ai E s e p t e m B e r 2 0 1 8 1 0 7 by dr brian p rnell Maine statehood and the o . No.23 Maine owes its state- hood to slavery. Re- member this when, in two years, we celebrate Maine’s two hundredth anniversary. In the midst of the platitudes and sales that will accompany the state’s bicen- tennial, remember the context that created Maine. Freedom for Mainers exacerbated slavery for black people, and strengthened slaveholders’ power. The Missouri Compromise en- abled Maine to become a state. In 1818, Missouri applied to become a slave state. If Missouri permitted slavery, the South would control twelve states to North’s eleven and disrupt a tenuous balance of power. Slavery was only one difference between the regions. Northerners favored strong central government, cities, high tariffs, in- frastructure, farming, manufacturing, and banking. Southerners desired weak central government (except when prosecuting fu- gitive slaves and securing land), low taxes, and profits from slavery funneled back into plantations. By the 1820s, the North’s econ- omy no longer needed slave labor, although northern shipping, fishing, farming, and fi- nance profited mightily from the South’s slave society. Few Northerners wanted to abolish slavery; most wanted slavery, and black people, to remain in the South. Maine provided a solution for the di- lemma Missouri caused. Congress declared in 1819 that Maine’s admission as a free state would be tied directly to Missouri’s entrance as a slave state. Congress should have called the compromise it passed in 1820 the Missouri-Maine Compromise. Without Maine, the balance between slave and non-slave states could not have been achieved. A rule also emerged for slavery’s future. For roughly thirty years, Missouri’s southern border marked the wall that sepa- rated slaveholding from non-slaveholding states. Maine’s independence strengthened slavery elsewhere. As slaveholders’ power grew, so did an abolitionist movement. A party opposed to slavery’s spread arose in the North. The South, foreseeing slavery’s demise, attempt- ed to dissolve the Union. Civil War ensued. Hundreds of thousands died. Much of the South smoldered in defeat. Slavery fell in blood and ash. Its death nearly cost the na- tion its life. Mainers rightly celebrate their role in keeping the nation together, especially dur- ing the Civil War. Maine takes pride in that terrible event’s creation of what Abra- ham Lincoln called the nation’s “new birth of freedom.” Mainers fought and died to save the Union. After Gettys- burg, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the professor from Bowdoin College, emerged an unlikely war hero. Han- nibal Hamlin, an anti-slavery Demo- crat from Maine, was Lincoln’s first Vice President. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the anti-slavery sensation Uncle Tom’s Cabin while living in Brunswick in 1852. Maine served as a terminus of the Underground Railroad, a series of safe houses that enabled untold num- bers of black people to escape the Unit- ed States and find freedom in Canada. In 2020, these important people and events of Maine’s history deserve hon- or and remembrance. I f not honor and pride, then honesty and integrity require that, alongside the expressions of jubilee, Mainers recognize how their independence came with a cost. After 1820, slavery spread. In the 1830s alone, 300,000 black men, wom- en, and children were forced to move south, and between 1800 and 1860, more than one million black people, slave and free, were forced to move as the South’s demand for labor in cotton and sugar fields grew. This internal migration and domestic slave trade from top: apprend.io “mainesindependence slavery elsewhere.”