CHAPTER 4

Data Maps of Downeast Maine

Missionary Records from the Early Republic Borderlands

JOHN MORTON

In 1804, the Reverend Alfred Johnson took a missionary trip to the far eastern corner of the District of Maine.1 Dozens of other Congregational ministers had taken similar trips in the previous decade and a half. The population of the district was expanding rapidly, and missionaries were doing their best to reach the far-flung settlements. They traveled from town to town, bringing sermons, books, and baptisms to communities that had yet to build permanent churches or hire settled preachers. When these ministers were feeling optimistic, they attempted to make inroads with Maine’s Catholic Indians—the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy—who consistently rejected their advances. So most missionary energy was spent on the white settlers who had recently moved north from southern New England.

Almost all of these itinerant ministers were employed by a missionary society. This meant they needed to keep a journal of their travels and the services rendered in order to be paid. Alfred Johnson was working for the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America (SPGNA).2 This Boston-based Congregational group was the first American missionary society to begin work after the Revolution, and it was the best funded, thanks to an annual grant from the Massachusetts Legislature. For years, the SPGNA had been sending ministers up to Maine with relatively simple instructions. Early on, they were simply asked to visit “eastern settlements.” Later, instructions got a bit more specific, referencing, for example, “the vacant towns and Plantations in the Counties of Hancock and Washington.”3 Itinerants were also asked to expand their missions by distributing books and pamphlets along their way. Having to carry increasing quantities of printed material around the frontier was a logistical challenge, and more demanding for the ministers than simply providing sermons and baptisms. But the fundamental mission—to bring religious services to as many needy families as possible—remained the same.

The year 1804 brought a significant reorientation. The SPGNA asked the Massachusetts legislature for more money in order to begin building a network of schools. The state agreed. And so the society asked Johnson and its other itinerants to go beyond their traditional role and to “map” the missionary field. It had previously been enough to preach at every available opportunity and distribute books. Specific data about the people one encountered was less important than covering a lot of ground. Now a more precise accounting was necessary. To create schools for the state the society needed to know who belonged to the state and what resources they already had. Ministers were instructed to “inform yourself as far as you can of the general state of the people . . . [and] the particular state of the several towns and plantations through which you pass” and assemble the resulting data into a chart.4

Reverend Johnson’s chart—filed away in the SPGNA papers at the Phillips Library in Rowley, Massachusetts—is not a traditional map. It does not provide the topography of the region, nor does it trace the borderline and the New Brunswick towns on its far side. And yet it provides an incredibly detailed picture of the eastern part of the District of Maine. Johnson laid out more than fifty towns and townships—providing the approximate population for each, the number of families in residence, where they had emigrated from, the local religious denominations, how many people were church members, how much money was raised for “public religious instruction,” the number of school and meeting houses, and the name of the local minister, if one existed. He was particularly meticulous about settlements in and around Passamaquoddy Bay, directly alongside the border. Johnson’s chart listed not only large communities—like Eastport on Moose Island, with 562 people—but also the tiniest of unnamed townships, like township one (twenty families and a little over 100 people) and township eleven (twenty-seven families). This chart, together with others produced by Johnson’s contemporaries, provided the SPGNA with a precise and comprehensive data map of the Maine missionary field.5

One striking thing about these missionary documents is their clarity regarding the boundary dividing Maine from New Brunswick. It appears that in 1804, to the people living in and visiting borderland communities, the boundary was a fixed reality. And yet on a diplomatic level this was not the case at all. Throughout the first two decades of the nineteenth century the precise location of the line was hotly contested. In a 1798 address to Congress, President Adams specifically highlighted Passamaquoddy Bay as a place where the border had yet to be negotiated. During the Jefferson administration—in the same years that SPGNA missionaries were creating their data maps—American and British diplomats argued over rights to the various Passamaquoddy Bay islands. The Americans emphasized the Royal Commission of 1763, which had attempted to clarify boundaries after the French and Indian War, to buttress their claims. The British pointed to the wording of early seventeenth-century land grants, which seemed to assign all the disputed territory to Nova Scotia.6 The British then tried to render the whole controversy irrelevant by invading and annexing eastern Maine during the War of 1812, only to be forced by the war’s conclusion to return to status quo ante bellum.

Even war and the resulting peace treaty did not settle matters. London and Washington continued to argue over the islands, especially the largest, Grand Manan, and the most populated, Moose Island. Traditional topographical maps were often enlisted as tools. An 1818 pamphlet promoting settlement in the British provinces featured a detailed map of Grand Manan, highlighting its strategic importance at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. To protect New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, its author wrote, the island had to be kept out of American hands. He was concerned, though, as he believed the island’s residents were potentially “tinctured with American manners and principles.”7 American mapmakers, for their part, simply started including all the disputed islands in maps of Maine. An American atlas published in 1824 made Grand Manan clearly a part of Washington County, Maine (and gave the state a much more generous northern border than what it would eventually receive).8 It was a battle of the maps: British subjects created maps that made the islands British, and American citizens created their own maps to do the opposite.

One prominent study of borders and frontiers in American history defines borderlands as “contested boundaries between colonial domains,” in which competition between rival states allows the inhabitants “room to maneuver and preserve some element of autonomy.” Another, focusing on the United States and Canada, characterizes a singular “borderland” as a place where a political boundary divides “people with common social characteristics.”9 In the postrevolutionary period, the area shared by the northeastern United States and British North America fit these definitions well. Stretching from the Bay of Fundy to the Great Lakes, it was a large zone of borderlands in which people frequently contested national boundaries. In northern Maine, for example, no permanent line would be drawn until 1842. In Vermont, the need to ship goods into the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence River led to a great deal of transnational negotiation and political intrigue.10 This chapter focuses on the easternmost part of the zone, a borderland shared by the District of Maine and the Province of New Brunswick.11 The American citizens and British subjects living in this region certainly had common social characteristics. Many on both sides had moved north from southern New England before the war, and almost all were Protestant English speakers.

