in Portland. The newer, white headstones of James Bowes, Plato McLellan, and Cato Shattuck were placed in the 1980s by William B. Jordan Jr., an activist in the preservation and restoration of Portland’s historic cemeteries, who, using old military records, obtained them from the Veteran’s Administration.

A few Maine slaves managed to gain independence long before the Revolution or the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision. Black Will was a slave living in York who was freed in 1700, but even as a slave, Will enjoyed some degree of freedom: Will’s owner, John Shapleigh, allowed Will to have his own house and to work his own land, though he remained Shapleigh’s property.

Will was obviously an industrious man, who, perhaps by doing extra work for his neighbors, was able to raise enough money to buy himself 100 acres of land. Eventually, Shapleigh freed Will for reasons that are not clear.

In 1708, Will used his land to help free another slave, Anthony Freeman. Freeman was freed by his owner, but the state of Massachusetts required a bond for any freed slave. (This bond was supposed to prevent slaveowners from freeing old slaves who would become wards of the state, but served as an obstacle to freeing any slave.) Will put up some of his land as bond then loaned Freeman two acres to settle and farm and allowed him to pay for it later.

Will is also remarkable in that he had an affair with a white woman who bore him a child but managed to avoid prosecution for what was, at the time, a crime punishable by jail.

Will’s son, William Black was not so lucky. Black lived and raised a son with a white woman, though he was not legally allowed to marry her. In 1715, he was jailed, not for miscegenation, but under laws prohibiting extramarital affairs.

By 1739, Black and his family had moved to the Harpswell area and were the first settlers on what was then known as Will’s Island. The island, today known as Bailey’s island, was bought by a Massachusetts man who kicked the Black family off as squatters. The Blacks moved to nearby Orr’s Island and today the water between the two islands is known as Will’s Straight.

After slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts and therefore Maine, the practice of owning slaves disappeared, but the issue that was dividing the nation did not. Politically, slavery surrounded Maine’s entrance into the Union in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise, which stipulated that Maine would be admitted as a free state while Missouri gained statehood as a state where slavery was legal.

“You can imagine how much pain that caused,” says Adams. “Our admission to the union was allowed only by tying it to Missouri, a state where people were to be legally bound to slavery.”

Around this time, the anti-slavery movement was growing in the North, including Maine, with the black community serving as the backbone of the cause. In Portland, the center of the community was the Abyssinian Church on Newbury Street. In 1832, William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and one of the most outspoken, uncompromising voices against slavery, made one of several speeches in Portland at the church. On this trip through Maine, Garrison also spoke at the First Parish Church on Commercial Street (whose pastor 60 years back was a slaveowner) and the Quaker meeting house which stood where Lincoln Park is today, across from the County Courthouse.

In the summer of 1833, Portland was host to the Great Colonization Debates between the colonizationists and the Garrisonian abolitionists. The colonizationists wanted to end slavery gradually by compensating slave owners for their slaves and sending all the black people in the country back to Africa. The Garrisonians argued that slavery should be ended immediately, and slave owners should get nothing.

Thousands of people attended these debates, and it was generally agreed that the Garrisonians presented the better argument. Of course, the United States ended slavery according to the Garrisonian model, although it took a civil war and the lives of 600,000 Americans.

Not everyone in Portland was an abolitionist, especially not those who made their money from the rum trade. Between the years of 1838 and 1847 there were three pro-slavery riots in the city perpetrated by these wealthy merchants. In 1836, an important abolitionist figure named Henry Brewster Stanton was speaking at the Quaker meeting house when a mob began what a Portland newspaper described in an article entitled “Portland Disgraced” as “Portland’s first anti-slavery riot,” though it does not describe the actions of the rioters.

In 1842, rioters attacked Stephen Simons Foster (not the songwriter who penned “Not My Kentucky Home”), who was giving an anti-slavery speech in the First Parish Church. Foster was a man who seemed to specialize in inciting pro-slavery crowds to violence. Wells Staley-Mays, a member of the Committee to Restore the Abyssian and an expert on Portland’s abolitionist history, calls him “the most extreme Garrisonian abolitionist, and the Garrisonians were the most extreme abolitionists,” and compares him to Abbey Hoffman, who incited violence during the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960’s. Adams, on the other hand, calls Foster “the Jack Kevorkian of his day.”

