USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 2 > Part 36
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At the military encampment at Waldoboro last week we under- stand that General Corcoran was compelled to entertain his guests, Gen- eral Webster and staff at the house of a friend, for the reason that his grounds were in such bad condition owing to the damage committed, that there was no chance for his guests to mount their horses near his premises.
The Journal gradually swings over to a direct attack on Isaac Reed, who was the pet antipathy of the Republicans. The reason for this is clear. Waldoboro was the largest town in the county, and its vote was so frequently decisive and was so com-
9Mr. Reed was a candidate for Governor in 1855.
10 Related by Miss Edna Young, Mr. Ramsey's granddaughter.
11Gen. Corcoran lived in the Leroy Miller house on Main Street and having be- come a Republican, had deserted the Reed machine in the election of the preced- ing November.
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pletely controlled by this one man, that in the town it would do a Republican as much good to smell of the ballot box as to drop a vote in it. The attack in the Journal continues:
General Corcoran's grounds were as fine as any in the village with the exception of the man whose hillside garden lot sold at an extra price flanked as it was by a little Custom House worth about $6,000.00 but costing the government $22,800. He could afford to have a substantial and splendid wall around his premises. People will be likely to notice the contrast at the present time between General Corcoran's premises and those of Isaac Reed. We wish to call public attention to the fact that this outrage has been committed from motives of political spite and personal malignity. No unbiassed man will pretend that the public good required anything of this kind. The outrage is all the more despicable because the real authors have attempted to screen themselves by using an ignoble tool for the purpose. Everyman who knows anything about affairs at Waldoboro, is aware that there was none like William S. Corcoran so long as he spent his time and money to forward the po- litical schemes of Mr. Reed. . . .
We do not wonder that Corcoran trusted these men, for if there ever was a man with a smooth and velvet tongue which could sugar over the poison of asps, it is the gentleman who acted as the standard bearer of the Straight Whigs of Maine. General Corcoran stuck to the old Whig ship till he found the officers in command ready to sell out to the slavery propagandists and raise the Border Ruffian flag with its death's head and cross bones; then as a friend of free speech, free labor and free men, he spurned their persuasions, their bribes and their threats, and stood up unmoved as the advocate of freedom and Fremont, and for daring to express his honest sentiments, this Plug Ugly Straight Whig Hunker Junto have assailed him with the envenomed tongue of calumny and detraction; their journals have teemed with the loudest abuse, every effort made to crush him in his business relations, to ostracize and de- grade him, and even the sacred name of friendship has been assumed to spread the virus of their hate ....
The outrage committed on General Corcoran's property is but a part of the foul conspiracy to crush and wipe out a political opponent. We appeal to those men who pride themselves on being conservative men of Maine, if it is not a duty they owe to themselves to repudiate such deeds of oppression. Well may the honest men in the Democratic party exclaim - save us from such contamination of such allies; if our leaders cannot get along without them, we can get along without such leaders. We know the old line Democrats of Waldoboro disapprove the deed. Will they not see how corrupt their party is when it is so shrunk and shrivelled as to require the aid of such men to keep the breath of life in it? Will they not turn their backs on such a mass of corruption? When Democrats last year asked Mr. Reed if he could carry Waldoboro for Buchanan, it is said he made the following reply: "I own them." The honest confiding population of that town, though they may have been deceived, are not cattle in the market. We believe they will repudiate the foul libellers of their fair fame. They are Republicans at heart and will in time vindicate their character.
In this review of political life in Waldoboro in the mid- century the reader may separate for himself the factual from the exaggerated rhetoric of the period. The incident is certainly not
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unusual, it was in fact just a phase of the practices in vogue from the days when the Federalist bankers were wont to use every financial screw to strangle their political opponents, or to pinch them into political submission. I can even recall from my own boyhood days in the town when the district road surveyor would tear up a lawn to vent a spite of his own, or do it on the tip-off of someone higher up.
It may have been that General Corcoran was ultimately crushed "in his business relations," for his name now disappears from our history. By trade he was a sailmaker, and as such par- ticularly vulnerable to economic liquidation at the hands of some of the pro-slavery Waldoboro shipbuilders.
