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It was after the treaty of Breda that the man who gave Pentagoet its permanent name of Castine arrived: John Vincent d'Abbadie, Baron of Saint-Castin. He came to Canada as a young man with the famous regiment of Carignan-Salieres and when, the war over, the regiment was disbanded, he decided to seek his fortune in the new world, moved to Acadia, and finally established himself at Pentagoet. A number of priests, starting with Father Lawrence Molin, a Franciscan, cared for the traders and the Indians until 1703 when the post was finally abandoned by the French. The Baron became a friend of the Indians, and one of his contributions to their welfare was a chapel built on Indian Island in the Penobscot.
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It was named in honor of St. Ann, and the succession of chapels and churches on this island have retained to this day that name.
3. NORRIDGEWOCK AND THE KENNEBEC
In the spring of 1646 an old missionary was dying in the church of Sillery, the village a few miles above Quebec founded in 1636 for the Christian Indians. News of this Indian haven reached the Kennebec and some of the curious found their way there to investigate for themselves. The reports they brought back were complimentary. No doubt the reports mentioned the old missionary who had tales about the old mission of St. Sauveur. The tales were true, too, for the old missionary was Enemond Masse, co-founder of St. Sauveur. Since that sad day when he was forced into a boat in the open sea, he had returned to Quebec to renew his labors among the Indians only to be exiled back to his native land when Quebec was captured in 1629. But he returned again in 1632 and since then had completed a full life on the missions. He was now old (72 years) and tired. He died May 12, 1646, three months before delegates from the Kennebec Indians arrived to ask for a Blackrobe to live with them. Their request was granted. Father Gabriel Druillettes returned with them to establish the second Jesuit mission among the Maine Indians.
The future of the Maine Indians was settled on the Kennebec, the decisive battleground, as far as the Indians were concerned, in the struggle between the Puritans and New France for the control of Acadia. They decided their own future when they elected to be Christians under the guidance of French missionaries, for that decision naturally linked them with France in the emerging conflict; it was settled when their village at Norridgewock was destroyed and their priest, Father Rasle, murdered in 1724. After that they had little to look forward to beyond the ever narrowing confines of
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reservations under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts and Maine.
The events of these four scores of years center around two Jesuits, Gabriel Druillettes and Sebastian Rasle. Happily we have many primary sources and much literature about these two priests and their works, and one will search the annals of our Indian missions in vain to discover two more interesting persons.
Druillettes was by any standard a highly talented man with considerable charm. The extent of his charm can be measured by his visit to Boston where he was granted facilities to say Mass and his visit to Plymouth where Governor Bradford ordered fish to be served because it was Friday. Both Boston and Plymouth had to receive him, for he came under the protection of diplomatic immunity. But diplomatic usage did not demand such courtesies to one who was, in the words of the Puritans, an agent of Antichrist. This visit would rightly be labelled a charming fantasy were not the records establishing the facts beyond dispute. One can find the explanation of what happened only in the captivating personality of this Frenchman who was so happily baptized Gabriel.
Druillettes left Sillery with the Indians on August 26, 1646 and this trip alone would have sufficed to place him in our history books among America's pathfinders, for he became the first white man to travel from the St. Lawrence via the Chaudiere and Kennebec rivers to the Atlantic. Benedict Arnold followed the route in reverse in his invasion of Canada during the War for Independence. On this trip the Jesuit stopped at Norridgewock and the other Indian villages along the river, paused at Augusta where the Pilgrims had a trading post to make the acquaintance of the Plymouth agent, John Wilson, a man with "a very kindly disposition," to use Druillettes' words. The acquaintance led to friendship strengthened by the bonds of mutual Christian concern for the welfare of the Indians. He then proceeded down the river, reached the Atlantic, and turned up the coast to pay
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a visit to the Capuchins at Castine. The Kennebec was part of their mission. Returning to Augusta, he established his first mission a few miles beyond the trading post where the Indians had gathered. That a French Jesuit and an agent of the Pilgrims could live in peace is a great tribute to these two men. How different the history of the Maine Indians would have been if it had endured.