No doubt Foster was a passionate man and his anti-slavery zeal angered some in the audience who rose up and attacked the speaker “giving him 20 blows to the head and tearing his coat,” says Staley-Mays, before the abolitionist women in attendance managed to push him out the back window.

Foster escaped next door to the home of Nathan Winslow, a wealthy Quaker merchant, who was a leading abolitionist in the city and a patron of William Lloyd Garrison. Winslow housed Foster until he healed from his beating.

It is not by coincidence that the women in the abolitionist movement helped Foster escape the mob. Among Garrisonian abolitionists, women assumed leadership positions within the movement. The next time there was an pro-slavery riot in Portland, in 1847, the women were ready.

The occasion was an evening of anti-slavery speeches by some of the most famous abolitionists — Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Lenox Remond — at the Quaker meeting house. When the mob broke every window in the building and prepared to attack the speakers, the women formed a ring around them and shielded the men from harm. (In those days the “gentlemen” of the mob would not harm a woman.)

Around 1850, public sentiment in Portland began to change against slavery. The major factor precipitating the change was the fugitive slave law of 1850. Prior to this law, an escaped slave living in the north had to fear only slavehunters, specialized escaped-slave bounty hunters. This law, however, allowed a slaveowner to enlist the aid of any citizen, even a woman, to retrieve a runaway slave. For instance, if a slaveowner was chasing a runaway slave down the street, he could order a bystander to assist him. If the bystander refused, he could be jailed. The law also allowed sheriffs to force the deputization of citizens and force them to help in a manhunt for a runaway.

This law convinced many northerners that Congress was bowing to the pressures of a minority of rich, southern slave owners.

In Boston, this feeling erupted when citizens stormed the courthouse in an attempt to free a captured runaway slave named Anthony Burn. President Franklin Pierce sent in federal troops to subdue the anti-slavery mob and ensure Burn’s return to his owner.

The most ardent, or perhaps the most daring, members of the abolitionist movement participated in the Underground Railroad, the system of people and resources that helped runaway slaves escape to free states and Canada. According to Staley-Mays, between 100,000 and half a million slaves escaped on the Underground Railroad and among these numbers, tens of thousands came through Portland. (Staley-Mays has recently begun offering tours of the Underground Railroad as it manifested itself in Portland.)

People who housed runaway slaves were known as conductors, and Portland was home to many who risked imprisonment to help runaways. One, Elizabeth Thomas, was a white woman who lived on India Street and is buried in the Eastern Cemetery. Another was George Ropes, a black man who lived on Oxford Street.

One of the most famous stories of runaway slaves in Portland concerns a slave couple from Georgia named William and Ellen Craft. The Crafts had two advantages that helped them escape — William was literate and Ellen was very fair-skinned. Their plan for escape exploited these traits. Ellen posed as William’s white, male owner. She pretended to be an invalid suffering from arthritis, and as part of the disguise she bound her face and hand in cloth. The couple stayed in hotels and William did the talking and signed them in as guests.

“It was common to see slave owners indebted to their slaves for everything,” says Staley-Mays, so the couple did not strike too unusual a sight.

When they made it to Philadelphia, William wrote their story as “a way to give the finger to their owners,” says Staley-Mays. The article was published in every major newspaper in the North, which of course alerted the Crafts’ owners as to their whereabouts. Using the Underground Railroad the Crafts quickly traveled to Boston.

While working as a waiter in Boston, William narrowly escaped being spotted when his former owner came in to dine at his restaurant. The close-call, plus the recently passed fugitive slave law, convinced the Crafts to escape to England.

They made their way, again by the Underground Railroad, to Portland and spent their last night in the US in home of Oliver and Lydia Neale Dennett on Spring Street. Once in England, the Crafts told their story in the book Running 1000 miles for Freedom. The book became a best-seller, and, after the civil war, they moved back to Georgia and opened a school.

Equally harrowing is the story of the HMS Albion Cooper. The Cooper set out from Savannah, Georgia with a cargo of lumber, but it wasn’t long before the crew discovered that there was a stowaway on board — a runaway slave.

