USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 2 > Part 10
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Meeting of May 9, 1812. "Voted that Isaac Reed be agent on behalf of the town to carry on prosecution against John Seidens- berger, Jr., on complaint of Polly Gellard for bastardy ... unless he give satisfactory security to the selectmen for the child."
Meeting of July 5, 1822. "Voted the selectmen secure the release of Charles Feyler, Jr., from gaol, provided the Mink girl release all claim on the town for cost against said Charles, and provided also his father pays all expenses for the support of said Charles in prison up to the time he is discharged."
In my possession is a bond, given by N -- L -- as principal and his father, J -- L -- , as surety to the town of Waldoboro for "the true and just sum of three hundred dollars."
The conditions of this obligation are such that whereas the above bounden N L_ ___ has been charged by M. H. of said Waldoboro, single woman, on her voluntary examination on oath, with being the father of the child of which she has been delivered and which was born a bastard, and whereas said child may hereafter become chargeable to said Inhabitants of Waldoboro by law as a poor person.
This bond was given in order that the town might not at any time thereafter be chargeable for the support and maintenance of the child. Thus it was that the problem of illegitimacy was met by the local folk a hundred and more years ago.
The town was equally swift and zealous in handling the prob- lem of pauperism, in fact, all towns were. If there was the slightest basis for shifting the expense of maintenance to some other town or to the state this was promptly done. The few surviving docu-
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
mentary remnants of the old files of selectmen contain corres- pondence with other towns charging them with the expense of a poor person and requesting his or her removal. In cases where one town incurred expense in such cases for another, there was full cooperation in holding such costs to a minimum. From an account rendered to the town of Waldoboro by the town of Scituate the following illustrative items are excerpted:
To boarding Hannah Martin from the 13th of
March 1814 to the 14th of September 1814 inclusive
she being sick the whole time at $1.50 pr. week. $37.50
To Dr. David Bailey's bill in her last sickness
5.50
To a coffin for sd Hannah
2.50
To digging her grave
1.50
To extra expense of the funeral 1.50
To interest on the above sum .83
Scituate, May 9th. 181519
$49.33
In the early years care of the poor was vested in the over- worked selectmen who cared for the old, the sick, and the helpless as cheaply as possible. In the case of paupers, if they were able to do any work, they were struck off at auction to the lowest bidder, and in the kitchen or field a considerable amount of work was secured from them to the obvious profit of their hosts. Such poor were highly desirable and were welcome in the best homes. Even Isaac G. Reed, the foremost citizen of the town at this time, took a pauper to board under these conditions. The following items excerpted from the Clerk's records afford a rather clear picture of the handling of the problem of the poor in these days:
May 4, 1801. The selectmen report that Bertram Gross proposes to take proper care of Henry Lehr both in sickness and health and find him in sufficant and comfortable food and lodging for $1.33 1.m. a week. Voted to accept the foregoing proposal.
Nov. 14, 1801. Voted to bind out Elizabeth Mink's child to Jacob Ried for 66 cents per week. In case said Elizabeth wants assistance Henry Demuth to take her for 42 cents per wk.
Oct. 10, 1803. Voted that Charles Boardman receive $2.00 per wk. for supporting Mary Braddock and her two children, as long as he shall keep them.
May 12, 1810. Voted $200.00 for the support of the poor.
May 9, 1812. Voted that Eliza Maddoc, now a town pauper, her child be sold at vendue to the lowest bidder and furnished with all necessaries except doctor bills. ... Struck off to Isaac G. Reed at 75 cents per week for one year.
At the same time John Benner was bid off in a similar fashion to Philip Newbit for $1.29 per week for one year. In 1815 John
19Original account in my possession.
79
Annals of the Early Century
Smouse boarded John Benner for $1.16 a week, and "Jacob Wins- low to keep Philip Handel for $1.00 per wk."
At the meeting of May 14, 1821, the selectmen were relieved of their duty of looking after the town's needy, and Overseers of the Poor were elected. The first Board of Overseers was made up of Jacob Ludwig, Jr., Henry Flagg, and Charles Miller.