There are two distinct kinds of documents in the archives that deal with this borderland, and they tell conflicting stories. State Department papers and traditional maps of the region from the first decades of the nineteenth century present a flexible border. The data maps created by Maine missionaries during the same years present a fixed border. This dissonance arises from the way the two different groups saw the region and the questions they asked about it. On the one hand diplomats, and others looking from afar, saw this borderland in an abstract way, as a place of competing claims and precedents. Their borders were aspirational. There is no evidence that diplomats used missionary documents to learn about conditions on the ground, because the experiences of the people who lived in the borderland mattered less than the legal case that could be made for drawing the line a certain way. This was about using maps to make bold claims. Missionaries, on the other hand, were more concerned with the people than with the land. As they focused more on books and schools than on sermons, they dealt with finite resources. What was the most efficient way to distribute those resources? Who actually belonged to the District of Maine, and what did they need? Legal justifications for potential adjustments of the border were not their concern.

Missionary papers also offer a window into the attitudes of borderland residents toward the flexibility and permeability of the line. The Jefferson administration made its claims, and patriotic mapmakers drew the maps they wished, but these people lived with the border. Where did they understand it to be? Who could cross it? Was shifting it actually a possibility? Missionary letters and journals consistently show a border that was less flexible than diplomats and traditional mapmakers made it out to be. Though residents on both sides often encouraged itinerant ministers to cross the line, everyone agreed on its location. The people of Moose Island knew they were in Maine, regardless of what the British claimed. The people of Grand Manan Island knew they were in New Brunswick, and thus American ministers did not bother trying to serve them.

As the missionaries traveled through Maine and created their data maps, they began to serve as border-makers themselves. The charts they submitted were used to determine resource allocation, and so by collecting and presenting data they were helping to solidify the boundary as they experienced it. Communities they mapped onto Maine through their charts saw more visits from itinerants, more books, and eventually schools. Communities they failed to include were ignored. This phenomenon—the border becoming fixed through the actions of the people visiting it and living around it—reverses a common understanding of border formation. Borders are often seen as structures imposed from above on a resistant populace. According to this thinking, diplomats draw lines on maps, and borderland people adapt to those lines. Multiple studies of Maine adopt this approach, arguing that post-Revolutionary British and American authorities drew and enforced a meaningful border, while nonstate actors like privateers and smugglers resisted and kept the border flexible.12 Missionary society sources from eastern Maine complicate this narrative. They present a situation in which distant authorities sparred over a boundary they (incorrectly) assumed was still negotiable, while itinerant ministers and their parishioners fixed the line in place. The diplomats should have paid more attention to what was happening in the communities they were haggling over. While they argued about the wording of old treaties, missionaries and their data maps were building a permanent border along the coast of Maine.

*  *  *

Debate over the precise location of the northeastern boundary began immediately after the Revolution and continued for decades. According to the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the eastern boundary of the United States was the “river Saint Croix, from its Mouth in the Bay of Fundy to its Source.” This phrasing may have seemed straightforward to negotiators in far-off France, but it quickly led to controversy in Maine. First, locals did not call any of the rivers “Saint Croix,” so that provoked immediate disagreement. Second, all of the rivers in question emptied into Passamaquoddy Bay, not the Bay of Fundy. And third, there were dozens of islands in the area to consider. The treaty awarded the United States “all islands within twenty leagues of [its] . . . shores,” while noting that this did not include “such islands as . . . heretofore have been within the limits of . . . Nova Scotia.” This provision again sounded simple but was in fact extremely complicated. The British and the Americans had conflicting ideas about which islands had “heretofore” been part of Nova Scotia.13

The question of the “true” river Saint Croix was settled first, though it took years of testimony from locals as well as archaeological excavation. Then the debate moved on to the islands. There are many islands in and around the bay, but only three really mattered to both sides: Moose, Campobello, and Grand Manan. For the Americans, the debate came down to proximity and common sense. All three islands are much closer to Maine than New Brunswick. Moose Island—the only one of the three the Americans would ultimately retain—is so close that it is now linked to the mainland by a causeway. Though Campobello is today part of New Brunswick, visitors arrive over a bridge from the town of Lubec, Maine. And Grand Manan is about seven miles off the coast of Maine, but eighteen miles from New Brunswick. When American diplomats presented their case for the islands, they almost always focused on this proximity. The US minister to Great Britain in 1803 argued that Campobello was obviously westward of any “suitable boundary line.” Moose Island was even farther west. Both would obviously be better administered from the United States. As for Grand Manan, the Americans pointed to the Royal Commission of 1763, which had divided Massachusetts from Nova Scotia by drawing a line from Cape Sable, across the Bay of Fundy, to the western tip of Passamaquoddy Bay. Grand Manan is west of that line. It was “clearly within the general limits of the United States,” according to Secretary of State James Madison, who asserted that “no just title can . . . be alleged on the British side.”14

The British argument was even more straightforward than the American. Every island belonged to New Brunswick, period. This position was most clearly articulated in a courtroom battle of 1805, in which an American citizen attempted to reclaim his seized ship from New Brunswick authorities. Ebenezer Lock’s sloop, Falmouth, had been picking up a load of gypsum in what Lock called the “principal channel” of the Saint Croix, between Campobello and Moose Islands, when it was captured by New Brunswick customs officials. Falmouth, Lock maintained, had been anchored in American waters, or shared waters at the very least. The British response attempted to settle the matter once and for all. Though Americans were trying to argue that there were still islands in dispute, they were wrong. There was no shared channel that needed negotiating. The whole of Passamaquoddy Bay was one arm of the Bay of Fundy. Any “principal” channel was limited to the river proper. The borderline thus ran along the mainland on the western side of the bay, and every island, no matter how close to Maine, was part of New Brunswick. If American ships had previously managed to trade unmolested in parts of the bay, it was “not from any doubt of His Majesty’s right to the islands, but because the Americans were in the actual possession of some of them, and it was not thought prudent . . . to dispossess them.” The New Brunswick court, unsurprisingly, ordered the Falmouth and its cargo to be forfeited.15

