\nI want to open today’s broadcast with mention of a Belgrade native who achieved fame in the middle of the 19th century. He was Lot M. Morrill, Governor of Maine, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of the Treasury of the U.S. He was born in Belgrade on May 3, 1815, the son of a Maine pioneer, Peasley Morrill, who lived briefly at Augusta, then moved to Belgrade in 1797. Peasley Morrill was the father of fourteen children, divided equally by sex, seven sons and seven daughters. He was the only man to be the father of two Maine governors. His son Anson Morrill was governor in 1855, and Lot followed Anson as governor in 1858.<\/p>\n
Lot Morrill graduated from Belgrade’s renowned Titcomb Academy in 1833, and then entered Waterville College, now Colby. He left before the end of his freshman year to teach in a private school in New York State. In 1835 he returned to Maine to study law in the office of Judge Fuller in Readfield. He was admitted to the Maine bar in 1839.<\/p>\n
Lot Morrill had become interested in law long before he had graduated from Titcomb Academy. When he was only thirteen years old, his father had taken him to Augusta to attend a trial in which Belgrade folks had special interest. A Belgrade home had been broken into one night and a horde of silver coins had been stolen. Three young men were arrested and indicted by a grand jury. At their trial the three men were defended so successfully by Samuel Wells of Hallowell that they were acquitted. Lot Morrill was so impressed by Wells’ able defense, especially his style of speaking, that the boy then and there determined to become a lawyer. Many years later another Maine attorney said of Lot Morrill: “He was ardent in feeling, fluent in speech, alert to seize the strong points of any question. He found his great opportunity in the spirited political controversy between Whigs and Democrats. He became a staunch advocate of temperance and was influential in the adoption of Maine’s prohibition law in 1851.”<\/p>\n
In 1841 Lot Morrill moved to Augusta and entered law partnership with Senator James Bradbury and Judge Richard Rice. Kennebec County and especially the City of Augusta was strong Whig territory, where a Democratic candidate usually met with overwhelming defeat. Augusta was then under the powerful sway of the editor of the Whig Kennebec Journal, Luther Severance. But not even Severance could stand in the way of Lot Morrill, who held the state chairmanship of Maine Democrats from 1849 to 1856. Midway during that chairmanship, in 1853, Morrill won a surprising upset election as Representative to the Maine Legislature from Augusta, and he put up a stiff, but losing, fight for the seat in the U.S. Senate won by William Pitt Fessenden. In 1855 Morrill was elected to the state senate and became its president.<\/p>\n
It was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and Stephen A. Douglas’ propounding of the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty that caused Morrill to break with the Democratic party, though it was not until the national election of 1856 that he openly left the Democratic ranks to join the new Republican party. In 1855 the Democrats had introduced into the State Senate a resolution pledging Maine Democrats to support of the Douglas position that would, by popular vote of the territory, permit Kansas and Nebraska to enter the Union as slave states. The resolution did not directly declare for slavery in Kansas and Nebraska, but only for whatever the people there should decide. This was indirect violation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that prohibited slavery north of a certain line. To be sure, that compromise had been repealed by Congress in 1850 an action that caused a violent split in the Democratic party. When the Douglas resolution was presented in the Maine Senate in 1855, the Senate President, Lot Morrill, left the chair and made a fiery speech in protest. He stated emphatically that, if it came to a choice between the Democratic party and his opposition to slavery, he must choose the latter.<\/p>\n
Support of abolition was already strong in the Morrill family. Lot’s brother, Anson had already been elected governor on the temperance and anti-slavery issues. In 1856 the Democrats did again elect their candidate for governor, Samuel Wells. However, the threatened dissolution of the Whigs, instead of heartening the Democrats spelled serious trouble for them, because the formation of a new party to replace the dying Whigs was sure to draw dissenters from the Democratic ranks. Too many Democrats, like Lot Morrill, refused to defend the Douglas position on slavery, and Douglas was the acknowledged leader of their national party. So, before the Presidential election in 1856 Morrill made this public announcement: “The Democratic candidate, Buchanan, is a good man, but the platform is a flagrant outrage upon the country and a direct insult to the North. Many people will stand for this for the sake of political power, but I am one who will not. I shall vote for Fremont.” Lot Morrill thus became a member of the newly formed Republican party.<\/p>\n
