R. to Frederick Douglass, September 22, 1855

MATTERS IN MAINE.

PORTLAND, Sept. 22, 1855.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Esq :—The result of the election in Maine is now fully known, but the cause or causes which brought the result—so disastrous to the Republicans—seems to be but little understood, or if understood, but partially confessed, by the anti-Administration throughout the North. Now, we propose to give our opinion upon the subject, and shall ask you to publish the same though you may differ with us in opinion never so widely.

The Republican party in Maine are beaten, beaten badly, and there is no use to disguise the fact, or to lay it to other causes than the real ones. There is no use in laving our defeat to the imprudent language of Senator Wade, on the one hand, nor to the Reed Whigs, on the other; for it was neither the one, nor the other, nor both. What broke the "backbone" of the Republican party, was, in shouldering Neal Dow, Elders Peck, Weaver, and the like, in upholding the Maine liquor law, and in de[illegible] the City Government of Portland, or some of the members thereof for their cowardly actions in the rum riot of the 2d of June last, the finale of which was the murder of young Bobbins and the wounding of several of the citizens of Portland. Enough to break the "backbone" of any party! Falstaff on the back of a mouse were a light load in comparison with that which the Republican party,

carried on the back throughout the entire campaign. The Republicans occupied a false position from the beginning of the canvas to the end. They were not driven into it by their opponents, but blindly choose the position for themselves, or allowed their leaders to make the choice for them. It would seem as though such men as Fessenden, Kent, Washburn, and others, should have been wise enough not to have gone into the campaign as the especial champions of an unpopular law, a law which their opponents passed, but by them repudiated because of its unpopularity. Was this not occupying a false as well as foolish position? I know not how to account for this art of folly on the part of the Republican leaders except by believing with another that "A modest man may like what's not his own."

The murder of Robbins cost the Republicans 5,000 votes, and their going before the people as the advocates of the Maine law and the defenders of Neal Dow, Marshall Weaver, and the rest, 5,000 more. Can the Republicans afford to lose 10,000 votes, and thereby allow the State to pass into the control of President Pierce's office-holders, for the sake of being considered the friends of the Maine law, Neal Dow, and a few itinerant temperance lecturers? If they can do not let us hear them complain if Nebraska bills be passed at every session of Congress, or if Stringfellow carries into effect the law of "popular sovereignty" in Maine as well as in Kansas. It has always seemed strange to us how a hater of the Fugitive Slave bill could be an admirer of the Maine law.—Both laws deprive a man of a "fair and impartial" trial by jury. Nay, the fugitives gets no trial by jury at all—nor does the rumseller unless he chances to be rich. Now, why be sticklers for a jury trial for one man and not for another? This is the question which the voters of Maine put to the Republican speakers; but, they did not get a satisfactory answer from one of them, from Fessenden to Ned Buntline.—The truth of it, Mr. Editor, the people of Maine are opposed to sumptuary laws and the Republicans, of all others should have known the fact. Our citizens are not only opposed to the so-called Maine law, but are decidedly against the foreign manner by which it has been enforced. Travellers have been put to as much inconvenience, and been as grossly insulted in Bangor as they ever were in Austria. They have had their trunks and valises broken open, or bored into, by those who are possessed of a "little brief authority," to see if they were not transporting a bottle or flask of rum, gin, brandy, or some other "destroyer of human happiness," contrary to law. Do you wonder that the Republicans lost the battle, after considering that their cardinal principle was the Maine law, and that they defended the official actions of those crazy men that enforced it? Then, again, was it wise in the Republicans, to send as speakers before the people an Astor-Place (N. Y. city) rioter, and a House of Correction (Boston) graduate?

Your Ned Buntlines and your Marshall Weavers may answer for Tammany Hall orators, but the voters of Maine like to be addressed by respectable, if not by eloquent men. If the Republicans had avoided all outside and unnecessary issues and gone before the people as the opponents of the present National Administration, the Kansas-Nebraska bill in particular, as being in favor of sectionalizing slavery and not nationalizing it, in short, as being the everlasting enemies of the Black Power, the victory had been theirs. But instead of that they supported and defended every man and measure that the Democrats had dropped, because of their unpopularity or some other cause, and the consequences of so doing, are now fully seen. Will the Republicans learn wisdom from this defeat, and be better prepared for another conflict? It is to be hoped that they will. The citizens of Maine are thoroughly anti-slavery, and if the Republicans will but be wise enough to let cast-off Democratic men and measures alone, and attend to the cause of human freedom, they will not suffer another defeat in the Pine Tree State.

R.