Not long afterward, American and British diplomats began again to negotiate the issue in London. Americans James Monroe and William Pinkney “argued in vain” for the American claim to Grand Manan Island. The British announced that they were in possession of that island and had been for years, and “possession . . . was a reasonable ground upon which to presume everything which constituted title.” When the Americans pointed out that this position ignored the actual stipulations of the treaty of peace, the British retorted that the American claim to Moose Island was also “very questionable.” For the time being, questionable claims could cancel each other out. At this point, the secretary of state asked his men to ease off, as he was concerned that trade between the United States and British North America was “more beneficial to the United States than to those colonies.” Around the time of this dispute, the Americans were importing somewhere between thirty and fifty tons of gypsum per year from the Maritime colonies to use as fertilizer. The Falmouth had been participating in this trade when it was seized for straying into British waters. Madison worried that a provoked New Brunswick might shut down the gypsum trade entirely. Monroe and Pinkney reluctantly agreed to “leave the case of Grand Manan for future adjustment.” There the negotiations ended for the time being, with the line unsettled, but a profitable trading relationship preserved.16

Part of the reason the British were willing to delay settling the border issue for so long was that they had designs on more than just the islands. Many in British North America felt that the Penobscot River was a more reasonable boundary for Maine. That would attach about a third of today’s Maine to New Brunswick and provide for a much more direct connection between Nova Scotia and Quebec. During the War of 1812, Lord Bathurst, the secretary for war and the colonies, sent orders to Nova Scotia to “rectify” the boundary by occupying “that part of the District of Maine which at present intercepts the communication between Halifax and Quebec.”17 In August 1814, British forces invaded and occupied everything east of the Penobscot River.

The British obviously hoped the new boundary would be permanent, but even if it was not, they were determined to keep the Passamaquoddy Bay islands. Soon after the invasion, all men on Moose Island were forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the king. In the mainland part of the occupied zone men had a choice: They could swear the oath to the king, or a different oath that pledged them only to behave “peaceably and quietly,” and refrain from carrying arms.18 Even after the war, when Americans took back control of Maine, British forces refused to evacuate Moose Island. They occupied it for three more years before finally giving up and departing in 1818. This evacuation created some uncertainty on the British side. If Americans had managed to wrest possession of Moose Island from New Brunswick, what else might they do? Was any island safe? Meanwhile, American mapmakers became more assertive, boldly including all the Passamaquoddy Islands in maps of the newly independent state of Maine.19

As late as the 1820s, those looking at the region from afar saw the boundary as unfixed. It was a line on a map, which had the potential to be drawn and redrawn, altered by force, or left for future adjustment. To people who lived there, however, that line became fixed much earlier. Though the border was permeable, and crossing or trading over it was routine, no one seems to have expected it to shift. And as missionary societies supplied ever more resources to Maine communities and mapped out the limits of their mission fields more precisely, changes to the boundary became more and more unlikely.

As diplomats maneuvered, the region they were attempting to delineate saw flourishing missionary activity. The population of northern New England was increasing exponentially, and the District of Maine was the epicenter. It had about one hundred thousand residents in 1790. By 1810 that more than doubled, and by 1820 it tripled.20 Similar, if slightly slower, growth took place in New Hampshire, Vermont, upstate New York, and the Ohio country. In many cases, the fastest growth happened in the most remote settlements, directly alongside the border: Passamaquoddy Bay in Maine, the Champlain Valley in Vermont, the Genesee country in New York, and the Western Reserve in Ohio.

Members of Congregational Church organizations in southern New England were greatly concerned by this growth. The settlers were “our fellow Citizens,” and without preaching, Bibles, or schools for their children, they might lose all “principles of Religion and morality.”21 In the late 1780s, Boston’s SPGNA began to hire ministers to itinerate in Maine, and the Missionary Society of Connecticut arose to serve that state’s emigrants in Vermont and New York. Both organizations also promoted the need for outreach to the Indians, but in private decided that outreach was impractical. Native American communities in Maine were Catholic, having been converted by the French in the seventeenth century, and they flatly rejected all overtures from Protestants. The Connecticut society sometimes tried sending ministers to Native towns in New York, but they failed to make much progress either. The societies responded by devoting almost all their resources to white settlers in “the back settlements.” Their successes led to a flood of similar societies, all collaborating on the same goal. The Berkshire and Columbia Missionary Society, the Massachusetts Missionary Society, the Evangelical, Hampshire, New Hampshire, and Maine Missionary Societies—each added more funding and ministers to the network. By 1810 these societies together had achieved remarkably thorough coverage, reaching even the newest and most remote communities in the northeastern states.

The papers of these missionary societies provide a wealth of ground-level detail on life in the northeastern borderlands. Itinerant ministers were required to submit detailed descriptions of their travels before receiving payment. In some cases—the SPGNA, for one—these letters and journals themselves survive. In others, summaries of missionary activity, complete with excerpts from letters, were published in annual reports. As time went on the societies began to focus more on sending printed material to the settlements, and so they required ever more precise accounting. Ministers were asked to detail exact numbers of each title, how many copies went to each town, and what contributions they collected from locals. This change brought a certain level of defensiveness about border crossing, as well. A minister providing only sermons might not need to justify a quick trip over the line in search of an audience. Once he was assigned a particular county, however, and was entrusted with books, time spent in New Brunswick rather than Maine required an explanation. Ministers wrote of locals asking them to cross over, or of the locals crossing themselves in search of preaching. The result is an extensive collection of reports from the ground in borderland communities, in which the permeability of the border can be tracked over time.

