How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [73]
Fort Montgomery, aka “Fort Blunder”
From this point on, the reality was that the U.S. government was no longer negotiating with England; it was negotiating with the District of Maine. And Maine (which gained statehood in 1820) wasn’t budging. Indeed, Maine became more militant, as a report from New Brunswick “to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty … humbly sheweth.” The report informed British authorities that “a senator of the state of Maine … came into this province and seized and marked a quantity of pine timber lying in the river St. John … as having been cut on the river Restook, in the territory of the United States.… In the last year, 1825 … [Maine issued deeds] to the settlers in this territory … [for] one hundred acres each of the land by them possessed.”3
Maine, in response, further sought to force the federal government to intervene on its behalf by ridiculing New Brunswick’s appeal to its mother country. “Our neighbors in New Brunswick,” Maine’s Thomaston Register wrote, “feel quite warlike on the subject of the northeastern boundary.… They appear to think their masters in England have no other interest to protect.… But [England] … has nothing to gain and much to lose by another contest with us.”
Angered by this taunting, New Brunswick bit the bait. “John Baker, the citizen of Maine who was lately seized by the British authorities and carried to Frederickton [New Brunswick], was indicted … on two charges amounting to Treason against the king of England,” Vermont’s Burlington Messenger reported. The acts of treason the newspaper cited consisted of Baker having flown the American flag and “resisted a British officer.”
The U.S. government did not bite the bait. “Some young, discreet lawyer should be sent into New Brunswick to see Baker,” President John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary, aware that there was more to the story than reported in the press. Baker, Adams noted, had been imprisoned “for stopping the British mail from passing over the land on which he was settled, within the disputed territory.”
Baker wasn’t the only American whose behavior was making life difficult for the president. The governor of Maine contributed, too, as Adams confided to this diary:
[April 28, 1827] A letter from Enoch Lincoln, Governor of the State of Maine … is querulous, testy, and suspicious.… The tendency of all this is to multiply the difficulties of the negotiation.
[November 26, 1827] Lincoln’s letters are absurd and provoking; and he is deeply infected with a disease which many of the Governors of the States are apt to catch—wanton assailing of the General Government, overweening zeal for the interests of the State.
When Maine’s governor then activated the state’s militia, Adams finally had no choice but to respond, and dispatched U.S. troops to Maine.
But Adams simultaneously made movements in the other direction as well, using the crisis to justify allowing the king of Holland to arbitrate the dispute. In 1831 King William I specified a compromise line that sought to split the difference between the American and British positions.
Maine responded by changing its strategy. It now maintained its boundary claims were part of a larger national issue: states’ rights.4 By aligning itself with slave states that were asserting states’ rights to resist federal restrictions on slavery, Maine succeeded in getting the Senate to reject the Dutch king’s decision. Consequently, the situation continued to smolder. Seven years later the smolders began to flame. In March 1839 the Boston Atlas reported:
A detachment of 26 [American] men, sent … to break up a horde of trespassers on the Fish River has returned, having succeeded in their object.… [Maine] Gov. Fairfield is urging forward his militia with great zeal. In addition to the 700 enlisted men on the Aroostook, [militia] Gen. Hudson’s