The facts warrant no sweeping condemnation of Isaac Reed. He was simply a politico of his period - of a strong, magnetic, and masterful nature, as must be all successful political leaders. Such outlet to his high abilities as his native town afforded, he used to the fullest, but this was not enough. Frustration he ex- perienced throughout his life, and it always met him just as he was about to reach the top. This Caesar in a Gaulic village was in no sense immune to disappointment and defeat. While the for- tunes of the Whig Party, to which he had given the earliest years of his life and from which he expected something for himself, were sinking to oblivion, he wrote to his brother Charles in Boston rather revealingly of his own feelings and outlook:
When I look back upon my short life, only about thirty years, I am at least satisfied with the confidence and kindness shown me by my friends and neighbors. (If not with myself). Who of my age in this town or vicinity has been more confided in? I have held every elective office in the gift of the people in this town. I have been a member of both branches of the Legislature - one of a Committee to revise the Statute Laws of this State, selected by the representatives of the people of the whole County. I have been as successful in business as could be reasonably expected. Have been connected by marriage with one of the most respectable families in the State. What more could I have ex- pected or deserved, and yet after all this I am not satisfied. . . . I feel lonely, if it were not for my boy and our aged parents, I would dispose of my property and leave this place, although my situation is pleasant and my house the best in town.12
Through these lines a thread of melancholy and frustration is apparent, even before the great frustration came in 1861, when the flood of Civil War weakened his political machine and foiled his ambitions. He stayed on in Waldoboro to the end of his days, became mellow and benign, enjoyed before retiring each evening his pitcher of cider, his pan of popcorn, and his dish of apples. Truly with all his faults he was a monument among men and one of those who has made Waldoboro worthy of a history.
12Letter to Charles M. Reed in Boston, May 1, 1845.
XLII THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES
Mark that now once more thou standest on fate's fine edge. SOPHOCLES (Antigone)
T HE SECESSION OF ELEVEN SOUTHERN STATES could have been no surprise to Waldoboro people, for the issue had been in national politics since the 1830's, and the slavery issue was even more an- cient. In Lincoln County the Abolition movement came to birth in the 1830's. It was promoted by the churches, especially by the Baptists and Methodists. The Congregational church, representing the power and wealth in the coastal communities, remained cool, for its membership embraced the shipbuilders and the ship cap- tains, and the interests of these men were too closely tied eco- nomically to cotton to enable them to approve or support any movement disturbing the economy of the cotton-producing South. In Waldoboro Abolition never met with favor. The town was too entirely committed to shipbuilding, and Isaac Reed was too powerful and too canny to permit such an uneconomic move- ment to flourish or even to strike root very deeply in his bailiwick.
There were, however, Abolitionists in the town and enough of them to maintain an active underground for the escaped slaves passing through to Canada. The route followed by these fleeing slaves lay about a mile below the village. They would come into town through the woods on the Old County Road on the west side of the river with an escort of local men, and a man some distance ahead and one in the rear of the party on whose signal the slaves could immediately disappear in the brush. Under cover of darkness they would cross the fields to the shore where they would be ferried across the river, and from thence over the fields and up the road to the house of William Cole.1 Here they were fed and rested up in Cole's barn at the foot of the old cow lane. From this point they would be provisioned and then escorted along the "old Cole road" through the woods to East Waldoboro and from there eastward across country in the direction of Canada.
1My present home.
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The old settlement of "Nigger Town" in the Waldoboro-Warren- Thomaston area may have been made up originally of those slaves who were fleeing toward the north when war came, and who under these circumstances felt no compulsion to move any farther northward.
Events are always stronger than men, and war came. In the early morning of April 12, 1861, General Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter and on the evening of the 13th the fort surrendered. On the 15th President Lincoln called for volunteers, and the North rose to save the Union. The history of this struggle in Waldoboro is a curious affair. There was much more than meets the eye. Outwardly the record is correct. It may be said that con- formity was the order of things, but this cannot disguise the fact that an influential faction of the town's leading men made up a silent opposition, and to a considerable degree this attitude was imparted to and pervaded the more common social stratum. From time to time during the war years the Copperhead view voiced itself, but under the leadership of men who knew the law, always in ways that were legal and correct.
Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers found the town unpre- pared. By and large the old musters had been abandoned and the militia organizations had fallen into a state of decay. In 1858 the Waldoboro Rifle Company, L. L. Kennedy, Commander, reported to the Adjutant General forty-one members present for inspec- tion. In 1859 there was no report on enrolled militia in Waldoboro on the part of its Division Advocate, John H. Kennedy. The militia had virtually ceased to exist. This lack of preparation would suggest at least that the war came as a surprise. War nearly al- ways comes in this way. It is the most tragic chapter in man's destiny, and he can never bring himself to recognize its existence until it is a fact.
Mr. Lincoln's call for volunteers came in mid-April. The town reacted at its first meeting thereafter, that of May 11th. This interim had given the people time for thought and enabled it to effect a correct response. The affairs of the town were under the control of the Democrats, but clearly there were some Demo- crats who in this situation would have to be muted. The resolu- tions committing the town to action were sponsored jointly by a Democrat and a Republican, and at the May 11th meeting "on motion of Bela B. Haskell, Democrat," the following resolutions were read and accepted:
Whereas, rebellion and Civil War exist in several states of this Union, therefore - Resolved that we are in favor of sustaining the Union, the Constitution, and the enforcement of the Laws and we are in favor of the enlistment of a company of volunteers in this town.
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Voted that the sum of three thousand dollars be appropriated and placed at the disposal of the selectmen to be expended in part or in whole for purposes thereinafter provided.
John H. Kennedy 1818-1863.
Voted that six dollars a month be paid to each man having a family, and four dollars per month to each single man, inhabitants of this town, who shall enlist in a company to be formed here - the time to commence
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when said company shall be mustered into service and continue while absent from the state in accordance with the provisions of an act passed at the extra session of the Legislature, and if the family of any such vol- unteer shall on account of sickness or death, stand in need of further assistance, the selectmen may at their discretion furnish it to such family, and they are authorized to furnish conveyance to such company to such place as they may be ordered by the Governor, and the selectmen shall keep a full and accurate account of all expenditures made in accordance of the above votes and present the same at the next annual March meeting.
Voted on motion of Henry Kennedy [Republican] that the Select- men be authorized to loan the money or any portion of it that may be needed in any contingency.2
In no subsequent war has the town found it necessary to call the citizens together in special meeting to vote on the ques- tion of "sustaining the Union, the Constitution and the enforce- ment of the Laws," and the fact that such action should seem necessary at this time is prima facie evidence of the existence of a strong sentiment in the town hostile to the struggle between the states. This resolution seems largely to have been a gesture- defining attitude, for there was no immediate response in enlist- ments. In fact, no company or part of a company was raised. Samuel L. Miller, a veteran of the war, observes that some men enlisted in different regiments, particularly the Fourth Maine. According to Miller's own tabulation there were five enlistments in this regiment in 1861.3 There was certainly no rush "to sus- tain the Union" in this first year of the war. In reality there was a good deal of anti-enlistment sentiment which does not appear in the record but which intrudes itself into the picture from time to time. The first volunteer from the town was Jacob C. Bogue who enlisted April 17, 1861, in the First Battery, Rhode Island Light Artillery. Waldoboro also lost two of her doctors to the service. Francis M. Eveleth was mustered into the Seventh Maine and George W. Colby into the First Maine Cavalry. In the meantime the state had raised six regiments, and thereafter recruiting was suspended for a while since the Federal Govern- ment was in no position to equip so many men.
In these early days the town was getting frequent glimpses of the distant war. On March 16th and again on the 19th omnibus loads of volunteers singing "John Brown's Body" passed eastward through the town to embark at Rockland for the scene of the war, but this did not seem to stimulate greatly the local war spirit. The Fourth Maine Infantry had its rendezvous at Rockland. It was mustered on June 15th and on the 17th set out for the seat of war, Soldiers in passing through received their rations in the town. The Damariscotta company of the Fourth Maine was greeted
2Town of Waldoboro, Clerk's Records.