It is clear that borderland residents believed there was a line, knew where it was, and understood that it demarcated their rights as American citizens or British subjects. But they often dismissed the idea that the border should serve as a hard barrier for preachers. One reason was the wide variety of preachers operating in the northeast in the late eighteenth century. When emigrants from southern New England first began to move to what became Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine in the 1760s, they brought their Congregational Churches with them. As settlement accelerated after the Revolution, however, religious enthusiasm and itinerant preaching grew in tandem. Even though the Congregational was the established church of Massachusetts, and the Anglican the established church of British North America, all sorts of ministers were circulating. Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists all vied to reach the burgeoning settlements. In Nova Scotia, a particularly charismatic preacher named Henry Alline inspired the “New Light” movement. Even Catholic priests made their rounds to serve Native communities and the small groups of Irish Catholics that were beginning to arrive. By the 1780s and 1790s the region had become a thriving religious marketplace. As an example, one study counted at least twenty-six distinct itinerant preachers visiting the community of Liverpool, Nova Scotia in those years. There were fifteen Methodists, eight New Lights, two Quakers, and a Presbyterian.22

Most of these men paid little attention to the international boundary after it was created. Many in British territory were originally from New England. They had emigrated north as children and saw all English-speaking settlers as souls to be saved, regardless of whether they were subjects or citizens. And though settlements on both sides of the border were growing, northern New England was growing the fastest. Henry Alline (born in Rhode Island) set an example by crossing to Maine just after the peace in 1783. He aimed to itinerate all the way to Boston, but took ill and died while preaching in New Hampshire. By the 1790s, at least five Nova Scotia New Lights were regular visitors to eastern Maine: James and Edward Manning, James Murphy, Daniel Shaw, and Elijah Estabrooks. Murphy and the Manning brothers even managed to establish a New Light church in Machias, Maine—by harassing the local Congregational minister and “publicly . . . mention[ing] him, in prayers, as an unconverted person,” until he left. The people of Machias apparently did not discriminate against these preachers from British territory. Good preaching was welcome, regardless of what direction it came from.23

As a result, when Congregational itinerants began to visit the region from southern New England, they crossed the border as well. Ministers preached wherever they could find an audience, even if it was in British territory. The instructions they received in those years also tended to encourage a laissez-faire attitude toward the mission fields. The first public statements from the Connecticut Missionary Society were quite vague, specifying only “destitute settlements” populated by “brethren emigrants.”24 Some men demanded more guidance. When Rev. Daniel Staniford was asked to attend to “the settlements on Connecticut River, adjacent to . . . Lower Canada,” he complained about receiving “no particular instructions from the Society.”25 When the SPGNA assigned Levi Frisbie to “the eastern settlements,” Frisbie requested “further Instructions respecting the extent and bounds of my circuit.”26

Crossing the border was especially simple in eastern Maine, because of the constant communication between British and American towns by water. It must have been refreshing, after struggling along between tiny settlements served by poor roads, to be able to simply row across the bay from one large town to the next. Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine, was one preacher who took advantage. On his first mission trip, in 1801, Fisher preached his way up the coast to Passamaquoddy Bay, and then carried on over the line into British territory. In his journal, Fisher mentioned big crowds in New Brunswick. He preached in at least three different towns and claimed to have drawn “probably more than 200 persons, of four if not five denominations” for one sermon.27 Another Maine minister, Jotham Sewall, spent years serving the eastern towns of the district for the Massachusetts Missionary Society, before eventually deciding that he too should go ahead and cross the border. He visited Reverend Fisher on at least one of his trips eastward, which might have affected his thinking. Perhaps Fisher told him about his sizable New Brunswick audiences. On Sewall’s second or third trip to the borderland, he tested the waters with a quick visit over the line. The following year he did much more, preaching multiple times in just about every sizable community on the British side of the bay.28

Another factor playing into this border crossing was pressure from the parishioners themselves. As mentioned above, there was constant communication between British and American settlements over the water. Locals were sometimes frustrated by missionaries’ reluctance to cross such an easily crossable border. As missionary societies provided more circumscribed mission fields, ministers sometimes wrote that they were being pressured to ignore the border. Alexander Maclean found himself in this sort of situation in the summer of 1803, as he was performing a mission for the SPGNA. After weeks of successful itinerating in western Maine and along the coast, Maclean headed for the “plantations bordering on New Brunswick” in mid-August. When he arrived, however, he had trouble finding a crowd. He began visiting one home at a time—directed from family to family, most often by the woman of the house. A Mrs. Goddard referred him to her sister Mrs. Brewers, who then suggested that Maclean cross the border and visit the Methodist preacher Duncan McColl. This provided quite a reversal of fortune. After lots of “edifying discourse,” McColl recommended that Maclean preach on the British side instead. McColl claimed that he regularly crossed to speak on the American side, and that people from both sides of the river would probably attend. Maclean “cheerfully consented . . . as there appeared to me no prospect of having an assembly [in Maine].” The next day “a very solemn and attentive” audience showed up for his sermon, “tho very few from the American side of the river.”29

The day after Maclean’s sermon, a man named Cales from the New Brunswick town of St. Andrews introduced himself. Cales was originally from Essex County, Massachusetts—and so not all that different from the many Massachusetts settlers on the American side of the river. He asked Maclean to come preach in St. Andrews too. Maclean said no, at first. He was uncomfortable and noted that it was “entirely out of my power & inconsistent with my engagement.” Cales was disappointed, but asked when the minister might reach Robbinston, Maine. Robbinston was easily accessible from St. Andrews, and if the minister would not cross over, the listeners themselves would. Maclean was a bit frustrated by the whole experience. His next sermon on the American side of the line “had but few hearers.” Then he departed, as he wrote to the SPGNA, “having received the kindest treatment from the people on the British side of the river,” and nothing but disinterest from the Americans.30

