Rum Riot Part 4: The Immediate Aftermath
Discussed in this post
John Robbins
Neal Dow
Politicization of the Events
Locating a Grave in the Eastern Cemetery
The dead man was John Robbins, of Deer Isle, Me. He was second mate of the barque Louisa Eaton, had come to the city on the day of the riot, and gone into the street in response to the fire bell.
The Immediate Aftermath
Portland officials tried to cast Robbins as a ringleader, while Dowʼs opponents, holding their own “Second Inquest” into his death tried to cast Dow as a callous, criminal racist, eliciting testimony that, “Information was brought to Mr. Dow, that a man had been killed, and he, after inquiring if it was irish [sic], said he would send some one to see about it. No farther efforts were made to discover the number of killed and wounded.”
Robbins was the only person killed, though others were wounded. One was certainly the man the Marshal heard cheering the crowd on, and whom he shot with his revolver; but he was shot before Robbins, and carried off by some of the crowd. Dr. William Young reported at the second inquest into Robbinsʼs death, "I heard the discharge of several firearms Saturday night, June 2nd, between 10 and 11 o'clock... nearly opposite the stone church... I saw several persons coming down the street, and they were bearing in their arms the body of John Robbins.” He examined the body and found the fatal wound had been caused by “a musket or a rifle ball of ordinary size."
I first researched the Rum Riot about seven years ago, looked at it again in 2017, and got interested in it again last June after we started our blog. One of the things I find interesting is the varying views of John Robbins. At the time, Neal Dow’s political enemies presented Robbins as an innocent bystander, while his supporters blamed Robbins as a rabble-rouser and instigator. Testimony at the inquest clearly shows he was more like the former than the latter. Many recent accounts conflate him with the man who forced his way through the door and was shot with a pistol, apparently in the head. But the modern tone has him more as a heroic leader than a drunken rioter.
Dow, Portlandʼs officials, and Republican apologists, blamed the events on Democrats, enemies of the Maine Law, and the lowly Irish.
In his memoirs Dow's self-serving analysis dwells on "What would have followed if the mob had got access to the liquors after trampling down the constituted authorities.” Separating the Maine Law from the event, “be it remembered: the enforcement of that statute, as we have seen, was not involved in the riot,” He claimed, “There would have been no disturbance of any kind had the complainants and those for whom they acted been content with the orderly enforcement of the statute under which they had sworn out the warrant."
Robbins was buried in the Eastern Cemetery at the foot of Munjoy Hill. An anti-temperance editorial declared Robbins a martyr, predicting that his grave would be remembered for all time, while Dowʼs was “lost among the wild grasses and weeds that spring from carrion carcasses, in places hideous to human tread.”
Dow is buried in Evergreen Cemetery
As I mentioned, I became interested in the Riot again last June, just as I was becoming a docent at the Eastern Cemetery. I bumped into Herb Adams at the Maine Mechanics Hall. I said stories about the Rum Riot say that John Robbins is buried in an unmarked grave in the Eastern Cemetery. He told me, “I know exactly where he’s buried.”
We didn’t have time to pursue it further, but later that week at the cemetery I asked Ron Romano, who manages the guide program in the EC, about Robbins. He used it as a teaching opportunity and showed me how to find a person in the cemetery burial records book; his grave is shown as NS A-7-14: that is New Section part A Row 7 Plot 14. It is unmarked.