Stephen Myers.
Black Leaders Gather for the First Colored Convention in Maine
“[O]ur posterity, our enslaved brethren, and our own interests for time and eternity, demand an immediate effort for our moral and intellectual elevation. … Come all. … Oppression is not heaven-inherited by any one. Such a condition is not, cannot be consistent with our duties as moral beings. The largest liberty is essential to humanity. The means for our full emancipation are within our reach; and we cannot longer refuse to use them, and be innocent.”
— Call to attend the 1841 Maine Colored Convention
When the Rev. Amos N. Freeman called the Colored Convention in Portland to order on Oct. 6, 1841, it was the first time Black Mainers had gathered to build a statewide movement for equality, Black empowerment and abolition. Freeman, the new pastor of the Abyssinian Meeting House in Portland, and the Rev. John W. Lewis had promoted the event as a joint Maine and New Hampshire convention, but the vast majority of delegates were from Portland and other Maine communities.
Serving as a vice president was Stephen Myers, a prominent abolitionist, newspaper editor and underground railroad conductor from Albany, New York. Born in 1800, Myers was enslaved until he was 18 years old (slavery wasn’t officially abolished in New York until 1827). During the 1830s, while Myers was working as a steward on a steamship, he and his wife Harriet opened their home to refugees from enslavement. He earned the reputation, according to Black NY abolitionist David Ruggles, as running the “best-organized section of the Underground Railroad in New York State.”
“We devote all our time to the care of the oppressed who come among us,” Myers once said. “Our pay is small, but yet we are willing to continue to do what we can for them. We have arrivals every few days from southern oppression and forward them to the next depot.”
Delegates to Maine’s first Colored Convention came from as far away as Belfast, Augusta, Gardiner, Bath and Brunswick. Many of them were the children and grandchildren of enslaved African Americans who won their freedom fighting in the American Revolution. They were proud of their revolutionary heritage and saw the fight for abolition and equality as a continuation of that struggle for liberty and justice. Others descended from Black loyalists who escaped their colonial masters to join the British side during the war. They emigrated here from New Brunswick and other parts of Canada in search of work in the 19th century.
Men with last names like Heuston, Hill, Garrison and Griffin were related to some of the earliest Black settlers of the Bath-Brunswick area, which had the state’s second-largest Black population, 220 people, according to Bowdoin College professor Randolph Stakeman’s “Black Census of Maine.” Delegate Prince Shapleigh of Brunswick was likely a descendent of Primus Shapleigh, who had been enslaved by Captain John Shapleigh of Kittery until he was freed in 1759. Primus later moved north to become the first free Black settler of Auburn.
Convention delegate Abraham Talbot Jr., a window washer from Portland, was the son of a formerly enslaved worker and Revolutionary War veteran from Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Talbot and his wife settled first in Gardiner, and then in China, to farm the land. Their descendants include civil rights leader and former Maine state legislator Gerald Talbot and his daughter, Rachel Talbot Ross, the current Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.
The delegates represented a socioeconomic cross-section of Maine’s Black community. They were sailors, small businessmen, farmers, laborers and house cleaners. Barbers like Albert Griffin of Gardiner, John T. Carter of Augusta, James Cook of Belfast, Richard Dickson of Portland, Paris Oree of Brunswick and Henry A. Chandler of Bath were well represented at the convention. Most of them were born free; Cook was not. He’d fled enslavement in Pennsylvania and came to Maine in 1820. In 1847, he built his brick shop with a double entrance on Main Street in Belfast, where the Green Store is today.
Henry Chandler was born in Monmouth and ran a barber shop on Front Street in Bath for 30 years. He was remembered as a “good, honest citizen and a Christian man,” according to his obituary in 1899.
His son, Henry Jr., went on to become the valedictorian of Bath High School and the first Black student to attend Bates College. He later moved to Ocala, Florida, where he became an attorney, newspaper editor and state senator. When Republican William McKinley was elected president in 1896, he appointed Henry Jr. as the local postmaster. This caused such an uproar among the white community that he was quickly replaced by a white Republican man. As the Ocala Evening Star observed, “If Chandler had taken the office, he would have been killed or run out of town,” and local residents would have to travel elsewhere for their mail.
John Carter lived with his wife Mary above his barber shop in Augusta. He was known as an outspoken opponent of slavery and distributed Myers’ Northern Star and Freemen’s Advocate newspaper. Carter made headlines in 1833 when he stood up and challenged American Colonization Society agent Benjamin Bussey Thatcher on the society’s scheme to send African Americans to the Liberian colony in West Africa. Carter reportedly spoke “with much animation” and destroyed Bussey’s arguments, drawing enthusiastic applause.