The ruthless and unintelligent manner in which the early set- tlers had dealt with their game resources had resulted in a greatly thinned out wildlife population. Only the wily wolf had survived in sufficient numbers to make the farmers dread the destructiveness of his onslaughts. Around 1808 they had become so troublesome, particularly in the wooded tract between Waldoboro and Warren and Cushing, that in this year concerted action was taken for their destruction by officers of the interested towns. A force of men was raised to sweep the whole tract. They assembled and marched within hailing distance of each other down to the coast to the ex- tremity of Friendship, where some wolves were seen and fired on but none killed. This campaign was followed up with such vigilant hunting during the winter that the wolves abandoned their favor- ite haunt and did not return to it until 1815. They again became so destructive that a conference was held by the selectmen of Cushing, Friendship, Waldoboro, and Warren, at which they agreed to pay a bounty of $40.00 to any inhabitant destroying a wolf in any of these towns.
From this time on a relentless war was waged against the wolves which culminated in a grand finale in 1820. This occurred in the boyhood of F. R. Sibley and there follows his account:
About the year 1820 late in the fall a general wolf hunt was an- nounced through several towns in the vicinity. At the appointed time there was as large a gathering as at a military muster. With guns, dogs and ammunition, the men from several towns met at Trowbridge's Tavern [Aunt Lydia's] on the Waldoboro and Warren post road. Joseph Farley Esquire of Waldoboro was chosen headman. As his health was poor, instead of going on foot, he rode and gave directions, and he entered with great zeal upon the expedition. Nathaniel Robbins Esquire of Union took a position about half way between the St. Georges and Medomak rivers. The men stretched out on his right and left, each man in sight of his right and left hand man, till the cordon extended from river to river. Robbins had a surveyor with him. The orders to him were to run a south course till he struck the salt water. As it was afternoon it was agreed to camp on the road between the Narrows at Thomaston and Broad Bay on the Medomak. There along the whole route - a distance probably of eight miles, fires were built so near to each other that a wolf could not pass between them without being seen; and, what would frighten the wolves back, a tumultuous noise of firing and hooting was kept up all night. The next day the party went through to the salt water and even down to the clam beds. Not a wolf was seen by any of them.20
2F. R. Sibley was the author of a History of Union.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
Mr. Sibley's narrative fails to mention the fact that the wolf has as good mental equipment as a dog; that he can hear and scent a man for a quarter of a mile; that he is on the whole a most canny animal. The Union historian also fails to tell us how much New England rum was consumed around the campfires on that cool night "late in the fall."
These opening decades of the century bore witness to many changes in fashions, ways of doing business, social organization, and modes of living. On the fringe of the village and in the back- districts there was still poverty. Life was still hard and its general character little changed from that of an older day. In the area around the head of tide, industry, shipbuilding, and trade were under way. Men had turned away from the life of the farm, and capital was accumulating in the hands of the more enterprising and powerful. Men of education and intelligence, graduates of Bowdoin, Harvard, and Yale engaging in business and the profes- sions, were taking over the direction of the town's affairs. A cul- ture was developing, and favored families were turning away from the harder modes of existing. The amenities of a more leisurely and gracious kind of life were coming into vogue. The most able and enterprising groups of men in the history of the town were gathering. The beginning of the Great Days was at hand. In the village the old German culture or folkways was melting and fus- ing with the Puritan way of life, losing its identity and thus seem- ingly disappearing.
The patterns and fashions brought in by the Puritan from the outside world became the way of life of the village German. The back-district folk remained largely what it had been while at the center German was becoming indistinguishable from Puri- tan. In the outward forms of life the change was especially marked. Double-vested coats with lapels were in vogue in the more select circles, where shoe buckles yielded to ribbons and silk strings. Long queues and the heavy club of hair gave way to short cuts. Horses' tails were docked and nicked, and the village aristocracy drove about in chaises, and in snowtime sleighs shod with iron were a part of the equipment of the fashionable families. The grand mansions for the grand families were beginning to give the village its architectural pattern. Fine old furniture and china were appearing in the homes of the select. Wooden clocks in these homes were telling time and in a few even "brass eight day clocks ticked off the minutes of the young century and regulated an easier and a statelier tempo of life." The social configuration of a new era was in its stride.