The Cooper was a British ship and therefore its crew held anti-slavery views — the Brits had outlawed the practice in all their colonies in 1837. However, if it was discovered that the men helped a runaway slave, they could face fines and imprisonment in the US. The captain decided to risk the consequences and steered a course for Portland, where apparently he thought he would find people friendly to the cause.

The captain went to a black-owned barbershop searching for people who could help. Haircutting, along with maritime work, carriage driving, and second-hand clothes dealing was one of the few trades a black person could work, and barbershops were centers of community news and abolitionist sentiment.

The captain had come to the right place. The barber contacted Daniel Fessenden, a leading abolitionist in Portland, who got in touch with Charles Pierre, another in the community of activists. The British crew left the ship, so they could not be implicated in the escape, while a Pierre-led group rowed out to the ship, picked up the runaway slave, and led him up India Street to the head of Hancock Street, where he disappears from record. Neither the crew of the Albion Cooper nor the rescue party were ever implicated in the deed.

Though Congress outlawed the importation of slaves into the country in 1807, Adams, his Telegram article writes that “from 1808 to 1860, sharp-eyed men smuggled more than 1.2 million slaves from Africa to the Americas.”

Only one man, though, was ever sentenced for slavetrading, and that man was from Portland, off Danforth Street to be exact. The son of a sea captain and a mother who was a leader in Portland’s Presbyterian Church, Nathaniel Gordon was “a human swine if there ever was one,” says Adams.

The veteran of many slave-runs, in 1860 Gordon was captaining a ship named the Erie when he was caught with a cargo of 900 Africans off the coast of the Congo by the USS Mohican.

Instead of returning the Africans to their native land 50 miles away, the Erie, now crewed by US officers, foolishly and unfortunately sailed 1500 miles to release the captives in Liberia. En route, 300 Africans died.

Meanwhile, Gordon was transported to New York in chains. Adams writes that if Gordon would have submitted to a quick trial he would have been acquitted. However, he had his lawyers end his first trial on a technicality.

That year, Abraham Lincoln became the new president and Delafield Smith became the new district attorney for New York. Both figured in Gordon’s demise.

The Mohican’s prize master (in charge of captured goods, in this case the slaves) had deserted to the Confederacy, leaving no government witness against Gordon, and it looked like he would walk.

Smith, however, “scoured waterfronts from Philadelphia to Portsmouth for old crewmen from the Erie,” writes Adams “and their testimony was devastating.” The jury found Gordon guilty in 20 minutes and sentenced him to death.

The verdict was front-page news. “Death! DEATH TO GORDON!” screamed the New York Herald. A national debate ensued over whether Lincoln should pardon Gordon or make an example of him and allow the first execution of a slave trader. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Lincoln and argued for Gordon’s death. Senator George Evans of Maine, on the other hand, brought a pardon petition to the president with 5000 signatures.

Lincoln was not swayed. Delafield Smith, the New York prosecutor, relates a conversation he had with Lincoln while the president held a pen over Gordon’s reprieve papers: “ ‘Mr. Smith, you do not know how hard it is to have a human being die when you know a stroke of your pen may save him!’ But he threw down that pen . . .”

On the morning of his hanging, November 21, 1862, Gordon ingested strychnine in an attempt to cheat the government of the pleasure of hanging him. Luckily, doctors were able to bring Gordon back from the brink of death with shots of brandy (which apparently cures strychnine poisoning). Gordon was hung at noon on the gallows of the New York City Tombs.

Gordon’s memory and Maine’s history of slavery are perhaps painful to recall. After all, Gordon was only hung 139 years ago and slavery was legal in Maine only 221 years ago. 221 years is not that long in the history of a nation, certainly not long enough for the shadow of an evil as great as slavery to abate completely.

The sooner and more honestly Portland, Maine, the North, and the United States confront its history of slavery the more accurately and effectively we can address the racial and economic injustices in our own time. n

Noah Bruce can be reached at nbruce@phx.com. He would like to thank Herb Adams, Wells Staley-Mays, and Randolph Stakeman.