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HEATHER COX RICHARDSON ON MARCH 15TH, THE DAY MAINE JOINED THE UNION
 
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Heather Cox Richardson
March 15, 2025
Letters from an American
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_ Maine's petition for statehood was stopped dead by southerners who
refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit human
enslavement—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave
state” resulting in the infamous "Missouri Compromise." _

Orignial State Flag of Maine adopted 1901. Replaced with current flag
in 1909 by the current flag with the state seal. The original flag has
seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years with many Mainers
choosing to diplay it.,

 

March 15 is a crucially important day in U.S. history As the man who
taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by
Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!”

He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course,
that it is 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 human 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 slave owners 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 slavery where it
could—by, for example, outlawing slave sales 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 slave owners, 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, Abraham Lincoln.

Lovejoy and Lincoln were also friends with another Maine man gone to
Illinois. Elihu Washburne had been born in Livermore, Maine, in 1816,
when Maine was still part of Massachusetts. 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 for his vice president to Hannibal Hamlin, who
represented Maine in the Senate (and whose father had built the house
in which the Washburns grew up). Lincoln won 62% of the vote in Maine
in 1860, taking all eight 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.

I was not a great student in college. I liked learning, but not on
someone else’s timetable. It was this story that woke me up and made
me a scholar. I found it fascinating that a group of ordinary people
from country towns who shared a fear that they were losing their
democracy could figure out how to work together to reclaim it.

Happy Birthday, Maine.

_[xxxxxx MODERATOR: ALSO OF INTEREST AN INTERVIEW ON KALX WITH
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
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ON, AMONG OTHER TOPICS, THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JOURNALIST AND A
HISTORIAN.]_

_HEATHER COX RICHARDSON (born October 8, 1962) is an American
historian who works as a professor of history at Boston College
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courses on the American Civil War
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the Reconstruction Era
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and the Plains Indians
[[link removed]]. She previously taught
history at MIT [[link removed]] and
the University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Richardson has authored seven books on history and politics. In 2019,
Richardson started publishing Letters from an American, a nightly
newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of
American history. Richardson focuses on the health of American
democracy. The newsletter accrued over one million subscribers, making
her, as of December 2020, the most successful individual author of a
paid publication on Substack
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_Letters from an American is the substack of Heather Cox Richardson._

* democracy
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* U.S. history
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* Missouri Compromise
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* slavery
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* Elijah P. Lovejoy
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* Abraham Lincoln
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