XXX
THE RISE OF PARTISANSHIP
The Federalists dreaded anything like a real de- mocracy, and wished affairs at home to be quietly managed by "the wise and good," that is by a few well-to-do, cultivated, conservative gentlemen, whose lead the people should meekly and gladly follow.
LOUIS C. HATCH
ROM THE EARLIEST DAYS the people of Waldoborough had been conservative in character and outlook. From the Old World the German element had brought to the shores of the Medomak a feudal view of social organization and political control. Neither they nor their forebears had ever exercised any substantial influ- ence in formulating the rules or determining the conditions un- der which they lived, and with something akin to the mute resig- nation of animals they accepted uncritically in the New World the forms of control which regulated their destiny. Even in their earliest petitions from Broad Bay to the Governor of Massachu- setts they couched their desires and hopes in the servile, abject language of serfs addressing their masters. In short, their whole social outlook was one of uncritical acceptance of the divine right of rule by the few at the top. In reality they were born Federalists. The most they desired was a minimum of interference with their rights, represented in the ownership of land and livestock, and their freedom to worship in the manner that had long been theirs. In political control and social change they were from long tradi- tion disinterested, and in the mass were slow to understand and to participate in the fluid state of democratic theory and control which was their new environment.
The theories of human rights and of representative govern- ment which formed the core of political agitation during the American Revolution was a matter of small interest to the Waldo- borough Germans. Throughout this struggle a strong undercur- rent of respect for monarchical forms had reflected itself in a neu- tral or mildly Tory attitude, based in some measure upon a strong
82
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
traditional faith in the divinely appointed right of kings and lords to govern. Hence it is understandable that in the very earliest days of the town's incorporation interest in local government was not strong. Town Meetings were sparsely attended - many of them so small that they were held in private homes, and power year after year was vested in the hands of the same few. Just as in plantation days when the local Germans accepted without question the lead- ership of John Ulmer, Captain Remilly, and Charles Leissner, so in the early years of the town power was vested over long periods in Squire Thomas, Jacob Ludwig, George Demuth, and a few of the Puritans who had been the first of their line to settle in the township. In these days it may be said that partisanship among the masses was nonexistent. So long as their purely individual interests were not in jeopardy, their participation in local government was limited indeed. It showed a marked increase, however, whenever the issue was one involving higher taxes, the expenditure of money, or a threat to their rights of ownership in land.
This condition of political indifference on the part of the "Dutch" was little affected by the considerable body of Puritans settling at Broad Bay just before the Revolution. Some of these at least were Tories seeking asylum from the radical patriots of Massachusetts Bay; some were sea captains seeking a snug harbor for their years of retirement, and others were men of some means who had sold their lands in the Boston area at a handsome profit and were settling on the cheaper lands of Maine. Many of them affected a studied indifference to the mad partisanship from which they had escaped, and merged their apathy with that of their "Dutch" neighbors. Thus they affected but slightly the indiffer- ent attitude of the latter to the existing forms of political control. Their main contribution was to initiate their German fellow townsmen into the forms of local government which came into being when Broad Bay was organized as a town in 1773.
From the foregoing it has been made clear that the spirit of partisanship remained at low ebb in the town through the Revo- lution and on into the decades immediately following it. It was, in fact, so low that in 1780, when the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts drafted its first state constitution and submitted it to the towns for ratification, the citizens of Waldoborough at a Town Meeting held September 17, 1780, "voted to drop the mat- ter of electing a Governor, a Lieutenant Governor and persons for counsellors and senators."1 Again, four years later, on April 5, 1784 an article in the warrant "to see if the town will vote to chose a Governor," was "passed in the negative." At the same meeting the town also declined to vote for any other state officers.
1Records of the Waldoborough Town Clerk.