An active member of the First Baptist Church, Carter led an effort in 1843 to take the church in a more radical direction. By that time, the church had already taken a stand against slavery with a resolution declaring it a “sin against God.” The First Baptist Church was also was active in the Baptist anti-slavery movement and voted to send Carter and four other delegates to the Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston. But Carter’s resolutions went further, seeking to ban slaveholders from taking communion and declaring it “the duty of Christians” to pray for the deliverance of enslaved people and bear “unequivocal testimony against the sin of slaveholding.”
A special committee was appointed to discuss those two resolutions, but after months of deliberation, its members failed to find agreement. Eventually the church became so bitterly divided over the resolutions that the pastor, Rev. E.G. Warren, resigned the following January, in 1844. He was replaced with the more moderate Rev. N. W. Williams, who believed slavery was wrong but didn’t think fellowship and church privileges should be denied to enslavers.
Congregants who sympathized with Carter’s position left to form the more radical abolitionist Second Baptist Church. The two churches would not reconcile their differences until 1849, five years after Carter died, at the age of 42. He was remembered by the Maine Cultivator and Hallowell Gazette as a “very intelligent and worthy colored man.”
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At the 1841 Colored Convention in Portland, delegates addressed both their own economic conditions and the broader national and international struggle for Black liberation. They declared their support for abolition and passed resolutions expressing solidarity with their enslaved brethren in the South. They called for Congress to abolish slavery in Washington D.C. and slave-holding territories.
Although a few Black families in Maine had achieved some financial success, most Black Mainers were wage earners working the lowest-paying and most precarious jobs, which left them without the means to buy or lease land. The convention proposed to a program of economic uplift by establishing an Agricultural, Mechanical, and Historical Association to help young Black men and boys become farmers and learn different trades.
The convention took aim at “Negro Seamen Acts,” Southern laws that allowed the jailing of free Black sailors from the North when they entered Southern ports, ostensibly to prevent them from provoking slave insurrections. Recognizing seafaring men as an “important class of community,” the convention created a committee to protect their welfare and advocate for their rights.
Black leaders in Maine were notably more progressive on women’s rights than Maine’s white abolitionist leaders, and they welcomed women into the convention. Miss Caroline Griffin of Gardiner, Mrs. A. Jackson of Brunswick, and Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. E. Spencer of Portland were all appointed to a committee to gather statistical information on the Black community.
The convention also addressed local businesses that treated Black Mainers like second-class citizens. They condemned stage coaches, steamboats and railroads that discriminated against Black passengers. They resolved that “it is the duty of the colored people … to patronize those of our own color in all business, in preference to those of white people in the same kind of business.”
That resolution had an exception for businesses that sold liquor. Convention attendees debated a measure calling for total abstinence from alcohol, but it didn’t pass, and it’s unlikely that all of those advocating for it practiced what they preached. A few months later, a man identifying himself as “Christophe” noted the irony of Abyssinian Church Deacon Abraham Talbot being selected to sit on the convention’s temperance committee, writing, “the last time we saw Deacon he was washing windows with New Rum! Fie, fie, Deacon!”
The delegates refused to pick a side in the factional split sundering the national anti-slavery movement — between the more radical Garrisonians and anti-Garrisonians — declaring that “there are true and tried friends to the colored people on both sides.”
Perhaps the biggest item on the agenda was a resolution stating that it was the “duty of every colored man” to vote the Liberty Party ticket, an anti-slavery third party formed in 1840. Up until that point, Portland’s Black voters were loyal Whig Party supporters, but frustration over its lack of action on the slavery question was growing.
Delegates like Rev. Lewis urged support for the Liberty Party, arguing that it would “do much, even in holding the balance of power, so as to control both the great political parties of the country.” Others, like John Hill of Portland, objected to the motion because they opposed voting in general. Whig Party stalwarts like Abraham Niles insisted there was “no prospect of the Liberty Party being the dominant party.” In the end, the Liberty Party endorsement passed overwhelmingly, by a margin of 25 to 5.
In retrospect, Niles was right that the Liberty Party would remain a marginal influence on national politics. Despite the support of Black leaders like Rev. Freeman and Lewis, the majority of Black Mainers decided to stick with the Whigs for the time being. But by the late 1840s, that would change.
Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
