To the editor:
Colin Woodard’s article “When Britain Invaded Maine” is of great interest to me as I have been researching Massachusetts’s role in the War of 1812 for nearly 50 years…
Massachusetts was violently anti-war, more so than the recent Vietnam War, and the reason was political. The opposition party had won the presidency. By 1807, relations between the U.S. and Britain were so bad that war was expected by both sides. Jefferson, however, decided on an embargo, which ruined New England’s merchant fleets and turned us against the federal government. At this time, the New England merchant fleet was nearly the equal of Britain’s and we had almost all of America’s deep-sea fishermen. Indeed, Massachusetts was so against Washington’s policies that she attempted to secede from the Union in 1814…
Yes, Maine did break away from Massachusetts because of the British occupation. This was the way to have a safe line of communication between Halifax and Quebec and the British were quite satisfied with the eastern half of Maine. The Massachusetts militias were quite reluctant to move against the British in Maine and have another fiasco in the Battle of Hampden.
You may be interested to know that one of your Mainers was a prime mover of handing the District over to Britain. According to Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, he was Thomas Adams, a violent anti-warite and selectman of Castine. In the fall of 1814, he became a member of the Massachusetts legislature representing eastern Maine. It was he who got the American plans to drive the British out into the newspapers … and saw that a copy of the newspaper was on the desk of Governor Sherbrooke of Nova Scotia.
I have turned up many incidents of the War of 1812 in this area, which have almost been forgotten. Recently, I heard that there is someone else working on “Maine and the War of 1812.” I applaud him, Mr. Woodard, and anyone else who is working on or contemplating a history of that war here. It is long overdue.
Robert Fraser