During this period the Marine Society’s charitable activities continued apace. Its invested capital—from which income for relief of the needy, mostly to widows, derived—grew from four thousand dollars in 1827, to sixty-five hundred dollars in 1847 and to twelve thousand dollars by 1863. From 1837 to 1846 Captain Lemuel Moody was the Society’s treasurer, and thirty-three pages of Moody’s meticulous accounts are preserved at the Maine Historical Society, along with his certificate of membership. Moody recorded nearly two hundred payments to at least thirty-five individuals, ranging from five to twenty dollars, rather impressive sums in an era when a dollar a day was a good wage.
Not all of the Society’s members were as upright and honorable as its treasurer, however. Captain Nathaniel Gordon was admitted as a member at the end of 1837. In 1808 Congress prohibited further importation of slaves and in 1820 declared slavers pirates, liable to be sentenced to death. Captured just before the outbreak of the Civil War with about nine hundred Africans aboard, Captain Gordon was tried and convicted of slaving in November 1861, and sentenced to death by hanging on 7 February 1862. The judge declared, "You are soon to pass into the presence of that God of the black man as well as the white man." Gordon appealed to President Abraham Lincoln for clemency. Lincoln confirmed the death sentence but gave Gordon a "respite until Friday, the 21st of February, 1862, between the hours of twelve noon and three o’clock in the afternoon of said day, when the said sentence shall be executed." Lincoln added that "in granting this respite it becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that relinquishing all expectation of pardon by Human Authority, he refer himself alone to the mercy of the common God and father of all men." Gordon was the only man ever convicted and executed for slave trading in the United States.
It has been asserted that the outbreak of the Civil War and the Confederate commerce raiders which soon prowled the oceans dealt the American—and Maine’s—merchant marine a blow from which it never recovered. True enough it is that nearly ninety Maine-owned vessels fell victims to the raiders, and that Portland’s postwar registered and enrolled tonnage had dropped to just over half of what it had been in 1860, but the fact is that the Alabama, Florida and other raiders simply hastened a decline which had been going on for some time. In the early years of the nineteenth century, and again with recovery from the Embargo and the War of 1812, roughly ninety percent of American imports arrived in American flag vessels, and almost as great a percentage of exports. By the eve of the war in 1860, only sixty-five percent of imports arrived under the American flag and seventy percent of exports. By war’s end those figures had dropped to a dismal twenty-six percent for both, and though there was a brief postwar recovery, the American share of the overseas trade continued to decline.
Page 5