Maine
By now you know a few things about me. One is that I am often saying that when you peel back a layer – usually a layer of history – that you find racial injustice. I’m not being rhetorical. For instance, some of the food you are eating today and some of the cotton you are wearing as you read this was grown on some of the millions of acres of farm land that in intentional cahoots with the United States Federal Government Department of Agriculture was stolen from Black Americans through subterfuge, bending the law, or when all else failed – or often before any other method was even tried – through the ever effective, old standby of terror, intimidation and murder.
The case of Pigford v Glickman tried to right that wrong. Pigford v. Glickman was a class action lawsuit brought against the United States Department of Agriculture in 1999, alleging that it had racially discriminated against African-American farmers in its allocation of farm loans and assistance from 1981 to 1996. I don’t know how those dates were chosen because from the inception of the USDA in 1862, the feds had been complicit in driving Black farmers into bankruptcy by withholding the pre-season loans that all farmers, then and now, needed to get through to the harvest and money-making season.
The lawsuit was settled on April 14, 1999, by Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Almost 1 billion US dollars have been paid or credited to some 20,000 farmers under the settlement's consent decree, who’s land – including that which was stolen and then transferred to White farmers - would be worth many hundreds of billions today. Under Pigford, nearly 16,000 claims were approved for monetary payments. But in continuing the USDA tradition of making money for Black farmers difficult to come by, just under 7,000 were then flat out denied, and roughly another 60,000 were rejected for being filed late.
Both the Obama administration and the Biden administration tried again to reimburse Black farmers for the governments discriminatory lending practices. Obama was thwarted when congress went home without authorizing the money.
Biden’s was thwarted when a federal judge agreed with white farmers who filed suit to stop the 4 billion dollars in payments to Black and other disadvantaged farmers from the 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package because that money had been earmarked based “solely on skin color” and did not meet the “color-blind” society that Doctor King had envisioned. How ironic that the goal is now to create color blind laws and policies. One wonders where that judge was when the USDA was approving or disapproving loans based solely on skin color.
But I digress. It is not my intent to write about Black land theft today. Maybe I should mention that I grew up on a small dairy farm in NH, next door to Maine, the place and thing that I actually want to write about today. That land was stolen as well. But it wasn't race. It was my dad’s second wife. Buy me a beer and you get the full story on that one.
The other thing you know about me by now is that if someone says something that I didn’t know and says it well, and it’s non-partisan, I’m happy to either host them here as a guest writer, or as I’m doing today, just re-post something they’ve posted.
Today I’m re-posting a piece by historian Heather Cox Ricardson about a group of white men from Maine – men, because in the 1800’s women were not expected nor allowed or even envisioned as being capable of playing any significant role in governing. Maine, one of the whitest states in the country, took a significant bite out of the proliferation of slavery. This is the story of politicians from opposing parties coming together and dropping their party’s ideology to do what was best for the country. In fact they came together so thoroughly that they formed another party altogether – the Republican party. I’m going to assume that their conversations were civil. Seems like there could be a lesson in there somewhere for today’s crop of performative politicians.
Heather: March 15 is, of course, the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.
Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit enslavement—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South.
They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.
But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that enslavers in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—Senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri question “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”
Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.
The petition drive that had begun as an effort to keep the admission of Maine from being tied to the admission of Missouri continued as a movement to get Congress to whittle away at enslavement where it could— for example, outlaw the sale of enslaved Americans in the nation’s capital—and would become a key point of friction between the North and the South.
There was also another powerful way in which the conditions of the state’s entry into the Union would affect American history. Mainers were angry that their statehood had been tied to the demands of far distant enslavers, and that anger worked its way into the state’s popular culture. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that Maine men, who grew up steeped in that anger, could spread west.
And so they did.
In 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton, Illinois, from Albion, Maine, to begin a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of human enslavement, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.
Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, had also moved west from Maine. Owen saw Elijah shot and swore his allegiance to the cause of abolition. “I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother’s blood,” he declared. He turned to politics, and in 1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature. His increasing prominence brought him political friends, including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky by way of Indiana, Abraham Lincoln.
Lovejoy and Lincoln were also friends with another Maine man gone to Illinois, Elihu Washburne. He was one of seven brothers, and one by one, his brothers had all left home, most of them to move west. Israel Washburn, Jr., the oldest, stayed in Maine, but Cadwallader moved to Wisconsin, and William Drew would follow, going to Minnesota. (Elihu was the only brother who spelled his last name with an e).
Israel and Elihu were both serving in Congress in 1854 when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturning the Missouri Compromise and permitting the spread of slavery to the West. Furious, Israel called a meeting of 30 congressmen in May to figure out how they could come together to stand against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. They met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson, of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, they left with one sole principle: to stop the Slave Power that was turning the government into an oligarchy.
The men scattered for the summer back to their homes across the North, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. In the fall, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates were sweeping into office—Cadwallader Washburn would be elected from Wisconsin in 1854 and Owen Lovejoy from Illinois in 1856—and they would, indeed, create a new political party: the Republicans. The new party took deep root in Maine, flipping the state from Democratic to Republican in 1856, the first time it fielded a presidential candidate.
In 1859, Abraham Lincoln would articulate an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans standing together against the oligarchs of slavery, and when he ran for president in 1860, he knew it was imperative that he get the momentum of Maine men on his side. In those days Maine voted for state and local offices in September, rather than November, so a party’s win in Maine could start a wave. “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” the saying went.
So Lincoln turned to Hannibal Hamlin, who represented Maine in the Senate. Lincoln won 62% of the vote in Maine in 1860, taking all 8 of the state’s electoral votes, and went on to win the election. When he arrived in Washington quietly in late February to take office the following March, Elihu Washburne was at the railroad station to greet him.