This was not the last that the SPGNA heard from the people of St. Andrews. The town had one minister in residence—an Anglican, coincidentally named Reverend Andrews—but he was getting older and could not preach every week. The parishioners were obviously quite aware of ministerial services on the other side of the river. A few years after Maclean’s visit, a Reverend Oliver spent much of 1805 and 1806 traveling around eastern Maine. It appears from his letters that while visiting Eastport he made several visits to St. Andrews. Then, in 1817, Reverend Daniel Lovejoy provided the SPGNA with an explanation of what was happening. Lovejoy wrote that he knew the society wanted his services “principally performed in Robbinston,” and also that he was not supposed to preach in places where there was a settled minister. The trouble was that people from St. Andrews kept attending his services and pressing him to preach on the British side. When he finally agreed, “the people attended remarkably well . . . I had many more hearers in this place than any other, where I preached during my mission.” So Lovejoy began visiting St. Andrews every Sabbath; it appears he preached in the morning in Maine, and in the afternoon or evening in New Brunswick.31

Rev. Lovejoy, like Alexander Maclean, felt defensive about the border crossing. He took pains to mention that he knew St. Andrews was “within the British dominions,” but that the aged Anglican clergymen had given his blessing to the visits. He also noted that the cash donation from the people of St. Andrews—twenty dollars—was the second largest total that he managed to collect in his travels. The St. Andrews parishioners apparently also sent a letter to explain the situation and confirm Lovejoy’s story. Alexander Maclean had adopted a similarly defensive tone in complaining about his American audiences a few years earlier. Many people on the New Brunswick side were originally from America anyway: “The inhabitants on the [eastern] side . . . are partly Americans partly British, [and] . . . a kind hospitable, religious people.” And yet neither the cash donations nor the ambiguous nationality of these borderland people seems to have swayed the SPGNA. After 1804, they were committed to collecting information on Maine settlements so as to better distribute their resources in Maine. Though they sent Lovejoy back to Robbinston repeatedly over the following years, he never again mentioned crossing the border. The SPGNA may have asked him to stop, or he might have decided that the St. Andrews visits were frowned upon and kept them unofficial.32

Documents exploring this dynamic from the British provinces into the United States are a little harder to come by. This dearth arises in part because the New England missionary societies sent many more preachers to the borderland than did British missionary societies. The few sources that do exist, however, seem to confirm a similar experience. The London Missionary Society (LMS) provides the most direct comparison with the various New England missionary societies. The LMS and the New England societies were all Congregational organizations (“dissenters” in England), they communicated with each other, and they shared essentially the same goals. The LMS was outnumbered by the New England societies, but it was large and wealthy and aimed to serve places as far afield as the Cape of Good Hope and the South Pacific. Although the LMS saw British North America as a minor part of its field, it did occasionally send ministers there. It appears from their letters that crossing the border was just as easy from the British side, and borderland Americans just as welcoming to visiting preachers.33

In 1800, the LMS sent two men, Clark Benton and John Mitchell, to Lower Canada (today Quebec). The LMS was responding to a letter from Protestant English speakers in Quebec City, who were dissatisfied with their preaching options. Quebec was overwhelmingly Catholic and French speaking, but the city had one Anglican and one Presbyterian minister to serve Protestants. Apparently, there was a market for a dissenting minister. Benton and Mitchell were instructed to go where they were needed within the province, so upon arrival Benton chose to stay in Quebec City, and Mitchell ended up in New Carlisle, a small fishing community on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In Quebec, Benton hired a room for Sunday services and attempted to assemble a congregation. By about a year later he claimed fifty or sixty weekly listeners, though he also complained about a lack of books and communication from London.34

Benton had a difficult time in Quebec City. The established Anglican and Presbyterian communities were unfriendly and attacked him for attempting to perform marriages and baptisms. In 1803 he decided to cross the border temporarily to get a pamphlet published that responded to his critics. Benton was thrilled to be in the States, where apparently he finally felt welcomed. The Connecticut Missionary Society had been serving small towns in the Champlain Valley of Vermont and New York for years, so the arrival of a random preacher was a common occurrence. Benton made his way south, preaching in Middlebury and Cornwall, Vermont, and Albany and Troy, New York. Around Albany he had his pamphlet printed, attended a couple of ordinations, and was even invited to preach to an assembly of ministers. His letters made pointed mention—in an ironic reversal of Maclean’s experience in Passamaquoddy Bay—of how nice and welcoming the Americans were compared to the decidedly unfriendly atmosphere in Lower Canada. Benton took his time heading back north, itinerating around Vermont for a while and preaching in a few more towns. Finally he made his way to Quebec City, presented his (apparently quite pointed) pamphlet, and was promptly arrested and imprisoned for libel.35

Very few British ministers ventured as far into the United States as Benton did. Those who briefly popped over the border, though, in the same manner as SPGNA ministers around Passamaquoddy Bay, seem to have been received well. Methodist Church records from New Brunswick indicate that Duncan McColl did indeed preach in Maine regularly, just as he told Alexander Maclean. In 1804, McColl reported to superiors in Halifax that he “frequently spent some months . . . in the U. States.” A few years later he claimed to have sparked a minor revival in Calais, Maine, just across the river from his home in St. Stephen. Some American women had asked him to come preach, which led to “powerful conversions.”36 Even Rev. Andrews in St. Andrews crossed over to Robbinston once in a while, though mostly to baptize babies rather than to preach.37

This freedom to cross the border and maximize one’s audience aligned well with the goals of the New England missionary societies when they were first organized. In their earliest mission statements most societies were quite expansive. They announced plans to serve all in need of the gospel, wherever they might be. When Connecticut Congregationalists first began to organize their missionary efforts, they wrote of the “destitute state of the settlements now forming in the wilderness to the Westward and N. Westward of us . . . many of whom are our Brethren Emigrants.”38 There was no reason for this missionizing to exclude settlements in British territory, which were also populated by many Connecticut emigrants. The SPGNA put its broad vision directly into its name, specifying “Indians and others in North America,” rather than the United States. It did not intend at first to focus on the District of Maine; that situation developed over time, as the society collected more money from the Massachusetts legislature. In its early years, the SPGNA occasionally sent ministers west instead of east and provided services to at least one Indian community in New York. Another group, the Maine Missionary Society, was even more ambitious. Due to the “great objects which the society have in view,” it investigated the possibility of sending missionaries west to the Mississippi country, or even east to Africa. The stated goal of the Maine society was to “send the glorious gospel to those who are destitute of . . . religious instruction.” This description applied to people just about anywhere.39

