USA > Maine > Biographical encyclopedia of Maine of the nineteenth century > Part 12
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Depending wholly upon his own exertions, he was compelled to teach during a por- tion of his college years, and was necessarily somewhat in debt at the end of his course. This circumstance-not usual, nor attending the course of self-supporting students alone- is not disheartening when the debt is an investment in the mind's culture, and when, as is always true in such cases, the debtor means to pay.
With resolution nowise abated, John Hubbard again applied himself to teaching, in order to discharge his obligations, and to obtain the money needed to educate himself for the medical profession, to which at this time he had finally decided to devote the labor of his life.
With this in view he taught, as principal, the Academy at Hallowell, Maine, for about two years, and afterwards taught in Virginia for abont the same length of time. Never diverted from his settled purpose by delays or obstacles, he was able, in 1820, to enter upon a thorough course of medical study at the Philadelphia Medical School, of the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania, which afforded the best opportunities for the special instuction he desired. Here he remained for two years, securing his diplomas as doctor of medicine and as fellow of the Philadelphia Medical School in April, 1822.
Immediately afterward he returned to Virginia, where as a teacher he had made many warm friends, and there, in Dinwiddie County, he commenced the practice of his pro- fession. He remained in Virginia in successful practice seven years, until 1829, when he determined to change his residence, in part from considerations of health, but chiefly because he preferred for his children the atmosphere and influences of a free State.
He always referred in terms of warm attachment to Virginia, for ten years and more the State of his adoption, and he retained till the close of his life, affectionate remembrance of the friendships he had formed during his long residence there. But the phases of his life had somewhat changed since that residence began.
In July, 1825, he had married Miss Sarah H. Barrett, of Dresden Maine. One child born of this marriage had died in Virginia ; one, a daughter, remained. The brother of Dr. Hubbard nearest his own age, to whom he was ardently attached, and whose name in after- life he never mentioned save in terms of deepest affection and with evident emotion, had also died. This brother, Thomas, had followed John to Virginia, had studied medicine, and had entered upon its practice with promise of unusual success, when in August, 1827, at the age of thirty-two years, he fell a victim to disease in Surrey County, Virginia.
The parents of husband and wife were still living in their native State, and in their
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advanced age needed the attentions of which distance and the delays of communication incident to that time deprived them.
Urged by these considerations, Dr. Hubbard decided to make his home at the North, and, before completing the change, to spend a year in the medical schools and hospitals of Philadelphia, to perfect his skill as an anatomist and surgeon, and to add increased scientific attainments in special directions to the knowledge already acquired by his years of study and practice. It was in keeping with the character of the man that he should wish to excel in his chosen profession, and should insist upon attaining the most thorough knowledge of whatever he professed to know.
His motive is best described by a sentence written at this time to his wife, who, with their young daughter, was necessarily separated from him during this additional period of advanced student life. Referring to their separation and to a book Mrs. Hubbard had recommended him to read, he writes, " My time is so occupied in medical studies as to leave me little leisure or inclination to read anything else. Lectures are now going on. I am also engaged much in the dissecting-rooms. I think my stay here will give me great advantage in the knowledge and treatment of disease, especially diseases of the chest, such as pleurisies, lung fevers, consumptions, etc. Should it be the means of enabling me to save one life which would otherwise have been lost, I shall be amply repaid, at least in feeling."
The temporary separation ended in 1830, when Dr. Hubbard took up his residence at Hallowell, Maine, a point nearly equidistant between the home of his wife's parents and his own. Here he remained for the rest of his life; constantly occupied, though in one of the quietest of small New England cities; constantly caring for others, though in a com- munity of people eminently able, as are most natives of New England, to care for them- selves. This resulted from his disposition, and not from any supineness on the part of his neighbors. His matured powers, his large experience, his vigorous intellect, and his im- mense energy of body and of mind, gave him, almost from the outset, a leading profes- sional standing, not only in his immediate neighborhood, but throughout the State. His love for his profession and his desire to use it for the greatest public good led him to respond to all calls, and his great generosity made him heedless of compensation. For a long series of years he was driving over the country distances of twenty, fifty, and seventy miles from his home, attending his own patients, or in consultation with his brothers in the profession. A part of this period was before the days of easy railroad communication, and but few of his objective points could at any time be reached by rail as rapidly as by his own conveyance. He kept four horses constantly in use making his professional calls, and upon his longer routes hired relays. This, it must be remembered, was in a country where one horse with a gig or light wagon was the traveller's equipage, and it represented, in addition to his office work, an amount of labor that must severely tax
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the strongest physique. His life was that of the country doctor, but eminently a life of action. Hence, although his fame extended, within his own profession, far beyond his State ; although he kept well abreast of the advance in medical science, and, by correspond- ence and constant examination of medical literature in its periodical and its permanent form, avoided that isolation from professional centres which is often the country doctor's fate ; although he was made member of medical societies far and near, and his opinions were quoted, and his treatment of certain forms of disease followed in places remote from his home-there remains but meagre record of his great professional work and worth. He used his science and his art to cure the sick, rather than to formulate new rules by which others might effect the cure. He waged successful war upon disease, leaving others to record for the benefit of science the history of the warfare. He spent himself to prolong the life of the sufferer, but did not chronicle the suffering of the patient to perpetuate his own fame.