83
The Rise of Partisanship
The first vote for such officials came a year later on April 4, 1785, when a meeting was held in the present Lutheran Church located at that time on the shore of the present Merle Castner farm. The building was unheated and its chilly atmosphere led a mere handful of voters, twenty-two in number, to adjourn to the house of Captain Stephen Andrews,2 where in the voting John Hancock received twenty-two votes, and all other state officers the same number of ballots. The numerical size of this first vote for state officers was significant in that it registered the general apathy of the voters. Its unanimity simply reflects the fact of no active party organizations existing in the Province at this time, and the officials elected were all men of conservative political outlook who in a few years were to furnish the hard core of the Federalist Party.
It was around 1785 that the question of the separation of Maine from Massachusetts first began to be agitated. The first newspaper in Maine, the Falmouth Gazette, appearing this year, had been founded to present the case for separation. Opponents of such a move were the men in office and the conservative leaders of both State and District. In 1785 and 1786 meetings and conven- tions were held at Falmouth by delegates of the three Maine coun- ties. Waldoborough sent no representatives to these meetings and in January 1787, when the vote of the towns in the District was canvassed, it was found that twenty-four of them had voted for separation against eight opposed. Waldoborough, true to the con- servative character and leadership of its citizens, had been one of the eight voting in the negative. A Town Meeting had been held on January 7th at which five votes were cast for separation and twenty-five against it. The size of this vote again revealed the tra- ditional apathy of the town, and its one-sidedness again stressed the conservative character of the interested voters and revealed how far out of line the town was with the prevailing sentiment in the Province. Throughout the balance of this decade interest remained at a low ebb, reaching perhaps its high point in 1789, when the town cast sixty-three votes for John Hancock for Governor, but even this unusual vote represented only a pitiful fraction of the town's eligible voters.
During the 1780's Waldoborough was represented only in- termittently in the General Court in Boston. Whenever the town was faced with a problem involving its interest, or whenever the Commonwealth enforced the law levying a fine for nonrepresen- tation, the town would choose a representative, otherwise it would sidestep the obligation of representative government. The citizens, however, did apparently send a delegate to the Massachusetts Con- vention called for the purpose of ratifying the Federal Constitution.
2The present Davis Dairy Farm.
84
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
It was in November 1787 that the General Court called upon the towns of the state to send delegates to the convention held in Boston in January 1788. In answer to the summons three hundred and sixty delegates convened, of whom forty-six were from Maine. The Waldoborough town records for December 10, 1787, contain this entry: "Voted to choose a delegate to represent the town in a convention ordered by the General Court." Who this delegate was or how he voted the record does not tell.
So far as Waldoborough had any partisan bias during its early years, it was overwhelmingly Federalist. Beginning in the 1790's the tiny flame of party hatreds began to blaze a little more brightly in the darkness of political apathy, and slowly increasing over the years, it became in time a conflagration lighting with a fierce partisan heat the bitterest period in American party history. The flame was first kindled in the town by the Puritan Junkers who came in the second migration, in the 80's and 90's, and in the first decade of the new century.
These men, who included such dominant natures as Joshua Head, Doctor Benjamin Brown, Deacon Samuel Morse, and Isaac G. Reed, were all of the Boston brood of Federalists, men who held with fanatical frenzy to the creed that "the good, the rich and the wise" possessed the divinely sanctioned right to govern. They were men of intelligence, ability, education, and property. In the new community they almost immediately assumed leader- ship, and the traditionally conservative "Dutch" were for them a field ripe for the harvest. Over the years they fashioned this stolid clay into a political mould that has retained its archaic form down to the present day, and made it at times a curiosity to the rest of the country. To gain a clear understanding of the stubborn fervor of these leaders who developed the political credo of the town and embalmed it in its enduring conservative medium, we must turn aside briefly to examine the underlying causes of the rise of the partisan spirit in New England, and to trace the rising of the storm which ultimately scattered Federalism to the four winds nearly everywhere except in Waldoborough.