The SPGNA was the first of the missionary societies to align itself explicitly with state government and treat state boundaries as the limits of its mission field. It began that process in 1791, when it secured an annual grant from the Massachusetts legislature with the promise to “disseminate the principles of religion and morality” in the District of Maine.40 The SPGNA used that grant to pay the salaries of the ministers itinerating in the district, which freed its remaining funds for books and pamphlets. The society purchased massive numbers of books—not just Bibles and testaments, but also spelling books, primers, and other works for children. By 1800 SPGNA ministers had distributed close to nine thousand books in communities throughout the northeast. The focus on books had a side effect of reducing border crossing as well; the word of God was free to all, but books cost money and were intended for Maine citizens. Jonathan Fisher, now working for the SPGNA, wrote of delivering a “horse load” of books along a 118-mile circuit of eastern Maine between Penobscot Bay and the border. Though he may have remembered his big New Brunswick audiences fondly, he did not report bringing them any books.41

In 1804 the SPGNA raised the stakes in its partnership with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Instead of promising to spread morality and civilization in a general way, the SPGNA offered itself more explicitly as a partner in state-building. The society and the state, it turned out, had a great deal in common. Maine was experiencing an increasing amount of political and religious turbulence. As one SPGNA missionary put it in 1797, “the religious state of Maine is not as one could wish.” The district was crawling with “zealous” Baptists, Methodists, New Lights, and many others, preachers who lacked training and “scriptural knowledge” and who led the unwary into “a religious [sic] of the imagination & into strange & very hurtful opinions.”42 Furthermore, many Maine settlers distrusted educated preachers, labeling them “grand folks.” The Congregationalists felt that they were losing ground in the spiritual marketplace, but they started to see schools as a way to reverse this trend. In towns where missionaries served as both preacher and schoolmaster, they were more appreciated in the latter role. One missionary in the town of Ellsworth made it clear that the townspeople only tolerated his presence for the sake of their children’s education. An Ellsworth committee wrote to the missionary society with the same message, noting that the whole town wanted Rev. Nurse for a teacher, but only half wanted him for a preacher.43

This focus on schools coincided with a gradual narrowing of the expansive missionary work the societies had anticipated. Though the kingdom of God was vast, and the need for missionaries global, there was a lot of demand to be met in the American backcountry. There was also a growing recognition that British organizations like the London Missionary Society were partners rather than rivals. The Connecticut Missionary Society exchanged letters with the LMS and published excerpts in its periodical. According to one such letter, there was “a glorious space to traverse” between British and American territory, and itinerants from both sides would eventually meet in the middle: “The Atlantic flowing between prevents not our united hands and hearts from cordially meeting in this work.” Readers knew that the LMS sent ministers to Canada and other parts of British North America, and so those places were covered. New Englanders could feel free to concentrate on their own backyard, where those troublesome Maine settlers were being seduced by unlettered Baptists.44

While the Congregationalists had religious anxiety about Maine, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had political anxiety. The families moving to the northeastern frontier needed to be reminded that they fell under Boston’s authority. The 1790s had seen a resurgence of backcountry resistance to large landowners, especially in the newly settled towns of central Maine. Massachusetts legislators did not know what was more troubling, the chaos caused by these “liberty men” in their attacks on land surveyors, or the possibility that they would give up on settling in Maine. If the state failed to provide, these people could move west—or worse, to British territory. The SPGNA directly addressed this fear in its petition for more funding. Expanding the mission to include schools would give Massachusetts an edge by inducing “people of sober life and conversation” to choose the District of Maine “in preference to going into New York, the Canadas and other places without the Commonwealth.” Schools were particularly necessary in the borderland around Passamaquoddy Bay, since those towns were “situated near the people of a foreign province, the sovereign of which, regards the conditions of his subjects in the wilderness with a tender eye.” Massachusetts certainly did not wish to be outmaneuvered by the tender eye of George III.45

Some people in Massachusetts were concerned about the possibility of Maine becoming an independent state. The missionary society was asking for a thousand dollars, which was double its previous grant. Why spend all this money to set up schools in a place that might break away from the Commonwealth entirely? The SPGNA petition addressed the issue by arguing, essentially, that state boundaries mattered less than national boundaries. Whether Maine became independent or not, the people there would always be “our brethren.” Should “events of a future day sever them from this state . . . they [would] remain a part of the nation.” And Massachusetts would always have an interest in the development of Maine’s economy and commerce.46 These arguments seem to have quieted any doubts about the wisdom of funding operations in Maine. A legislative committee responded warmly, thanking the SPGNA for its “essential service . . . with incalculable benefits to the inhabitants and to the Commonwealth.”47 The state approved the increased grant.

And so the SPGNA asked its ministers to expand their work. They had been preachers; now they became census takers of a sort. What the SPGNA asked for, however, went beyond the simple survey that was the US census. Under the Constitution, the decennial census simply counted the population, sorting people based on age, sex, and status as free or enslaved. The SPGNA asked for not only numbers, but also “the general state of the people . . . [and] the particular state of the several towns and plantations through which you pass.” Ministers were supposed to paint a detailed picture with this data about who exactly these people were and how willing and able they were to support churches. The SPGNA may also have provided more specific guidance in letters that have not survived, because several ministers submitted charts with extremely precise detail. Benjamin Chadwick, after spending the summer of 1804 serving Kennebec and Lincoln counties, produced a neat grid detailing the forty-two towns he visited, their populations, where their residents had emigrated from, what denominations were present, the “religious disposition” and ability to support schools, and the number of existing schoolhouses and houses of worship.48 The same year in Hancock and Washington counties, Alfred Johnson contributed his aforementioned chart of more than fifty towns and townships, with a similar level of detail.49