So, like Homer's heroes who are forgotten while Homer's name is immortal, his- heroic acts, even if they had been chronicled by others in the literature of his profession, would soon pass into oblivion.
His most valued record was always found in the grateful hearts of those hc cured; in the confidence of many who trusted him so that the sense of healing entered their sick- rooms with his presence ; in the lasting recognition of many who, down to the latest days of his life, would have no other physician, and would not willingly believe that any save Dr. Hubbard could properly treat a dangerous case.
That he exposed himself without reserve to disease as well as to toil, is matter of coursc. That he served without regard to compensation or the ability of his patient to make it, is likewise true.
Though devoted to his profession and engrossed with its labors, Dr. Hubbard had always been an attentive observer of public affairs, and ardently attached to those principles of true government by whose aid he knew that, in this country of all others, every man might rise to the level of his merit. His convictions led him to unite with the Democratic Party in Maine, although self-interest would have counselled association with the Whigs, then in the ascendancy.
But in the opinion of Dr. Hubbard the Democratic Party kept clearest in the fore- ground, and was itself most earnestly committed to the principles vital to the Republic- absolute equality of all citizens, unchanging opposition to all preferences or privileges of class, and perfect loyalty to the Constitution of the United States. In his mind and to quote his language, the Democratic spirit was "the spirit of the Pilgrim fathers, the spirit of the people, rising against all arbitrary power, whether monarchical or aristocratic, or in whatever form ; against all factitious power and privilege, whether in the shape of moneyed or political aristocracies; the enemy of the spirit of exclusiveness ; the steadfast opponent
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of privileged orders; the constant advocate of equal personal liberty, and the equal rights of all citizens before the laws."
The just limitation of this spirit of liberty he found in a strict, honest, and fair con- struction of the Constitution of the United States, by the application of sound common- sense to its several provisions, without any technical refinements or sublimated moral spec- ulations ; conceding to every State, slave or free, the rights which she possessed, either in territory or otherwise, as an independent sovereignty, before entering into the Union, and which were not surrendered by the Constitution ; and securing to every State the grants of power or privilege awarded to it by the Constitution. Such he believed to be the spirit that quickened and the covenants that controlled the Democratic Party, and with this belief he felt that only the Democratic Party could preserve the Constitution, and at the same time maintain the freedom of the people.
In 1843, quite unexpectedly to himself, Dr. Hubbard was elected to the Senate of Maine, though his own was one of the strongest Whig districts. Without previous experi- ence as a legislator or practice as a debater, he immediately took a prominent position in the Senate, and at once applied himself with his accustomed energy to the business before him, sparing no pains to obtain a thorough knowledge of the varied matters which came up for discussion. He seldom addressed the Senate at length, but when he participated in the debates he always commanded attention by a compact and logical presentation of the question at issue, and by a frank and independent expression of his views.
During the session of 1843 an earnest effort was made to procure the passage through the Maine Legislature of an Act obstructing the execution of what was known as the Fugi- tive Slave Law of 1793. Petitions for such an Act were presented and the Act was formulated. The leaders of the Whig Party generally favored this effort, and many Democrats were also inclined to promote it. Dr. Hubbard was appointed chairman of a joint Select Committee to whom petitions praying for these enactments were referred. While then, as always, an enemy to slavery, he considered that by the terms of the Con- stitution and the acts of Congress passed in the early days of the Republic, it had been accepted as one of the necessary conditions of a union of the States, and that it could only be removed by a process of gradual emancipation and with the concurrence of the slave-holding States. He deemed that to pass the act and grant the petitions would involve a violation of the solemn compact embraced in the Constitution of the United States ; that such a course could not be expedient, because it could not be honorable, and that it was fraught with imminent danger to the peace of the country. He labored suc- cessfully to impress these views upon his associates, and a majority of them agreed in a concise and well-reasoned report drawn up by him and presented to the Senate, in which were strongly stated the evil results likely to follow such a policy on the part of the Free
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States. This report was adopted by the Senate, which also rejected the act in question, which had passed the House of Representatives by a decided majority.
