Maine History Online

Others who were notable in the movement in Maine were Samuel Fessenden (1784-1869) of Portland, a lawyer, legislator, and major general of the Massachusetts militia; and Reuben Ruby (1798-1878), a leader of Portland's black community and supporter of Freedom's Journal, the first black newspaper in the county.

The anti-slavery groups brought many noted speakers to Maine, raised money for the cause, and generally worked to convince Mainers of the moral imperative to end slavery in America.

Although New England shipbuilders and owners benefited from the trade in slaves and traded in the products made from slave labor, as Willey pointed out, the region's religious heritage and individualistic traditions aided anti-slavery sentiment.

Maine's north Atlantic location was well positioned to facilitate escaped slaves, and its privateering past lent a certain cachet to pirating human contraband out of the country.

The Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850, requiring ordinary citizens to participate in the recapture of runaways, offended Maine's libertarian ways and provided its peoples with an opportunity to lead in a regional cause.

Typically resentful of being told what to do, a cross section of Mainers seemed to participate with satisfaction in ferrying runaway slaves northward and eastward away from federally sanctioned capture. Located near the city's docks, the Abyssinian Meetinghouse in Portland played a crucial role in receiving escaped slaves and channeling them outward at no small risk to the congregation and its pastor.

Amos Freeman, the church's minister, managed to maintain the operation's secrecy and success in the decades before the Civil War.

The 1997 discovery of a tunnel linking the Holyoke House in Brewer to the Penobscot River nearby underscores legends about its use as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Similar stories and tantalizing bits of evidence exist for dozens of other stops in cities and small towns across the state, and the evidence that does exist lends credence to Maine's history of evading inconvenient or unpopular laws being applied to anti-slavery efforts.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, wife of Bowdoin College professor Calvin Stowe, wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly while the couple lived in Brunswick. The book was influential, spawning several imitators in the north and harsh rebuttals from affronted readers in the south.

Church and town abolitionist groups often worked in relative obscurity, and leaders like Joshua L. Chamberlain and Hannibal Hamlin collectively helped eliminate the institution itself. Most famous for his military leadership in the pivotal Little Round Top battle at Gettysburg, Chamberlain's role is well known; Hamlin's perhaps less so.

A physician's son, Hannibal Hamlin grew up in comfortable circumstances in Paris Hill. He attended a private academy and later studied law with an abolitionist attorney, which both grounded him in a quasi-political profession and exposed him early to the most critical moral issue of his time. Hamlin practiced law in Hamden, and entered politics early as a state legislator.

His service in the United States House of Representatives during the Mexican War in the 1840s allowed him to combine his moderate but growing abolitionist sensibilities and his political ambitions to author and support a provision limiting the westward expansion of slavery into the new territories. "I have no doubt," he maintained, "that the whole North will come to the position that I have taken." It did, but legislation could not forestall the conflict even he knew was coming.

Moving on to the Senate, Hamlin and other Democrats split from their party over the issue of slavery. Hamlin ultimately became a Republican and was added to the fledgling Republican ticket in 1860 to balance Lincoln's western background and Whiggish inclinations.

Writing of the nomination to his wife, Hamlin confessed, "I neither expected or desired it. But is has been made and as a faithful man to the cause, it leaves me no alternative but to accept it."

Never a radical, the popular temperance man offered a measured tone and moderate position that helped elect Lincoln president, and provide counsel during the resulting war. He supported Lincoln, approved of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, but grew bored with the limits his office imposed and missed the power and significance of the Senate, which had offered him a far greater sense of accomplishment.

Dropped from the 1864 ticket, he nonetheless campaigned for Lincoln's re-election, and later resumed his much missed Senate seat, this time as a Republican. The anti-slavery efforts of Lincoln, Hamlin and others helped secure African-American political allegiance for the Republican Party. Not until Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal did African-American voters realign with the Democratic Party.