SPGNA ministers were particularly careful with their accounting of communities close to New Brunswick. Alfred Johnson’s chart divided Washington County into two parts: a “North Circle” around Machias and an “East Circle” directly on the border. The largest settlement in the area was Eastport, on Moose Island, which had 100 families and over 500 people. Johnson seems to have taken for granted that Moose Island was part of Maine, and he spent a significant amount of time there. But Johnson also accounted for the tiniest of unnamed townships, many with only a handful of families. Another unsigned and undated chart from the SPGNA records (likely from the same year) divided the borderland towns into “About Passamaquoddy” and “On Schoodic River.” The Schoodic was the local name for the Saint Croix, so towns “on Schoodic” were directly across the river from New Brunswick. This person traveled up the river to unnamed townships number six and seven, reporting that only ten families lived there, and that they had no money to support schools or the gospel. The anonymous itinerant, like Johnson, was much more bullish on Moose Island and Eastport, writing that it had considerable prospects and would be a place of great consequence in trade.50

These charts of the Maine borderland were intended to facilitate the establishment of schools, but they did more than that. Compiling the data maps changed the way Congregational missionaries understood their field. In their earliest missions, preachers had been asked to look for destitute settlements and people in need. They were supposed to find an audience. It was not that difficult to convince Alexander Maclean to cross into New Brunswick because he felt that his job, at least in part, was to reach the maximum number of people. Now, in 1804, SPGNA employees were being asked to take a step back. Instead of assembling an audience, they were to provide a statistical picture of the district. The picture they provided altered the work of itinerants even once the focus returned to preaching.

Ephraim Abbott accepted a SPGNA mission to Passamaquoddy Bay in 1811. Like his predecessors, he did most of his preaching in the larger towns of Robbinston, Schoodic (Calais), and Eastport. Yet Abbott also made several trips upriver to preach in those tiny numbered townships recorded in the 1804 charts. He mentioned specific visits to townships one, three, six, seven, twelve, and seventeen.51 Abbott could easily have devoted some time to the New Brunswick towns on the other side of the river. He could also have visited Campobello or Grand Manan Island, which were close by and had lots of settlers, many of whom were recent emigrants from the United States. Islands in the bay were far more accessible than tiny, remote, upriver townships—and the crowds would have been better. But neither island had been included in the data maps compiled by SPGNA missionaries. These maps helped the border evolve into more of a barrier for Abbott than it had been in the past. The society and its missionaries knew exactly which communities they would be serving. These changing ideas about the border also help explain why Daniel Lovejoy was so apologetic in his letters of 1817, explaining that he knew the town of St. Andrews was British, and that he was not really supposed to be preaching there. SPGNA ministers were supposed to be improving the lives of Maine settlers. Preaching to “brethren” emigrants wherever they might be was no longer the mission.

*  *  *

Borders are sometimes fixed in place through intense, high-level diplomatic processes. Empires and nations challenge each other with conflicting maps, fighting to lock down their peripheries. But this is not always how border-making works. Sometimes lines can be fixed through collaboration, rather than conflict, and this is what happened in the early nineteenth-century District of Maine. Itinerant American ministers came to an understanding with their British counterparts. They asked for and received state funding to allow them to expand their book distribution and open schools. Then they built the data maps they needed to serve their borderland parishioners and began distributing resources accordingly. Though diplomats continued for years to draw and debate lines on maps, the actual work was done on the ground. Missionaries mapped the data, and the data maps created a meaningful border.