It was largely due to the influence of Mr. Hubbard that the State of Maine at this early period refused to put upon her Senate-book an act which would be construed as a determination to violate her obligations under the Constitution of the United States, and was able consistently to insist upon the inviolability of the federal compact and the preser- vation of the Union, while abating nothing in her opposition to the system of involuntary servitude. Her forbearing devotion to the Constitution under the stress of great provoca- tion added force to her indignant protest in later years against the Kansas outrages and the Lecompton constitution.
The great question, of which these resolutions of 1843 exhibit one phase, has passed into history, and the passions it excited are allayed. This is not the occasion to follow in detail its origin and growth. But it must be remembered that in 1843 the differences be- tween North and South had not been recognized as an "irrepressible conflict." It was the prevailing sentiment in the North that slavery was a wrong to humanity and should cease. Of the great number who held this opinion, some deemed the wrong so great that no consid- derations arising from the relations of the States under the Federal Constiution should be allowed to delay its immediate suppression. Others held that the Constitution was a sol- emn agreement, binding every State which received its benefits to comply with its terms ; that the Northern States could not honorably violate any one of its provisions, and that to keep their compact was a stronger obligation than to contend for an instant emancipation of the slaves. They believed, too, that emancipation was sure to arrive in due time by peaceful methods.
The opinion of these was voiced by Mr. Jefferson, when in 1820 he wrote to John Holmes, then a Senator from Maine, his memorable letter at the time Missouri was admitted to the Union as a Slave State, under the compromise which fixed the parallel of 36° 30' as the line of demarcation between freedom and slavery.
" I had for a long time ceased," he wrote, "to read newspapers or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for a moment. But this is a reprieve only; not a final sentence. A geographical line coinciding with a marked prin- ciple, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated, and every new irritation will make it deeper and deeper. I can say with conscious truth, that there is not a man.on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a baga- telle which would not cost me a second thought, if in that way a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually and with due sacrifices I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-
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preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffu- sion over a greater surface would make them individually happier and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation by dividing the burthen on a greater number of coadjutors." . . .
"I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves and of treason against the hopes of the world."
Such was the spirit of the report, which reasoned that the act prayed for was contrary to that provision of the Constitution which declares that persons held to service in one State escaping into another shall not be discharged from such service, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service may be due, and that therefore the request to pass the act was in effect a proposal to violate the Constitution and to dissolve the Union.
But Mr. Hubbard reprobated the claim, asserted by the advocates of slavery, that the institution was in itself right," and he was as strenuous to exact from the Southern States a performance of their constitutional duties as to insist upon the duties of his own section. With this intent he drew up and advocated resolutions which passed both branches of the Legislature, declaring the right of every citizen, colored or not colored, to the protection of the Constitution in his person and property ; protesting against the existence of any laws, in any of the States or Territories, which subjected free colored citizens to the liability of being arrested and imprisoned, and sold into slavery for the costs of arrest and imprison- ment ; and instructing the Senators and requesting the Representatives of his State to use their influence for the repeal of such laws.
In 1849 Dr. Hubbard was nominated by the Democratic Party as its candidate for Governor of the State, and was elected to that office over the opposing candidates, Elijah L. Hamlin, the nominee of the Whigs, and George F. Talbot of the Free-Soil Party, which then controlled about one tenth of the entire vote of the State.
In 1850 Governor Hubbard was again put in nomination by his party and was elected for a second term ; the opposing candidates being William G. Crosby, Whig, and George F. Talbot, Free-Soil. At this time the Maine Legislature commenced its sessions in May, but an act approved August 21, 1850 (Chapter 274, Laws of 1850), provided for submit- ting to the people a constitutional amendment fixing the annual meeting on the first Wednesday of January, and also provided that the Governor and other State officers elected for the political year commencing on the second Wednesday of May, 1851, should hold their offices till the first Wednesday of January, 1853.
* During his long residence in the South he had never owned or been willing to own a slave.
