Here’s one I remember growing up in western Maine. A local man wakes up with a jolt. His wife, seeing he is clearly shaken, asks him what’s wrong. “Had a terrible nightmare,” he explains. “My own car had Massachusetts plates on it.”
Folks with out of state plates sometimes get a hard time when traveling the coast of Maine, but our Bay State neighbors seem the object of special scorn, their tags triggering the kind of resentment that a car from New Hampshire or New Brunswick never could. There’s even a band that plays clubs down here in Portland called The Massholes, after a common endearment in the Maine vernacular, which has no equivalent term to describe Vermonters, Texans, or Ohioans.
So how did Massachusetts earn such a special place in some Mainers’ hearts? The answer, like so many things, lies in our complicated historical relationship with our Patriot cousins. It’s one with some bizarre twists and turns including, unique in the American experience, the annexation and rule of one English colony by another.
In the beginning, all of New England was ruled from Maine. Or at least, that’s how it was on paper and in the fanciful mind of New England’s first English ruler, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a charming knight with lordly aspirations.
As knights went, Gorges was a Johnny-Come-Lately, a commoner who’d earned his noble title on the battlefield. But Gorges wanted what some of the old Counts and Barons had: a vast personal domain of rambling estates populated by pliant tenant farmers. Unfortunately, by the time Gorges was knighted in the late 16th century, England’s land was already spoken for. What was a poor peer to do?
The discovery of the New World provided Gorges with a solution. Gorges called in some favors and in 1606 got King James to give him a present: a royal charter for all of New England which gave Gorges the right to rule the entire region as a private estate, inhabitants included! Gorges never laid eyes on his vast new domain, but he spent years developing grandiose plans for a feudal empire of counties, baronies and manorial estates, all ruled from the grand city of Gorgeana (now York), in his “Province of Maine.”
But his plans went awry. His first colonists got lost at sea and wound up in Spanish captivity. His second band spent a difficult winter near Popham Beach before building North America’s first seagoing ship, climbing aboard, and fleeing the continent and its disgruntled native inhabitants. Gorges named James Smith “Admiral of New England” and twice outfitted him with ships and colonists; the first expedition turned back after encountering a violent storm, the second was captured by Spanish corsairs in the Gulf of Maine.
In 1640, more than three decades into Gorges’ project, his 22-year old cousin, Thomas Gorges, arrived in York, from which he was to run New England as Deputy Governor. Instead of a teeming imperial city, the young college graduate found a rugged fishing village of less than 100 souls living in drafty houses built on the remains of an Indian village. Maine, he wrote, was a “receptacle of viscous men” and a “garden of vice.” He found winter “very tedious” and the summer mosquitoes to be “exceeding great trouble to man and beast.” Ferdinando responded with orders to make “Gorgeana” an Anglican cathedral city.
But something was happening out in the “provinces” of Gorges domain. Through an oversight, Gorges’ partners had granted a group of religious radicals the right to settle around Massachusetts Bay. These Puritans – enemies of Gorges, the King and the Anglican church alike – had the harebrained idea that they on a divine mission to build a Calvinist utopia in the New England wilderness. Unfortunately for Gorges, they came across the ocean in droves. In the early 1630s, Maine had an English population of 700, while Massachusetts swelled to more than 7,000.
A God-fearing folk, the Puritans didn’t think much of Maine’s hardscrabble settlers, whose toleration of Baptists, Quakers and other religious deviants was seen as evidence of Satan’s influence. Worse yet, Mainers maintained decent relations with the natives, whom the Puritans regarded as Satan’s children. Mainers had to be saved by any means necessary.
The Puritans’ chance came in 1649, when their Calvinist allies back in England trounced the King’s armies in the English Civil War, lopping off the monarch’s head. Massachusetts seized this opportunity to annex Maine’s towns, one by one, into the Bible Commonwealth. By 1658, Maine had become a colony of a colony.
And so it remained for nearly 200 years, during which Boston capitalists, merchants and land speculators had their way with the “Eastern Territories.” Maine didn’t gain its independence until after the War of 1812, when British forces occupied the eastern half of Maine but Boston refused to lift a finger to oust them. “Our brethren in the West [view] us as an inferior race,” a leading Portland paper complained after the war, likening Maine’s position to “colonial vassalage.”
Mainers soon voted for statehood, and in 1820 Maine became a separate state. That’s 183 years ago – a long time, but not quite long enough, perhaps, for a culture to completely forget its colonial past.
Colin Woodard is finishing his second book, a cultural history of coastal Maine, which will be published by Viking in 2004. He lives in Portland and maintains a website at www.colinwoodard.com.