3Samuel L. Miller, History of Waldoboro (Wiscasset, 1910), p. 145.
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in Waldoboro with salvos of artillery. One of the cannon on Clark's wharf burst in discharge and a fragment of the bursting gun in its descent killed Gilman Kuhn instantly.
The gubernatorial election of September 1861 furnishes a very definite insight into the attitude of the citizens of the town in reference to the conflict over the slavery issue. The war had split the Democratic Party in the state into two factions, the compromisers and the anti-compromisers. The first of this group, or the regular Democrats, selected as their candidate for gov- ernor, John W. Dana, who held that "the reconstruction of the Union by force was an absurdity," and he advocated a convention of all the states for an "amicable settlement." There was in the second place a strong faction of Democrats, the Breckenridge group, who dissented from this view, holding that "there can be no neutrals in this war, there can be none but patriots or traitors." This faction put Colonel Jameson forward as its candidate. This placed the issue squarely before the voters of Waldoboro and gave them the full opportunity to register their views anonymously. The vote in the town was not heavy, but it was startling. Dana, the anti-war candidate, polled 329 votes, whereas, Jameson, the "patriot" candidate polled 95 votes. The Republican, Washburn, on a war platform received 162 votes.4 The town by a clear ma- jority of seventy-two votes revealed the anti-war set of its mind. In the state Dana polled 19,801 votes, Jameson, 21,395, and the Republican, Washburn, 58,689. Thus by a vote of about four to one, the state registered its decision for a vigorous prosecution of the war. Waldoboro, with its anti-war vote, remained as usual a political pariah in the county and the state.
The existence of a strong Copperhead faction in the town is not difficult to understand. Its core was the shipbuilders, the most powerful and influential group in the community. It was they who built the vessels that carried the cotton of the South to the textile mills of England and the continent. So strong was the feel- ing in Southern ports in the days before the war against "Black Republican" shipowners that the latter were faced with economic discrimination unless they were known to be Southern sympa- thizers, and they were known as either one or the other, even those in the small coast towns of Maine. This fact is clearly set forth in the editorials of a New Orleans newspaper in reference to the ship Webster Clark and her part owner, Joseph Clark, a "black Republican of Waldoboro." The editorial comment runs as fol- lows:
There are some Black Republican vessels now in port, very anxious to take cotton to Liverpool at 34 d. In fact the owners of some of these
4Town of Waldoboro, Clerk's Reords.
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vessels illuminated their houses on the election of Mr. Lincoln. There are vessels called the Webster Clark and the Naples as standing at the head of the black list, though half the former ship is only owned by a Black Republican living in Waldoboro, Maine. We are asked for in- formation. Black Republicans will continue to send their ships hither.5
On the following day, January 23, the newspaper continues:
Some captains and co-owners happen to have some of these Black Republicans as co-owners of which they are innocent, as in the case of the ship Webster Clark, Captain Kopperholdt.6 This ship hails from New Orleans, and is owned in part by one of our fellow citizens, R. B. Sumner with Captain Kopperholdt. The other owner or owners reside in Maine. . . . It is very fortunate for these owners of the Clark in Maine that they have fallen into the hands of such good company as our ex-New Orleans merchant, Mr. Sumner, and Captain Kopperholdt.
