HOME: The Story of Maine "Land of Liberty"

the following program is a production of the main public broadcasting network very few people lived in maine on the eve of the revolution perhaps 30 000 however the settler population exploded during and immediately after the revolution so that by 1790 there were probably a hundred 000 people living in maine and then it would double again in the next decade fire people believe that in fighting for the revolution that as the victors of that revolution they ought to be able to obtain frontier land and they especially thought so in maine because most of the frontier land had belonged to people who had been loyalists who had sided with the king and the assumption was that these lands then were all confiscated by the state of massachusetts but it turned out that that assumption was mistaken maine's rich forest lands were disputed territory after the revolution hoping to establish family farms and free themselves from wage labor settlers poured into maine's isolated backcountry region they cleared the rocky soil and dense forests only to find that they were expected to pay for the land they had claimed after all its great american belief that there were free homesteads in the frontier but this wasn't the case especially in the generation the american revolution and that's because these governments needed money fast and most of your common farmers had very little money even if they might have a decent farm they couldn't turn that readily into cash and the only people who could raise cash quickly were these merchants wealthy lawyers and other capitalists who could raise the money and could buy this land in massive amounts for very low price per acre but it added up when you were selling thousands and thousands of acres the new settlers and property owners clashed over land rights in a conflict that changed the political landscape of maine the land of liberty next on home the story of maine production of home the story of maine on mpbn was made in partnership with the maine state museum major funding was provided by the institute of museum and library services a federal agency committed to fostering innovation leadership and a lifetime of learning additional funding was provided by elsie viles henry knox rose from obscurity to become a revolutionary war hero and the country's first secretary of war known to be charming and gregarious knox moved easily into america's new elite ruling class as a member of george washington's cabinet he helped to shape the new nation henry knox is a bookseller in boston on the eve of the revolution he enters a fortunate marriage with the daughter of a very wealthy family her name is lucy flucker the revolution comes along and henry knox who has read the military books in his collection is in a unique position to become the commander of the artillery of the continental army because very few potential officers of this army had any kind of technical expertise and even though he has no practical experience book learning will go a long ways when nobody else has any other expertise he was working on fortifications at roxbury and george washington in 1775 had come through and was inspecting what was in roxbury and was so impressed that he wanted to meet the young man that was involved with it and that directly led to knox being put in charge of the artillery for the revolutionary army knox was commissioned a colonel and his political rise was underway but this was a mixed blessing for lucy and henry thomas and hannah flucker lucy's parents were forced to flee the country because they were loyal to the british crown they never returned to america and lucy never saw her family again as loyalists the fluckers left all of their belongings and a substantial amount of land when they fled you couldn't hold land in this country if you were a loyalist if you were loyal to the british government and so that meant that it was forfeited now of course it was forfeited to the government so it went to the massachusetts government henry knox is in a position to save the family lance his in-laws the fluckers and their connections the winslows and the waldos were all loyalists and so this property should have been confiscated by massachusetts but henry knox pulled strings with the legislature and the governor of massachusetts and saw to it that that land was not confiscated and then saw to it that these other loyalist heirs to the waldo patent would transfer ownership to him having no independent income of his own henry knox saw his main lands as the way to make his fortune his plan was to sell back country lots to finance a number of business ventures in maine so knox left his position as secretary of war under george washington and built a house in thomaston in 1795. there wasn't much of a community here at that time i believe it was about 300 people and he brought at least that many with him in order to get places built to build this mansion he saw himself as coming up here and really getting the development of maine started he was involved in lime quarrying brick making shipbuilding logging he built canals to facilitate transportation he built a lot of roads the road from belfast to augusta happened because of henry knox thomaston and the surrounding area grew rapidly because of knox's many businesses and the people he hired to work in them the back country population in the interior also grew going from about 30 000 in the 1770s to almost 100 000 in 1790 most of this settlement was in lincoln knox and hancock counties many of these new settlers were veterans who felt that participation in the war entitled them to cheap or even free land soldiers of the american revolution the continental army were promised land by the federal government but that land turned out to be in ohio which was very distant and very expensive to get to for the poor people of new england who served in the continental army these soldiers found that all the promises made to them had been broken then they had to decide what were they going to do how were they going to support themselves how are they going to support their families and the answer that many of them came up with was they were going to move to the frontier and the closest and the cheapest frontier for these people living along the coast of massachusetts was to go down east it was to go to maine because you could get there pretty quickly you could get there in a day or two by boat and then go up the rivers and you could find relatively decent farmland by new england standards and you could get to work then cutting the timber which you could sell to make some money and in hopes of clearing enough of the forest to make a farm the waldo lands that henry knox acquired were over six hundred thousand acres that