Will Susan Collins Have Her Concerns?

AS REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS come up with every lie they can to try to thwart statehood for the District of Columbia - and they will and all of them will have their most potent weapon against egalitarian democracy behind it, racism - it's good to remember such incidents in our past, starting with the admission of my state as a state in 1820. For those who don't know, until then Maine was a colony of Massachusetts, on the basis of which it became a part of the country with full representation in Congress, which is certainly not the case for the far larger concentration of American citizens who live in the District of Columbia. The issue for opponents of Maine becoming a state, in its own right was, of course, the damned Senate.

Heather Cox Richardson recently told it pretty well.

By the time most of you will read this it will be March 15, which is too important a day to ignore. As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!”

He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.

Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit slavery—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state, lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South.

They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.

But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that slave owners in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—Senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri 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 the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”

Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.

The petition drive that had begun as an effort to keep the admission of Maine from being tied to the admission of Missouri continued as a movement to get Congress to whittle away at slavery where it could—by, for example, outlawing slave sales in the nation’s capital—and would become a key point of friction between the North and the South.

I will leave it to you to read the rest of her interesting account of how Mainers, bitter at the slave-power trying to make that use of them went West and helped seed the upper mid-west with with abolitionism. My only qualms about it aren't due to Richardson's telling of the story, it is the general tendency of white people to act as if the primary force behind the abolition of slavery was not from people violently held in slavery, those who became free on their own initiative - by escaping North or those who became free through crossing the even more treacherous waters than those of the Ohio river. Hollywood loves to reinforce the idea that emancipation was a gift of benevolent white people when what it was was a mere down payment for, by then, already centuries of violently enforced, uncompensated servitude, destruction of families, rape and murder.

I would expect that Susan Collins will have her patented concerns about DC statehood - concerns that never furrow her brow or lead to her learning anything - I doubt anything any of her constituents say to her will keep her from doing exactly what she figures will be best for Susan Collins, but, who knows, maybe somewhere back in the vestiges of her family history that strain might have some effect on her. Though she'll probably do what she does, if she can do the decent thing, the right thing, the just thing, her calculation will be if her doing right will make a difference or not and if it won't make a difference, she'll do the right thing.