Notes

1. 1.  It was called the “District” of Maine because until 1820 Maine was part of Massachusetts.
2. 2.  The SPGNA should not be confused with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), an Anglican organization. The British SPG could no longer operate in the United States after the Revolution. Boston Congregationalists explicitly modeled their society on the SPG’s example, but they were not Anglican and the two groups had little to do with one another.
3. 3.  Levi Frisbie Letter, Folder 11, Box 2; Samuel Eaton Letters, Folder 5, Box 2, Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America papers, Phillips Library, Rowley, MA (hereafter SPGNA, PL).
4. 4.  Instructions to Missionaries, 1804, Folder 1, Box 8, SPGNA, PL.
5. 5.  Alfred Johnson Letter, Folder 1, Box 3, SPGNA, PL.
6. 6.  Francis M. Carroll, A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783–1842 (University of Toronto Press, 2001), 38–40.
7. 7.  Anthony Lockwood, Brief Description of Nova Scotia with Plates of the Principal Harbors; Including a Particular Account of the Island of Grand Manan (Printed for the Author by G. Hayden Brydges St. Covent Garden, 1818).
8. 8.  Map of Maine, Finley’s New General Atlas (Jos. Perkins, 1824).
9. 9.  Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 814–41; Lauren McKinsey and Victor Konrad, Borderlands Reflections: The United States and Canada (Borderlands Project, Canadian-American Center, 1989).
10. 10.  For example, the Ira Allen canal affair, in which Vermonter Allen attempted to organize a French invasion of Canada because London would not finance a canal project. For the whole saga, see J. Kevin Graffagnino, “‘Twenty Thousand Muskets!!!’: Ira Allen and the Olive Branch Affair, 1796–1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1991): 409–31.
11. 11.  Maine, at the time, was still part of the state of Massachusetts. It would become an independent state in 1820. New Brunswick was one of the newest provinces of British North America, having split off from Nova Scotia in 1784.
12. 12.  Edward J. Martin, “The Prize Game in the Borderlands: Privateering in New England and the Maritime Provinces, 1775–1815” (PhD diss., University of Maine, 2014); Joshua Smith, Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783–1820 (University Press of Florida, 2006).
13. 13.  The Paris Peace Treaty of September 30, 1783, The Avalon Project, Yale University, accessed May 22, 2019, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp. Samuel Champlain dubbed a river in the area “Saint Croix” during his explorations of the early seventeenth century, so European maps included that name.
14. 14.  James Madison to James Monroe, 15 May 1806; Monroe and Pinkney to Madison, 25 April 1807, in Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Canadian Relations, 1784–1860, ed. William Manning (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1940), 172, 589.
15. 15.  “The Question of the Rights of the U.S.A. to the Islands in Passamaquoddy Bay, by virtue of the Treaty of 1783, considered in the case of the Sloop Falmouth, in the court of Vice Admiralty, for the Province of New Brunswick, in the year 1805.” Printed by J. Ryan, Printer to His Majesty, Folder 24, Box 1, Barclay Collection, Maine Historical Society (hereafter MEHS), Portland, ME.
16. 16.  What seems to have worried Madison was the potential for a slew of cases like that of the Falmouth. Gypsum fertilizer was important to the economies of the northeastern states. The gypsum trade involved a lot of small ships on both sides and depended on weak enforcement of trading regulations. British decisions to enforce the letter of the law would have seriously affected the US economy. Madison to Monroe and Pinkney, 17 May 1806, in Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence, 173; Monroe and Pinkney to Madison, 25 April 1807, in Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence, 595–96; Gerald Graham, Sea Power and British North America, 1783–1820: A Study in British Colonial Policy (Harvard University Press, 1941), 171.
17. 17.  Robert Dallison, A Neighbourly War: New Brunswick and the War of 1812 (Goose Lane Editions, 2012), 90–96; George F. W. Young, The Capture and Occupation of Downeast Maine, 1814–1815/1818 (Penobscot Books, 2014), 12–13.
18. 18.  Proclamation, Governor John Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia Gazette, 5 October 1814, in Young, Capture and Occupation, 106–11.
19. 19.  See for example Anthony Finley’s 1827 map of Maine: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1827_Finley_Map_of_Maine_-_Geographicus_-_Maine-finley-1827.jpg.
20. 20.  Publius Research, “Population Since 1741,” Maine: An Encyclopedia, accessed June 18, 2019, https://maineanencyclopedia.com/population-since-1741/.
21. 21.  Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1791–1792 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1869–1886), 563.
22. 22.  Elizabeth Mancke, The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1760–1830 (Routledge, 2005), 122; for the religious marketplace in the United States, see Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989); Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Harvard University Press, 1982). For the marketplace in Maritime Canada, see George Rawlyk, Wrapped Up in God: A Study of Several Canadian Revivals and Revivalists (Welch Publishing, 1988); Rawlyk, The Canada Fire: Radical Evangelicalism in British North America (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994).
23. 23.  Stephen Jones to Edward Manning, The Newlight Baptist Journals of James Manning and James Innis, ed. D. G. Bell (Lancelot Press, 1984), 92; Mancke, Fault Lines, 117.
24. 24.  Meeting minutes, 22 June 1775, Folder 15, Box 1, Congregational Churches in Connecticut General Association. Records, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.
25. 25.  Daniel Staniford Letter, Folder 43, Box 1, New Hampshire Missionary Society Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, NH.
26. 26.  Levi Frisbie Letter, Folder 11, Box 2, SPGNA, PL.
27. 27.  Jonathan Fisher Journal, Mss Boxes F, Jonathan Fisher Papers 1791–1826, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA.
28. 28.  Rev. Jotham Sewall (Jr.), A Memoir of Rev. Jotham Sewall of Chesterville, Maine (Tappan and Whittemore, 1853), 120–50.
29. 29.  Alexander Maclean Journal, Folder 7, Box 3, SPGNA, PL.
30. 30.  Ibid.
31. 31.  Daniel Lovejoy Letters, Folder 6, Box 3, SPGNA, PL.
32. 32.  Ibid., and Alexander Maclean Journal, Folder 7, Box 3, SPGNA, PL.
33. 33.  London Missionary Society, Continent of America, Incoming Correspondence, Box 1B: Canada, SOAS Archives and Special Collections, London, UK.
34. 34.  Ibid.
35. 35.  Ibid.
36. 36.  McColl to William Black, 6 August 1804, and Black to Robert Smith, 11 July 1814, MC990, Microfilm Reel #9720, Wesleyan Methodist Church Foreign Missions Fonds, Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (hereafter PANB), Fredericton, NB.
37. 37.  St. Andrews, NB, Anglican Church records, Microfilm Roll #F1082, PANB.
38. 38.  Meeting minutes, 22 June 1775, Folder 15, Box 1, Congregational Churches in Connecticut General Association. Records, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT.
39. 39.  Trustee Records 1807–1829, Vol. 1, Maine Missionary Society Records, MEHS; “Address of the Maine Missionary Society to the Public,” 1808, ECL 5.26, MEHS.
40. 40.  Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1791–1792, 563.
41. 41.  Jonathan Fisher Journal, Mss Boxes F, Jonathan Fisher Papers 1791–1826, AAS.
42. 42.  Paul Coffin letter, 1797, Folder 22, Box 1, SPGNA, PL.
43. 43.  Nurse to Thayer, 21 May 1811; Committee to Thayer, 26 January 1811, Folder 2, Box 1, Evangelical Missionary Society in Massachusetts records, 1808–1914, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA.
44. 44.  Connecticut Evangelical Magazine, Volume 1, Number 1, July 1800, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT. For the idea of a vast kingdom of God, see Emily Conroy-Krutz, “The Vast Kingdom of God,” William and Mary Quarterly 78, no. 2 (April 2021): 222–29.
45. 45.  Petition, 30 January 1804, Folder 1, Box 6, SPGNA, PL; for liberty men and backcountry resistance, see Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
46. 46.  Petition, 30 January 1804, Folder 1, Box 6, SPGNA, PL.
47. 47.  Response from the Legislature, Folder 1, Organizational Records and Miscellaneous Bills and Receipts, 1791–1807, Box 8, SPGNA, PL.
48. 48.  Benjamin Chadwick Letter, Folder 17, Box 1, SPNGA, PL.
49. 49.  Alfred Johnson Letter, Folder 1, Box 3, SPGNA, PL.
50. 50.  Oversized Folder 1, Financial Papers 1789–1830, SPGNA, PL.
51. 51.  Ephriam Abbott Journal, Folder 1, Box 1, SPGNA, PL.