Druillettes remained with his Abenakis until the spring of the following year, joining them in their hunts as far as Moosehead Lake, and then they brought him back to Sillery in June apparently none the worse from the experience. He was now their patriarch. His influence during this brief time on the Indians has elicited admiration from Parkman whose honest mind recognized greatness and virtues even though the supernatural and the order of grace were beyond his grasp. He marvelled that Druillettes could persuade these savages of yesterday to accept the idea of Christian forgiveness and the obligation to pray even for their deadly enemy: the Iroquois.
Druillettes did not return to the Kennebec until 1650. This was, as we have noted, within the field assigned to the Capuchins and although he had received a warm welcome on his Castine visit, evidently they did not expect the Jesuits to establish a permanent mission there. At least, the Jesuit superior declined to send him back with the Abenakis when they returned in 1647 and again in the next two years to get their Blackrobe. But the decision was reversed in 1650, when the Capuchins added their request to that of the Indians. Yet the mission to Boston and Plymouth may have been the deciding motive for the reversal. He was commis- sioned by the Quebec authorities to seek an alliance with southern New England colonies against the Iroquois who were bent on destroying the Algonquins, an Indian family that included the Abenakis of Maine. In return for the military aid, free trade with New France was offered.
Druillettes' two trips, in 1650 to Boston and Plymouth and
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to New Haven in the following year, have been frequently described. The diplomatic missions were a failure. It was too much to expect the New England colonies to risk warfare to save Indians. With few exceptions (John Winslow and John Eliot), the Puritans had no concern for the Indians,- a heathen people whose land the Lord God had given to them for a rightful possession, as Cotton Mather phrased it. In fact, when Druillettes arrived, the neighboring Indians were becoming an encumbrance, having lost their economic value to the Puritans; they had passed on their knowledge of native foods and food raising, and the fur trade, where the Indian was a necessity, was declining in favor of fishing. Besides, these colonies had found it difficult to unite among themselves on grounds more common than the protection of the Abenakis. United action did not come until they were faced with their own local Indian problem, and then in the King Philip's War (1675-1677), they confederated to exterminate the southern New England Indians.
Yet the failure of the diplomatic missions does not detract from this amazing adventure. On the Jesuit's first trip he was welcomed by his Indians along the Kennebec, was greeted again by Winslow who, at great inconvenience, accompanied the priest-diplomat to the mouth of the river where he boarded a boat for Boston. In Boston, Winslow's employer, Edward Gibbons, provided him with a room and key for his own privacy where he could and, no doubt, did offer Mass. He talked with the younger Winthrop and Eliot in Boston, Bradford in Plymouth, and with Endicott at Salem on his return. He was at home wherever he went, except with English proper names which gave him, a good linguist, no little difficulty. Cape Ann became Kepane, Gibbons sounded like Gebin to him, and Roxbury like Rosqbray.
Druillettes returned to the Kennebec in January, 1651. The hard glances that had been thrown at him in the company of Winslow had somehow turned to smiles when he reached the mouth of the river. He spent the winter with his Indians,
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establishing Norridgewock as the center of the mission. He was back in Quebec in the spring to make his report, and in June was again commissioned to consult with the New England colonies at New Haven. At New Haven, however, the French proposal was rejected.
But his work among the Kennebec Indians was no failure. On his return from New Haven he spent the winter and spring with them before returning to Quebec. It is doubtful that he returned to Norridgewock again. The rule of Cromwell interfered with work among the Maine Indians and Acadia was under the control of the English from 1654 to 1667. And King Philip's War took place during the last two years of this period, a war that gravely affected the Maine Indians although they were not directly involved. Brief though his days with the Abenaki Indians were, he had managed to plant the faith deep in their souls. That was a miracle of grace.
4. SEBASTIAN RASLE
Sebastian Rasle arrived at Norridgewock in 1694. He was thirty-six years old and had been in New France four years; two of these four had been spent with the Abenaki Indians mastering their language and making a start on his dictionary that would eventually be housed at Harvard University and the other two years were with the Indians on the Illinois River. By the time he arrived on the Kennebec he had mastered several Indian dialects and was, we have been told, as fluent in them as in French and Latin. That would make him highly proficient, for he boasted, to the irritation of the Puritans, about his Latin ability.