Maine governors then served for single year terms. Lot Morrill first served in that office in 1858; then he was re-elected for 1859 and again for 1860. The next year, just before the beginning of the Civil War, he won election to the U.S. Senate, where he became a powerful colleague of the other Maine senator, William Pitt Fessenden. He introduced, and led the fight in the Senate for successful passage of, the bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. In 1863 he entered the bill that established a Negro school in the District — the school that later became Howard University. Then in 1866 he successfully managed a bill to give District Negroes the vote.<\/p>\n
The reconstruction of the Confederacy, after their defeat in the war, is in many respects a disgraceful story. Lot Morrill was not one of those extremists who would still treat the Southerners as rebels and second class citizens after their surrender. He valiantly defended the bill to welcome back into the Union any state that would guarantee citizenship regardless of race or color. If the carpet-bagger actions in the South had not so angered Southern leaders, many of the Confederate states might have accepted those terms. But they were so alienated by oppressive political actions that they supported the Ku Klux Klan and made integration impossible for more than a hundred years.<\/p>\n
Preferring to remain in the Senate as chairman of the powerful Committee on Appropriations, Morrill turned down President Grant’s offer to make him Secretary of War, but upon the election of Hayes in 1876, he did accept the position of Secretary of the Treasury. When he left that office he became Collector of the Port of Portland.<\/p>\n
In the notorious Count-Out Election in Maine in 1879, Morrill took a conciliatory position and successfully urged Governor Garcelon to refer the controversy to the Maine Supreme Court for mandatory decision. Here are a few extracts from Morrill’s letter to Garcelon:<\/p>\n
“Two great political parties embracing the entire population of our state are brought into angry relations, producing bitter personal animosities and possibly leading to scenes of violence. Unhappily, for the first time in Maine, a great political party feels dissatisfied with the way the votes have been counted and declared. Even granting that these men may be in error, Your Excellency must see that it is a very serious matter to have a sense of wrong rankling in the minds of so many citizens. The counting out of a third of the legislators whom the Republicans claim to have elected is certainly extraordinary. Your Excellency can now render a valuable and honorable service by adopting a measure that will satisfy every citizen of the reasonable justice of your course. You are the only person who singly and alone can request a prompt opinion from our Supreme Judicial Court. At no time has that court ever been charged with rendering a decision tinged with politics. Your Excellency can restore peace and good feeling to all inhabitants of our state by seeking the opinion of our Supreme Court on each point of law involved in the controversy. I address Your Excellency not simply as an individual anxious for peace, but also as Chairman of the State Committee of the Republican Party, all members of which desire above all things to avoid disturbance of the public tranquility and allay the popular distrust.”<\/p>\n
Now before we close, just a few words about another distinguished family, the Redingtons of Waterville, whose name is perpetuated in the museum of the Waterville Historical Society on Silver Street. That family in America got off to a rather notorious start, because in the 1690’s Margaret, wife of Abraham Redington of Boxford, Mass., was connected with the Salem witchcraft trials, being the accuser of Mary Esty of Topsfield, who fortunately was one of the few accused that escaped execution. A fifth generation descended from Abraham Redington was Asa, who came to Vassalboro after the Revolution and married Mary, the daughter of Nehemiah Getchell. In 1792, with his father-in-law, Asa Redington built the first dam across the Kennebec at Ticonic Falls. Asa’s second son, Samuel, became a very prominent citizen of Waterville, a lumberman, miller and banker, who was known as Squire Redington. Samuel’s son, Charles H. Redington, had seven children, five of whom were living in Waterville at the turn into the present century. Two of them were male — Frank and Charles A.<\/p>\n
Frank Redington graduated from Waterville Academy just before it became Coburn, and went to work in his father’s furniture store. In 1881 Frank and his brother, Charles took over the business under the name of Redington and Co. For six years Frank Redington was President of the Waterville Board of Trade, and he promoted the building of the City Hall. He married Carrie, the daughter of Moses Foster, and for many years they lived in a beautiful home on Park Place in Waterville.<\/p>\n
Today I have not time to tell you about distinguished marriages of Redington girls, but I’ll try to do that on some future broadcast.<\/p>\n
Year: 1970<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #847, Broadcast on April 5, 1970<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1205,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}