Colonial Era Mainers Opposed the Recapture of Refugee Slaves
For as long as slavery has existed, enslaved people have found ways to escape to freedom. But for just as long, slavers have striven to put them back in chains.
During the Colonial Era, when slavery was legal, ads seeking information about runaway slaves in Maine ran in Boston newspapers. General Ichabod Goodwin of Berwick — a blacksmith, tavern keeper, church deacon, sheriff, and militia commander in the French and Indian War — enslaved five African Americans and Wabanaki people in the mid 1700s. On New Year’s Day of 1748, Goodwin ran an ad in the Boston Post Boy offering a reward of four English pounds for the return of an enslaved man named Pompey. He described Pompey as “a short thick fellow” who was wearing a “homespun doubt-breast light color jacket with pewter buttons.” Also, “one of his ears was cut.”
Pompey, who allegedly fled in the company of a 14-year-old white boy, was recaptured, but escaped again. Another advertisement, placed on July 19, 1750, stated that Pompey “had on a pair of pot-hooks,” a type of iron collar with prongs extending inward that made it difficult to move or to lie down. Goodwin also ran an ad in the same paper offering a reward for the recapture of SaraJohn, a Native American enslaved worker.
In his 1956 history of Waldoboro, Jasper Bacon Stahl describes “old Ictus Benedictus Chine Port-Royal,” an African American man who lived in a secluded cabin in the woods near Slaigo Brook with his wife during the early 19th century. Stahl speculated that “Old Rial,” as he was known, had been a runaway slave in hiding, but he may just as likely have been a free man who simply wanted to avoid oppressive white society.
Isaac Davis, known as “Black Isaac” to the white residents of York, escaped enslavement and fled on foot from Eatons Neck, on New York’s Long Island, to Southern Maine in the early 1800s. He married a woman named Chloe Ward and raised 14 children in a small house a half mile west of Cape Neddick. Davis was renowned for his fiddling and would often perform at local militia trainings for three cents a dance.
After slavery was abolished in Maine in the 1780s, ads began appearing in local newspapers seeking information about runaway Black slaves and sailors from other states. One ad in the Nov. 24, 1804 edition of the Portland Evening Argus read as follows:
Ran away from on board ship Indian King, Nicholas Parker master, lying at Bath, a Negro Man Sailor, named JULIOUS LlGHTBOURN, (who called himself JULIOUS BEEN.) He had on when he ran away, a blue Jacket and Trowsers [sic]; is a stout male fellow, with a light yellowish complection [sic], about five feet ten inches high, and plays tolerable well on the Violla [sic].
An 1836 notice in the Portland Courier and Family Reader offered a one-cent reward for informations regarding the whereabouts of a 15-year-old runaway slave named Benjamin Palmer.
Maine’s Black population was always small, but refugees from slavery could find support at the Abyssinian Meeting House, a Black church in Portland’s East End, and sometimes in rural Black farming communities. Before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, it was rare for those assisting fugitive slaves to face any legal consequences. On occasion, reports of Maine abolitionists helping former slaves escape to Canada were openly published in anti-slavery newspapers.
There were laws on the books before 1850 requiring people to return runaway slaves to their enslavers, but they was not well enforced. For example, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, delegates unanimously approved language proposed by Pierce Butler and Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina stating: “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service may be due.”
As Pinckney later bragged to the South Carolina Legislature, “We have obtained a right to recover our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before.”
Abolitionists decried the pro-slavery compromises in the Constitution, including the aforementioned language regarding the recapture of escapees and the infamous clause counting slaves as three-fifth of a person for the purposes of taxation and congressional representation. They also protested that abolition of the international slave trade to the U.S. was to be delayed for 20 years, not taking effect until 1808.
At the Massachusetts Convention held to ratify the Constitution in January of 1788, delegates James Neal, of Kittery, and a tavern keeper named Samuel Thompson, from Topsham, both opposed the three-fifths clause and the continuance of slavery. Neal declared he could not support the new nation’s founding document unless the offending clause was removed.
A staunch anti-federalist, the stocky, belligerent Thompson was appalled that the proposed constitution recognized the institution of slavery and gave it political representation, wrote historian James Leamon. Thompson took direct aim at George Washington for the Founding Father’s rank hypocrisy.
“O! Washington,” Thompson roared. “What a name has he had! How he has immortalized himself! But he holds those in slavery who have as good a right to be free as he has. He is still for self; and, in my opinion, his character has sunk fifty percent.”
Historian Eric Foner notes that abolitionists feared the fugitive slave clause was intended to destroy the “asylum of Massachusetts,” of which Maine was then a part. But its language didn’t make clear whose responsibility it was to “deliver up” so-called “fugitive slaves,” and it did not include a legal procedure for their rendition.
Seeking to address that, Southern slaveholders pushed Congress to pass the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which stated that a slaver or his agent could abduct “persons escaping from the service of their masters” and bring them to a judge or “any magistrate of a county, city, or town corporate” to rule on the matter. Anyone assisting a freedom-seeker could be subject to a year in prison and a $500 fine (a fortune in those days).
Massachusetts Congressman George Thatcher, who lived in Biddeford, was one of seven representatives who voted against the bill. Thatcher hadn’t been a vocal opponent of slavery before, but the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act changed that. The following year, he moved to amend a bill requiring anyone applying for U.S. citizenship to declare that they renounced all possession of slaves; Thatcher wanted to add a line mandating applicants also pledge they “never will possess them.” The bill was defeated by a coalition of Southerners and Northern slavery sympathizers.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was also vague regarding what a slaver needed to provide as “proof to the satisfaction of the official” when asking a local magistrate for permission to take possession of fellow human being. This opened the door for what became known as the “Reverse Underground Railroad” — the kidnapping and enslavement of legally free Black Northerners by gangs of human traffickers.
In the late 1790s, Quakers began freeing their enslaved workers and even bought slaves in order to free them. However, a North Carolina law allowed the capture and sale of any former slave who had been freed without court approval, with 20 percent of the sale going to the individual who reported the illegal manumission.
In 1797, four African American men who had been freed from slavery in North Carolina petitioned Congress to overturn that state law, and they directly lobbied Thatcher on the issue. The Biddeford lawmaker came out in strong support of the former slaves, declaring, “They certainly are free people.” Thatcher said he hoped his colleagues would “never refuse to lend their aid to secure freemen in their rights against tyrannical imposition…”
But ultimately, they did, and the petition to overturn the North Carolina law was rejected by a vote of 50 to 33. Thatcher also moved to prevent the expansion of slavery into the newly acquired Mississippi territory, which appears to have been the first attempt by a U.S. Congressman to stop slavery’s westward expansion. His amendment received only 12 votes.
In October of 1839, the abolitionist Caleb Hodson of Gorham took out an ad in the Portland Advertiser accusing army lieutenant Marshall Howe of Standish of bringing a free Black man named Austin Cavy to Missouri and enslaving him there.
“What can a slaveholder want of a free colored man?” Hodson’s ad read. “We believe it is unprecedented for a slaveholder to keep free negroes as servants. Besides, do the laws of Missouri allow free blacks to settle in the State? What security can this colored man have that he will not be made a slave?”
Maine’s statehood, achieved fewer than two decades prior, had come at the cost of allowing slavery in Missouri. But history is unclear as to whether Howe did indeed bring Cavy there for the purpose of enslaving him.
Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