His facility in dialects was needed on his mission, for much had changed on the Kennebec since Druillettes' last visit. A new tribe, from the upper reaches of the river, had moved to the old mission grounds. The Iroquois, fiercely pressing
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their old enemy eastward, and King Philip's War had brought about the change. There was extensive fighting with the Maine Indians during the war (1675-1677) and they had been rather decisively defeated. And the fighting, usually scattered Indian attacks on a farm or a village, had made the Indians the bitter enemies of the Puritans on the expanding Maine frontier. The chapel built by Druillettes had been destroyed, and the Kennebec Indians, pressed by the Iroquois from the west and the Puritans from below, had moved towards Canada. About 1680, Jacques and Vincent Bigot, brothers and Jesuits, were assigned to care for them at Sillery and at a new village (1683) on the Chaudiere River which Druillettes had travelled on his first trip to the Kennebec. But the situation had sadly changed since that trip. There was no John Winslow waiting with a welcome for Sebastian Rasle. A new chapter starts with Rasle's arrival on the Kennebec. It is the last chap- ter, and it is a sad one.
Rasle arrived at Norridgewock at an unfavorable time and an atmosphere of uncertainty hovered over the Indian mission to the very end. France and England were at war when he came, and after a brief interval of peace it was renewed in 1705. Even treaties of peace, like that of Ryswick (1697) when Acadia was ceded to France and Utrecht (1713) when Acadia was ceded to England, brought no comfort to the Indians. Acadia was never defined, and the land between the Kennebec and the St. Croix remained disputed territory. Actually, by this time, possession (Indians excluded) was the determining factor, and the tide was running in favor of the Puritans of Massachusetts who were determined to possess Maine. As Jonathan Greenleaf, Maine's pioneer church historian quaintly states: "In 1652, the government of the whole Province of Maine was assumed by Massachusetts." Anyone who supported the cause of the Indians had to expect opposition from Massachusetts; if the person was a priest, hatred was added to the opposition. Yet the Indians' title to the land and their right to possess it in peace and
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with the missionary of their choice were, and still remain, undisputed particulars in this sad chapter.
Rasle spent nearly thirty busy years at Norridgewock, a village that was only a two days journey from the nearest English post. By a daily routine that demanded heroism he fashioned a Christian village there. On Sundays and holy days he preached a sermon, and seldom did a week pass without a brief exhortation of some aspect of Christian living. He remained in his cabin mornings, after Mass, to listen to the troubles of the Indians, advising and settling quarrels; afternoons were spent calling on the sick and needy in their cabins. He prepared his own food, for he could not adjust to Indian cooking. He composed prayers which they chanted during Mass; he organized a choir among the young. He went along with the Indians on their hunting and fishing trips, following as closely as possible the daily routine of the village. And he kept working on his dictionary. They were a zealous group of Christians, devoted to the Catholic religion, and they were, as Rasle remarks,
convinced that if they gave themselves up to the English, they would very soon find themselves without a missionary, without sacrifice, without a sacrament, and nearly without any exercise of religion, and that little by little they would be plunged into their first infidelity. Rasle was determined that this would not happen and he decided to remain with them. The authorities of Massachusetts were determined to drive him from the village. From the start they had, as Greenleaf observes, "viewed him with a jealous eye."
Three attempts were made to dislodge him. In 1705, at the start of the next war between the French and English, the village was raided; they found the village deserted and left it destroyed. The Indians returned and rebuilt it. In 1722, it was raided and destroyed again. It was on this raid that Rasle's dictionary was looted, along with his strong box. The third expedition came two years later, during August. Strangely, it caught the Indians by surprise. Although orders had been given to capture Rasle alive, he was killed by one of the militia
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who claimed Rasle offered resistance to capture. Rasle's scalp was among the twenty-seven that were brought back to Boston. It was not Boston's best hour.
This violent death was not unexpected. A few years prior to his death he had written to his nephew in France:
These beginnings of misunderstandings fail not to alarm me, & make me fear the dispersion of the flock, which Providence has confided to my care so many years & for which I would willingly sacrifice that which remains of my life.
But his death did not save the Indians.