These comments are quite amazing, revealing as they do a correct knowledge on the part of a newspaper in New Orleans of the political views of Mr. Joseph Clark in Waldoboro. They also explain to a degree the pressure exercised on the leading ship- builders of the town by the Southern cotton men. The Copper- heads in Waldoboro, in other words, had reasons for their attitude, but it is clear in some cases that they were not aware of these as real reasons. Like businessmen in all times they believed that any- thing which interfered with business was bad and deserving of strong opposition. They doubtless ascribed their convictions to impressive moral reasons and rationalized their stand in a thor- ough manner. The unhealthy consequence was that many of the rank and file, workers and mechanics in the shipbuilding industries, took their cue from those at the top and added their drop to the community's cup of bitterness. The war did not end their criti- cism, it only stilled it and put an end to outward disloyalty such as the town witnessed on the eve of the struggle. This feeling is illustrated by an incident in which some patriotic citizens had hung a large American flag across lower Main Street from the Fish Block to the Clark Building on the opposite side of the street. They were told by some of the local Copperheads to take it down, whereupon Mr. Joseph Clark armed himself with a rifle and took his stand on the platform before his building. All day he re- mained there and let it be known to all bystanders that anyone who molested the flag would get a bullet in his hide and that the flag would not be taken in until sunset.7 The outbreak of war, of course, put an end to such incidents as this and opposition went underground, revealing itself only in elections, in opposition to
5Clipping from New Orleans newspaper, preserved in the Clark family. Issue of Tuesday, Jan. 22, 1861. "Captain Herman Kopperholdt of Waldoboro.
7Mrs. Maud Clark Gay.
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the draft, and in other situations where the right of the citizen to criticize and differ was generally recognized.
The Copperheads remained especially militant on the issue of enlistments and the later draft. In my boyhood I was amazed on one occasion in talking with one of them to hear with what ve- hemence the cause of the South was upheld. From this experience came the realization, deepening with the years, of the extent to which frank disloyalty existed in the town in Civil War days. George W. Singer, former editor of the Damariscotta Herald, born in 1861, wrote me of his varied recollections of Civil War days under date of November 20th, 1942. In his characteristic and vigorous language he stated:
My father was a sea captain but happened to be home at that time. He was loyal alright. I have been told that he was drafted along with a well known Copperhead, who, on the way home, slapped Father on the back and addressed him as "brother conscript." Father, I am told, gave him an uppercut that laid him out. There were plenty of Copperheads. I am ashamed to say that an uncle of mine was one, and on one occasion we would have come to blows, but he had some doubt about his ability to back up a remark he made about Abraham Lincoln. I was six feet tall at eighteen.
Throughout the war there was little abatement of Copper- head sentiment in Waldoboro. Those responsible for it were among the most influential and respectable citizens, who conformed out- wardly and in a measure fell into line in cooperating in the town's efforts, but the anti-war virus was so widely diffused among com- mon folk that every major war move was attended in the town by a spirit of uncertainty and misgiving on the part of those pro- moting them.
In 1862 the call came for more men. Volunteering had not been an unqualified success and in consequence conscription was being agitated in the national capital. In fact, a law was under debate in Congress for drafting members of the militia, but it failed of passage on constitutional grounds. In its place the state started calling a definite number from each locality. Waldoboro's quota in July was fifty men for a three-year enlistment. This call was the signal for the more militant Copperheads in the county to start their undercover work, and of their activities the Bath Times and Sentinel of August 4, 1862, reported the following:
There has been a small squad of Secessionists canvassing Lincoln County for sometime telling all sorts of cock and bull stories to dis- courage enlistments, endeavoring to frighten people about being drafted. We are sorry to say that in a few instances they have been successful. I understand that three persons have left Damariscotta for an undiscovered country where Lincoln's draft cannot go. It is said that in some of the
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seaboard towns there has been quite a rush into the fishing business.8 It is said some of the boats under 20 tons have shipped about a man a ton's burden. The fishing bounty to these boats must be divided up into pretty small shares.
In view of such conditions - the imminence of a draft, the reluctance to enlist, and the activities of the disloyal - the towns felt the need of bestirring themselves to meet the demands for levying their quotas of men. In Waldoboro they beat the tom-tom, stirred up public enthusiasm, and raised money for bounties as an inducement to enlist. At a Town Meeting held July 28, 1862, "it was voted that the town pay $100. to each volunteer enlisting to make the town's quota; and appoint three persons orderly ser- geants ... to go around and see who will enlist."9 As further inducement a group of citizens subscribed $650 to pay $10 addi- tional to each enrolled person.
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