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By force of the vote adopting this amendment, Governor Hubbard's term of office was extended from May, 1852, to January, 1853.
Among the measures to which he early directed the attention of the Legislature were the establishment of a reform school for juvenile offenders, distinct from the State prison, and from contact with the older class of criminals; the establishment of an agricultural school ; provision for a college or seminary for the education of females in the more advanced departments of study; suitable endowment for academies and colleges, and a proper system for the instruction of teachers.
He laid especial stress upon the subject of education, to which he always assigned that first importance due to it in a country where the will of the majority makes the law ; and where, if the majority be ignorant or vicious, the laws must take a similar complexion.
"Knowledge," he said, "under our form of government, is the foundation upon which our institutions rest : it is the vital fluid which imparts health and strength to our social system."
Perhaps the subject which he urged with most constant earnestness was the acquisition by the State of the public lands within its own limits, the encouragement of settlers, and the development of the northeastern portion of the State.
Upon the separation of Maine from Massachusetts in 1820 the parent State owned a large part of the public lands within the limits of Maine, and the development and prosperity of the new State depended in no small degree upon their management.
While their occupancy for permanent settlement and as homesteads was manifestly in the interest of Maine, it had been found that more immediate and larger returns in money could be secured by selling the timber or leasing the lands for lumbering operations.
Thus both States had been drawn into the latter policy. Large tracts of land were being stripped of their timber, and made comparatively valueless; and the progress of permanent settlement was also obstructed by the exclusion of small holders resulting from the action of large proprietors.
It also appeared that the State of Massachusetts, by adopting a system of leases for long terms, and by making conditional sales of her interests, reaped the benefit of absolute sales, yet, by retaining the actual title to the lands, in effect extended to her lessees and purchasers an exemption from taxation which was intended only for herself.
It appeared, too, that neither the State nor the proprietors claiming under her, gave equitable proportion of aid to the construction of roads requisite for the occupancy of the country.
Governor Hubbard presented these matters to the Legislature, and pointed out in strong terms that Maine was bound, in justice to her citizens and from a proper regard to her own independence, to initiate a different policy.
In consequence of his suggestion, the Legislature on the 3d of April, 1852, passed a
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resolve authorizing him to take such measures as he might deem expedient to lay before the authorities of Massachusetts, the grievances of which Maine complained in regard to the management and disposition of the lands owned by that State in common and in severalty in Maine, and to ask such action as the interest of the State demanded.
Under this resolution Governor Hubbard, through the agency of Mr. Anson P. Morrill, the land agent of Maine, and Mr. John A. Poor, entered into negotiations with the State of Massachusetts, which finally resulted in the sale by that State to the State of Maine of all her interests in the public lands within the limits of the latter, upon terms substantially made by the purchaser.
The purchase was not consummated until after the expiration of Governor Hubbard's term of office, but it was the completion of a policy initiated and earnestly advocated by him, and to his efforts is due in great measure the fact that Maine became complete mis- tress of her own territory, and was enabled to pursue a policy suited to its development, and in harmony with the interests of her citizens who wished to build up homes within her borders.
As a part of the same general policy, Governor Hubbard urged that the advance cash payment then required from settlers on the public lands be remitted, and recommended the law, soon afterward adopted, which enabled every bona-fide settler to acquire a home without making any other payment than a reasonable amount of labor in constructing roads for the use of his own neighborhood.
Governor Hubbard also urged that proper encouragement be given to the construc- tion of a railroad from Bangor to the eastern line of the State, making direct connection with the British Provinces, and a railroad into the great northeastern section of the State, known as the Aroostook, to secure the growth of that fertile region and bring to the markets of the State its products, previously diverted to the neighboring Province of New Brunswick.
The result of his efforts was to give a marked impetus to the settlement of the public lands and the development of the richest agricultural portion of the State.
The subject of State action which most absorbed public attention during Governor Hubbard's Administration was temperance legislation, and he signed, as Governor, the first act known as "the Maine Law."
The subject of this law had for several years occupied a prominent place in the public mind, and had been earnestly discussed. Neither of the leading political parties in the State was committed in its favor. Individual sentiment among members of those parties was divided, and indeed the opinion prevailed among the leaders of both parties that the question was not of a political character, and should not be made a party issue.
In 1846, "An Act to restrict the sale of intoxicating drinks" had been passed and approved. This was followed, near the end of the session of 1849, by the passage, through
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