New England writers have been harsh on Rasle even in death. But their treatment of the Indians can not be defended, and one can understand Rasle and his great work only by understanding the Indians. This John Francis Sprague has succeeded in doing in his small volume called Sebastian Rasle a Maine Tragedy of the Eighteenth Century (Boston, 1906). Sprague has succeeded because he has approached the tragedy from the Kennebec and not from Boston, with an understanding of the Maine Indians who were a peaceful tribe with a remarkable love for children and entitled to live with their missionary of their own choice on the Kennebec, and with an admiration for a man who made great sacrifices to protect those Indians.1
If John Eliot had been at Norridgewock in place of Sebastian Rasle, if he had labored thirty years to make good Christians of these savages and had succeeded in doing so, if he had refused to abandon his post and his Indians on orders from French officials, if a price had been placed on his head for failure to move, if his village had been destoyed twice by French soldiers and he himself killed by one of them in a third raid, would there be any doubt in New Englanders' mind about the greatness of Eliot? I think we can safely say there would not be. He would have been remembered with great admiration, and rightly so. Hence, it is quite confusing to
1 Surely this is a much sounder approach to an understanding of Rasle than Indian gossip gathered two centuries after the event on the steps of a Maine general store, an approach used by Fannie H. Eckstrom in her article "The Attack on Norridgewock, 1724," in the New England Quarterly, VII (September, 1934).
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discover at this late date that the Puritans were "subjectively" justified in considering Rasle "an incendiary" because he opposed their plans.
Jonathan Greenleaf who has sketched for us the origins and status of the churches in Maine when the District became a State honestly recognized the worth of the man and his judgment makes an apt conclusion to this section on Rasle. Noting that the English have blamed the Jesuit for the troubles on the Kennebec, he adds:
Let this be as it may, the fact of his having devoted his superior talents to the instruction of the rude children of the wilderness; con- senting to spend his days in the depths of the forests, in unrepenting conformity to savage customs, and modes of life; enduring such privations, hardships, and fatigues as he did by night and day in the discharge of his mission, proves him to have been a very superior man, and well entitled to the admiration of all.
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LAYING THE FOUNDATION: 1783-1818
ITH considerable reluctance, a reluctance bolstered by a group in the District who preferred Boston as a state capital, Massachusetts granted Maine permission to seek admission to the Union on June 19, 1819. Then a convention was called to frame a constitution which was approved by Congress and in 1820 Maine was admitted to the Union. People, both contem- poraries and later generations, would want to know the status of this eastern frontier state at this transitional period, and so Maine's pioneer church historian, Jonathan Greenleaf, busied himself collecting data and statistics on the religious groups for his Sketches of the Ecclesiastical History of the State of Maine (1821).
For some of the churches he had to depend on friends and acquaintances to supply him with information or to check on what he had gathered. For his chapter on the Roman Catholics he relied on Edward Kavanagh, a young man but, as we shall see, a reliable source. Scarcely five pages (chapter twenty- four ) in the small volume were needed to tell the story of the Catholics in Maine in 1821. "Four meetings," Greenleaf tells us, "of the denomination are held in Maine; two among the remains of the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indians, one at New Castle, and one at Whitefield, in Lincoln County." This is not quite correct, as Edward Kavanagh would discover in 1831 when he and John G. Deane were commissioned to in- vestigate and report on the people living along the banks of the St. John River. They discovered a goodly number of French Catholics living in this area on land disputed between
[ 17 ]
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the United States and Great Britain since the peace treaty of 1783 but stoutly claimed by Maine as part of her domain. Eventually, in 1842 and again with the help of Kavanagh, the St. John River became the international boundary and all those living on the south shore of the river down to Hamlin were on American soil. The omission of the Acadians in the Madawaska district by Greenleaf (and by Kavanagh) is easily explained. Little was known about them until Kavanagh and Deane made their study in 1831. But when Maine started her history as a state there were three centers of Catholic life: the Indians, now reduced to about 750 in number, 350 of them on Indian Island, near Oldtown, and the others at Pleasant Point, near Eastport; the Acadians living in the Madawaska district in northern Maine; and a group of Irish immigrants, totalling about 108 families, living in and around Damariscotta and Whitefield where there were two churches, St. Patrick's and St. Dennis', and where there was one priest, Father Dennis Ryan.