As defined in public address by the political leaders of the Revolution the war had had as its primary objective the realiza- tion of the rights of man, the rights of common as well as privi- leged individuals. The end of the war, however, had brought its problems, for its costs had left the states deeply in debt, which involved a burden of taxation that the poor just could not carry. With the farmer class in the colonies the margin of income over basic need was always slight or nonexistent. In fact, the country people were usually in debt and as the creditor class, the profes- sional and mercantile groups in the towns and villages, put on the pressure for the payment of debts, a clamor for cheap money was
85
The Rise of Partisanship
raised. Since then, as now, inflation meant the ruin of the proper- tied class, the conservatives, seeing their wealth and position threat- ened, accepted the gauge of battle and pitted themselves against the have-nots. This struggle lasting over many long years gradu- ally developed into one of unbelievable bitterness, and split New England into two groups, the propertied and those for whom exist- ing conditions were an oppressive and intolerable burden. The latter becoming more and more class-conscious in time solidified into a party dedicated to its basic right to survival.
This state of embitterment was further intensified by the harsh laws in Massachusetts governing the treatment of debtors. James T. Adams has not overstated the case in pointing out that
when judgment was entered against a debtor, there was no property, save the clothes on his back, that could not be seized. Not only his farm but his livestock, his bed, and even the last bit of food in the house could be sold by the sheriff for a portion of their actual value. If the proceeds of these at forced sale were not sufficient to satisfy the judg- ment, the unfortunate debtor could be thrown into prison and thus deprived of all opportunity of working off the debt,3
and to this it should be added that while in prison the debtor was obligated to defray the costs of his own incarceration and mainte- nance while confined. Such a practice obtained in Broad Bay from the earliest times and was of frequent occurrence. Here a board of umpires made of local citizens was usually appointed to execute such a judgment. These men would convene, arbitrarily survey enough of the debtor's farm to satisfy the judgment, and the credi- tor would receive the title to the portion thus set off. In one case, that of Friedrich Hahn, the line was run through his house and a portion of the latter, upstairs and down, was assigned to his credi- tor.
In the face of such conditions the Legislature was repeatedly petitioned for redress of grievances, but it being under conserva- tive control there was no redress from this source. In consequence more direct methods of relief were sought, and the spirit of parti- sanship broke into open revolt in western Massachusetts under the leadership of Daniel Shay, an officer in the armies of the Revolu- tion. The details of this rebellion are not directly a part of Waldo- borough history, but it was an outgrowth of conditions which were as keenly felt, but more patiently endured, in Waldoborough than in western Massachusetts. This battle of a class for relief occa- sioned a shock which opened a fissure in all New England society. In our own town it made the poor more class-conscious and cre- ated the beginnings of a split in the local community which was to widen and endure for upwards of a century.
&New England in the Republic (Boston, 1927), p. 144.
86
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
In the District of Maine rebellion came in the form of a separatist movement. A gathering of delegates from the three coun- ties, meeting in Portland in the autumn of 1786, had declared that no redress of grievances could be secured until Maine became an independent state. This was a revealing declaration implying as it did that redress was impossible at the hands of the Massachusetts ruling class. The Federalist ruling class in Waldoborough was no more than a small coterie of like-minded men transplanted from Boston to Maine soil, and one in conviction and feeling with Sam Adams, the old Revolutionary firebrand, when he declared that all the trouble came "from wicked and unprincipled men" seeking their own exclusive advantage; and one in conviction with Henry Knox when he characterized Shay's rebels as "twelve or fifteen thousand desperate and unprincipled men"4 bent on seizing and dividing the property of the rich.
The dream of the Revolution had obviously not been real- ized. In 1776 these rebels had heard from Sam Adams and Henry Knox that all men were born free and equal and were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A decade later the dream had faded and these warriors of freedom found themselves lan- guishing in jails for a few shillings debt and labelled by the same erstwhile leaders as "wicked and unprincipled men." Even while the leaven was at work in Waldoborough "the Dutch" were still submissive; poverty was nothing new in their experience, but a few were shaking off their lethargy even while the great majority were safely tethered in the Federalist fold.
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