The role of New England merchant ships and captains in the slave trade has been sanitized and over-simplified with the bland phrase “triangular trade.” Wayne Curtis effectively points out the degree to which it was a lie. However, the truth behind triangular trade was the source of Thomas Robison’s fortune. Ongoing research continues to uncover details of the slave-trading activities of his ship the Eagle.
In 1820, the same year Maine attained independent statehood, the US made slave trading a capital crime. The only US citizen ever executed under that law was a sea captain from Portland named Nathaniel Gordon. His house was right over there in front of those row houses. On August 7, 1860 Gordon traded Cuban rum for 897 human beings, most of them children, at Sharks Point in West Africa. These people were intended for sale to sugar plantation owners in the Caribbean or perhaps Brazil. The next day, his ship the Erie was captured by the USS Mohican.
Gordon was hanged at the Tombs in New York City on February 21, 1862.
Please Visit Atlantic Black Box for more about the New England-Slave Trade connection.
In 1859 the finest mansion in Portland, now the Victoria Mansion Museum, was built on this corner by Ruggles Morse. Morse was a Maine native who made a fortune owning hotels in New Orleans. “Owning hotels” is also a sanitizing phrase. One of them was “for gentlemen only.” Drinking, gambling, and prostitution were undoubtedly the sources of his money. Neal Dow, “The Napoleon of Temperance,” noted in his autobiography that when Maine troops occupied New Orleans during the Civil War, Morse welcomed the officers with drink, which Dow pointedly refused.
This house was built a full decade after Maine enacted Prohibition. I’ll say more about Dow and Prohibition later.
After the war, Morse and his wife used this as a summer home and eventually primary residence until his death in 1893. The house features a billiard room and an opulent Turkish smoking room. It would be naive to think that rum didn’t flow freely in there. Maybe ‘Ti Punch on a summer afternoon?