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Publication Date

4-1-2021

Document Type

Article

First Page

26

Last Page

44

Abstract

In 1837 a trading sloop arrived home in Thomaston, Maine, from Savannah, Georgia, carrying a fugitive slave, Atticus, who had hidden on board. In violation of federal law, Atticus remained and worked in Maine until he was betrayed and his owner, in pursuit, reclaimed his “stolen property.” When Georgia’s governor demanded the captain and first-mate stand trial in Georgia for theft, the case drew national attention and grew into a fierce political and legal fight that reveals the competing interests and contradictory attitudes Mainers held toward race and slavery. Like most of the North, Maine owed its economic success to the South’s slavery-based economy and robust North-South trade. While Southern sympathies and deep-seated racism entrenched themselves in Maine, so did antislavery sentiment and a strong interracial abolitionist movement, described in private diaries, contemporary journals, local histories, as we l as minutes for church and town meetings. A rare example of Maine’s Underground Railroad accounts for which documentation exists through letters, court records, and newspaper coverage, Atticus’s es cape questions whether Maine’s coastal trading routes were used more frequently in self-emancipation than currently substantiated. Also considered is Maine’s proximity to Canada and the role borderland culture played in race relations and abolitionist activism. The story of Atticus reflects as much about the inherent contradictions within Maine’s antebellum past as it does about the myths it used to reinvent its past after the Civil War.

Eileen Kurtis-Kleinman is a Maine-based freelance writer, whose works include Life on an African Slave Ship (Lucent Books, 2001).

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