stretched from broad bay at waldenboro and over into the area that is bangor today these were the very lands that the settlers assumed were free to them for their support in the revolution they viewed land as the way of obtaining independence and liberty as a wage laborer which many of them would have become if they have stayed in their own communities you always are beholden to somebody even if the job is good and if you have the land you can grow the crops you can take care of your family independently to the degree that one can in a subsistence world you're free nobody owns you and and so land and liberty are completely interconnected but the land was not free after the revolution knox and the other proprietors quickly sent surveyors into the back country to map and inventory the region these agents also acted as bill collectors for the proprietors settlers were shocked to learn that they were expected to pay for the lands and so they assumed that after the american revolution that the new political order established by that revolution would protect the independence of farming people and what they assumed then was that they would have access to free frontier land or virtually free frontier land that the people who would move into the forest and would apply their labor to clear that forest and develop farms which was great back-breaking work that those people ought to be able to own that property without paying anybody else for it it's a life of unrelenting work where it's you and nature and god in a confrontation can you tame this wilderness such that you will literally survive it's a very rough life it's not only the physical labor it's the human tragedy of losing children accidentally to disease in an isolated context where you get no health and no doctors to know there's no way of assistance you're out there on your own and it's in that kind of subsistence community then that when religious revival comes through and converts one of your neighbors you'll pay attention with the lord jesus christ your brother the divide between settlers and proprietors like henry knox deepened with a religious movement called the new light stir your sins and join the lord in paradise because the settlers were too poor to pay a congregational minister evangelical religion as preached by methodists baptists and universalists spread into the new settlements so they've left behind the culture of massachusetts in which almost every town had a tax supported congregational minister who was college educated who preached a relatively rationalist version of the gospel and who preached social order and reverence for the existing social order in the existing rulers so what happened is the congregationalism though it was the state religion of maine did not expand into the new settlements and barely expanded up the rivers in the river valleys so that it left a religious vacuum so you have new people in a religious culture but but now unmoored from the traditional religion of congregationalism and they were a ripe audience for these new evangelists of the new sectarian religions that came in they are drawn to these preachers who are like themselves they are fellow settlers they are fellow farmers but they are people who have done some reading in the bible who have had an emotional experience of the new birth who organize themselves then into prayer groups and they are the evangelicals and it is these evangelicals that will organize most of the churches in the frontier proprietors and community leaders like henry knox relied on the church to maintain social order since the congregational church was supported by taxes it worked with government to reinforce the social hierarchy and if there's no congregational church in town to link you back to the center back to the coastal elite that such a town would develop its own alternative set of what political priorities were what good government looked like what the proper governance of the local community was and what the political attitude toward the establishment would be well the congregationalists are insisting that the existing social order which is an unequal one in which some people have more power and more wealth than others that that's essentially mandated by god and that people should accept it but these visionary evangelicals say no that god intends for people to be equal and they have learned this by talking directly to god and they say that this kind of experience is trumps anything that a congregational minister can say i have seen the light and i have talked with my brother jesus so just by reaching the level of organized religious difference they are making a profound statement of cultural resistance and the step from religious resistance and dissent to political and cultural resistance and dissent is a very small one now they didn't actively engage in political dissent until the elite disturbed them by trying to collect rents of dubious uh a title by trying to extend the religious establishment and tax them for a religion that they didn't believe in when those things started to happen the folks in the in the in the new settlements activated and got very extreme and started mobbing proprietors breaking into their homes and threatening them driving congregationalist missionaries out of town henry knox and the other proprietors were shocked by this descent they found it difficult to enforce payment for their lands because settlers banned it together and refused to pay in order to defend their possession of the lands they organized together and they organized secret militia companies initially they called themselves liberty men later especially after 1800 they would call themselves white indians because they would dress up as indians and they would arm themselves and they would try to terrify anybody who came to try to evict them from their farms or to serve legal papers on them or anybody who came as a surveyor for these proprietors but the goal of all of this is to try to scare people away without killing them they made crude attempts to disguise themselves as indians blacking their faces and donning costumes acts of intimidation and terror spread throughout the backcountry lands surveyors and land agents were stopped and threatened proprietors received threats against their lives and homes barns were burned and property was destroyed samuel thatcher a local government official woke one morning to a chilling site liberty men had left an open coffin on his doorstep so they insist that they are doing the public a service by resisting the henry noxus that they are defending the revolution from being corrupted by these powerful men who have in the opinion of these settlers have hijacked the revolution for their own purposes henry knox certainly doesn't think of himself