These three centers were the Catholic inheritance from Maine's colonial and post-revolutionary history and they be- came the foundation stones of the diocese of Portland estab- lished in 1853. Each of the foundation stones deserves a remembrance.
There was, however, one other inheritance that merits a mention. The people of Maine had inherited from their long colonial history, as had all the other New Englanders, a strong dislike of Catholicism. The Pilgrims and the Puritans had brought an intensely hostile attitude towards Rome to these shores, and that attitude had been intensified, rather than softened, with the passing years. Their isolated position both from other colonies and from Europe had protected and nar- rowed the original frame of mind, education and pulpit had nourished it, the conflict with France, the activities of French missionaries in Maine, and the threat of an Anglican episcopacy imposed by King and parliament had kept the frame of mind alert. Indeed, the history of Catholicism in colonial New Eng-
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LAYING THE FOUNDATION 1783-1818
land was a "history of the moulding and development of a hostile viewpoint in regard to various aspects of Catholic civilization."
The people of Maine naturally inherited this attitude. Rome, the Pope, bishops, priests, the Mass, Catholic practices, even such holydays as Christmas were synonyms for something evil, somehow associated with Antichrist. This fear of Catholicism was present when the new state constitutions were framed after the Declaration of Independence. Accordingly, the Massa- chusetts Constitution of 1780 required all state officials to take an oath that excluded Catholics from office and provided that Congregational ministers be publicly supported in towns unless the system of voluntary support, as in Boston, for instance, had been accepted.
Yet Maine, despite this inherited hostility to Catholicism, manifested her independence of Massachusetts by framing a constitution that guaranteed freedom, religious and political, to Catholics. Some have credited this constitutional provision to the small but influential group of Catholics living in and near Damariscotta. It is true that the drafting convention was presented with a petition signed by three leaders of this Catholic community, James Kavanagh, Matthew Cottrill, and William Mooney, which begged the delegates to place the Catholics of Maine upon an equality with their Protestant fel- low citizens and to see to it
that the Constitution which you are about to frame as the funda- mental law of this State may contain no clause or provision requiring any man to renounce his religion or become prescribed: to either betray his conscience or be debarred of the privileges and immuni- ties of the citizen . . .
Yet it is not easy to determine the exact influence of this peti- tion.
It is obvious that this small group of Catholics were smart- ing under the restrictions imposed by the constitution of Massa- chusetts and that they feared Maine might follow this example. There does not appear to have been, however, any desire or plan by the delegates to exclude Catholics from political life,
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and independent of any petition by Catholics, the omission of the ministerial tax was inevitable. The Baptists and other re- ligious dissenters to the standing order, stronger in Maine than in the Bay State, insisted on the omisson of that clause. Kava- nagh and his friends were aware of this, no doubt, and hence concentrated on the omission of any oath that would exclude Catholics from full political life of a citizen. The delegates, whatever the influence of the petition, did frame a constitution that satisfied the petitioners. So, in 1820, the few but articulate Catholics of Maine could aspire, if otherwise qualified, to politi- cal office. One of them, at least, did so aspire and in time became the governor of Maine. It was a happy turn of events that this person who became governor also penned the petition. He, in turn, had to thank his father, James Kavanagh, one of the signers of the petition for selecting Maine as his home in the new world. It is quite unlikely that Edward Kavanagh would have been a governor if his father had settled in any other New England state. In New Hampshire, which would be part of the diocese of Portland when established in 1853, Catholics were disqualified from the office of governor and membership in the legislature until late in the nineteenth cen- tury (1876). The few Catholics of this state found the pro- scription a painful humiliation and this was especially true of the converts who found themselves second-class citizens. New Hampshire was chided for this survival of colonial mentality. As late as January 26, 1854, we find the editor of the Bangor Whig and Courier sympathizing with the status of these con- verts. "We have known," he remarked, "several such instances to occur in New Hampshire, and they keenly felt the full weight of that anti-republican and oppressive provision." Maine had good reasons to be proud of her basic law framed in 1820 and of her rejection of this part of her colonial inheritance.
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