Content area
Full Text
HISTORIANS of the American Revolution are familiar with Lorenzo Sabine's biographical sketches of the loyalists, the first full listing of royal partisans in the conflict of 1776.1 Few know, however, that the sketches originated as lectures that Sabine delivered before Maine audiences in the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, it was Mainers who first heard Sabine declare that all who called themselves patriots in the American Revolution "were not necessarily disinterested and virtuous, and the Tories were not to a man, selfish and vicious." A resident of Eastport, Maine-where "the graves and children of the Loyalists [were] around him in every direction"-Sabine drew his material from interviews "with persons of Loyalist descent, and [from] family papers and rare documents."2 His work on the loyalists was, however, just one aspect of his intellectual activity in Eastport during this period. While these other pursuits are not as central to his renown, they are worth noting, for they help us trace his genesis as a Whig politician; they are interesting, too, for what they reveal about his role in the cultural life of a small Maine town in antebellum America.
Sabine was born in New Hampshire in 1803, the son of a poor country parson. In search of opportunity, his family moved frequently, and so Lorenzo received little formal education. After the War of 1812, the family traveled down east to Hampden, Maine. After his father's death and his mother's remarriage, Lorenzo decided to seek his fortune "on the eastern frontier of the Union" in Eastport.3
Located on Moose Island in Passamaquoddy Bay, Eastport was home to some two thousand people when Sabine arrived there in 1821. Settled by fishermen from the Portsmouth-Cape Ann area, the community survived by exporting much of its catch-primarily cod, mackerel, and herring, salted or cured-to Boston, New York, and the West Indies. While its boat and shore fisheries and weiring and seining were important, each year Eastport also sent out a large fleet to the fishing banks of Labrador, Newfoundland, and Cape Sable.4 Sabine began his career by clerking in a local store; he took his meals at what he called a "sad boarding-house" and slept in an "unfinished garret among old barrels, boxes, and other rubbish." While yet a minor, he tried...