Making Maine: Statehood and the War of 1812
Schedule
Thu, 16 Mar, 2023 at 06:30 pm
Location
City of Augusta | Augusta, ME
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March In-Person Presentation: “Making Maine: Statehood and the War of 1812”Today Americans obsess about disorder in the nation. Politics have become bitterly partisan, and the news media blatantly takes sides, urban elites and their rural counterparts vie for moral ascendency. There are widespread concerns about riots, coups, and what role the states and federal government have in maintaining order or quelling dissent. Some alarmists even predict the end of American democracy. My message is: fear not. The republic has witnessed all these travails before and has not only survived but generally thrived. My evidence lies in a detailed analysis of Maine’s search for a new identity separate from Massachusetts from roughly 1805 to 1820, and more especially how the travails of the War of 1812 led to statehood in 1820.
The choice of Maine may surprise many who know it as the land of quaint villages, Moxie, lobster rolls, and L.L. Bean, a political and economic backwater tucked in an obscure corner of the nation. But Maine in the early 1800s was a dynamic place, well placed for international trade with the British Empire, with a rapidly growing population. Increasingly its citizens sought independence from Massachusetts, ultimately becoming a separate state in 1820. Why did Mainers seek separation from a large, prosperous, and important state like Massachusetts? In part, its leading citizens decided that the time was ripe for them to take control. Another factor was a growing perception that Massachusetts treated Maine as a colony to be commercially exploited and its inhabitants disdained as uncouth rustics.
The War of 1812 brought this vexing issue into sharp relief, as a national government intent on waging an unpopular war confronted a populace in Massachusetts that was vigorously opposed to it. Maine, which at the time was part of Massachusetts, served as the battleground in this political struggle. Drawing on archival materials from the United States, Britain, and Canada, Smith exposes the bitter experience of Maine’s citizens during the War of 1812 as they endured multiple hardships, including starvation, burdensome taxation, smuggling, treason, and enemy occupation. War’s inherent miseries, along with a changing relationship between regional and national identities, gave rise to a statehood movement that rejected a Boston-centric worldview in favor of a broadly American identity.
KHS speaker, Joshua M. Smith, grew up on Cape Cod and coastal Maine. He holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews, Maine Maritime Academy, East Carolina University, and the University of Maine. He is author of Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820, which won the John Lyman Award in American Maritime History in 2007, and edited Voyages: Documents in American Maritime History, 1492-Present, a two-volume sourcebook in maritime history created in conjunction with the National Maritime Historical Society. He has also written a monograph with a Canadian perspective entitled Battle for the Bay: The Naval War of 1812, published by the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society. Smith lives with his family on Long Island, where he is a professor of Humanities at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, as well as Director of the American Merchant Marine Museum, both in Kings Point, New York.
The Kennebec Historical Society’s Special March presentation is free to the public (donations gladly accepted) and will take place at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 16, 2023, at the Augusta City Center, located at 16 Cony Street in Augusta. If you have any questions about the program, please call Scott Wood, executive director, at 622-7718.
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Where is it happening?
City of Augusta, 16 Cony St,Augusta,ME,United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