as a villain he thinks of himself who has the best interests of these settlers at heart and his belief is that the lazy and the immoral will be weaned out that they will move off elsewhere and that only those who work hard enough to meet his purchase price will stay so the community will be bettered by his presence and by his control and he is also providing certain community benefits he does subsidize a minister he does contribute toward the construction of a church in thomaston he does set up businesses in thomaston he becomes an employer there so he sees himself as being a great community benefit he was really well liked close to town and probably it was simply because of the force of his personality the people in town knew him he was very nice to the people in town but as you get farther away and the only contact that these people really have with him is this dispute over land i can imagine he probably wasn't the most popular person when she got away from the local area because the settlers had little luck in solving their dispute with the proprietors they turned to the government to settle the situation but until 1820 maine was a part of massachusetts and representatives to government had to travel to boston for legislative meetings most of the new towns were too poor to send a representative and many people still lived in unincorporated areas with no representation at all so while they tried to use the system by petitioning the general court to intervene the settlers made very little progress by using legitimate channels the settlers would frequently send petitions to the state legislature asking for the legislators to interfere to provide them with cheap or free lands or at least some mechanism for resolving this conflict but they're frustrated in that often they are sending petitions but they don't themselves have elected representatives in the legislature either because their settlements have not yet been incorporated as towns or because they are too poor to afford the cost of sending a representative off to the massachusetts legislature many people in the rural areas of america felt isolated from government local issues had a much more immediate impact on lives in the backcountry communities and citizens there regarded the new government in much the same way they had the british monarchy out of touch and far away and they felt therefore that real government should be present and not distant they deeply distrusted any authority that was at any great distance and that meant falmouth let alone philadelphia or boston they didn't want a central government they wanted local government and the settlers wanted a local government that would address their concerns over land and end taxation for churches they didn't attend more and more people began to vote and by 1805 maine's political landscape had changed the settlers on knox's lands showed their dissatisfaction at the polls and knox lost his seat in the massachusetts legislature for henry knox he is quite shocked by his political setback and for the community to withdraw that deference in this very public fashion is very wounding to henry knox this turning point signaled a change on the main frontier increasingly the settlers were beginning to challenge the old political order politicians were beginning to respond to the settlers demands and the conflict over in 1808 when government officials passed the betterment act one of the ways that the controversy gets settled is by a compromised bit of legislation authored by william king called the betterment act which said that when a proprietor sued a settler and obtained a judgment that the jury would then set a price for the value of the improvements on that farm and set a price for the wild land value of the farm and the proprietor would then have a choice he could either sell the land at the wild land value or he could buy out the settler by paying the price of the improvements that he had made on that land but henry knox never lived to see the passage of the betterment act already experiencing financial problems the negotiated prices would have been devastating for him despite all the money he's made selling all of these farms to settlers he's been spending it with wild abandon he's built this big white elephant of a mansion he lives in the grand style he spends money like there is no tomorrow well tomorrow arrives about the same time that he loses his legislative seat he is essentially bankrupt and when he dies shortly thereafter it turns out that his debts exceed his assets well like most of the founding fathers he was trying to keep up appearances and trying to keep up with the french and the english but really truly they didn't have a whole lot of substance to to back that up enormous debt forced knox to surrender his large tracts of wilderness lands to his creditors from whom he had borrowed thousands of dollars to finance his lifestyle though he had made steady efforts towards solvency when he died in 1806 his wife and children were left with a mammoth debt and no way to pay it off he and lucy the family they were going to the ebenezer alden house and union where they had a dinner and henry knox supposedly swallowed this chicken bone and a sliver of it and it lodged in his intestines and caused infection and he died a very untimely and painful death announcements of knox's death appeared in newspapers throughout new england huge crowds gathered at his funeral and three military companies performed ceremonies he was celebrated as a hero of the revolution knox and his compatriots had worked to create a country they could control but a grassroots revolution had occurred on the main frontier the propriety of challenging government because it's not providing rights becomes what amounts to a new philosophy of government in the back settlements so that what you have on the frontier is the emergence of something new and which i would would not hesitate to say is distinctively american at least american revolutionary it's what's new about about the revolutionary generation and it is aggressively democratic for more information about the conflict over maine lands plus resources for educators visit our website at mpbn.net production of home the story of maine on mpbn was made in partnership with the maine state museum major funding was provided by the institute of museum and library services a federal agency committed to fostering innovation leadership and a lifetime of learning additional funding was provided by elsie viles so you

Channel: Maine Public

Views: 41,232

Rating: 4.884892 out of 5

Keywords: maine public, maine public broadcasting, maine public television, home: the story of maine, land of liberty

Id: YnTFRxfwcaU

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2015