Actually, I sent him an email. I had sent two letters to the candidate via his campaign headquarters. I waited until after the June convention, then called and got the usual recorded message - everyone is out and busy. I decided to send a third communication by email and see if it got someone's attention. So I sent this email in July 2022:
July 2, 2022
Dear Paul LePage,
Two months I wrote to you again, my second letter, asking you to explain remarks you made on WVOM in August 2017 about Maine’s role in the Civil War. I also called the campaign office three times and left my number but never received a call back. I hope this email will elicit a response.
You said, as a reminder, that, “7,600 Mainers fought for the Confederacy and they fought because they were concerned about, they were farmers and they were concerned about their land, and their property.”
I cannot find any documentation at all that 7,600 Mainers fought for the Confederacy. I did discover that 15 or so Mainers fought for the Confederacy; however, most of those were college students from the south. Some Mainers moved to the south before the war, adopted their new homeland and became southerners, a member of the Buck family from Bucksport, comes to mind.
How did you arrive at the figure of 7,600 Mainers, over 10% of the total enlistment that Maine sent to fight to restore the Union and free the slaves?
I await your reply,
Ray Estabrook
I never received a reply so I guess we will never know.
Bear with me for a moment, while I try to deconstruct his comment and put it into context,
First, we can accept as false the assertion that 7,600 Mainers fought for the Confederacy. As I said in my email, depending on you count them, the number is more like 15, and half were probably students at Bowdoin who were from the south anyway. This is an example of a made-up fact used to bolster an argument and deployed as a throw away, in confidence that no one will try and hold you accountable. Fairly typical these days.
So what is his real argument? According to LePage these mythical Maine farmers were concerned about their land and their property and that is why they chose to commit treason and fight for the Confederacy. I don't use the word treason lightly. President Lincoln made the case very clearly - secession is treason because the union is, to quote the Pledge of Allegiance, INDIVISIBLE.
The key word in LePage's argument is property. If Confederate sympathizers, and there were many in the north, saw the Republican Party as the enemy of slavery, and they understood the law as saying that slaves were property, then any attack on the south could be seen as an attack on all property. If "they" can take their slaves, then "they" can take your cows and maybe even your farm.
I conclude that Paul LePage made this statement as part of the new revisionism, where the secessionist states were victims of a powerful Federal government, that can take your slaves, take your cow and make you accept that all people born in this country are free citizens of one indivisible nation. In other words, in this revised view, the Civil War was not about slavery at all, it was about property rights.
I conclude then, that LePage is trying to portray today's Republican Party as a protector of property rights.
But the war was about slavery. Although no political party in 1860 advocated for the abolition of slavery the southern states seceded anyway. Read any of the declarations of secession and you will discover that they seceded in order to preserve the institution of slavery. For them, it was about slavery. For the north, initially, it was about preserving the Union and later freeing the slaves. And Maine played a leading role.
I'm not writing any more letters or emails to Paul LePage. We will leave him to the verdict of history.
Union private Daniel A. Bean of Brownfield, Maine, 11th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment by John Wilson (sculptor)
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Maine_in_the_American_Civil_War
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