Show description

On June 19, 1780, after nearly two decades in Liverpool, Perkins recorded in his diary that he had seen some of the best land in the township, with topsoil nearly two feet deep. 20 Although Liverpool’s agricultural potential was manifestly marginal, Machias’s was not. The 1771 commission that reported to Governor Hutchinson on the settlements in eastern Maine thought that “[t]he quality of the Land at Machias is very good, capable of making extraordinary Farms, from the produce whereof the Grantees may live very comfortably and have a surplusage for market,” a prospectus that actual settlers might have disputed.

By sanctioning private petitions to the Crown, the Massachusetts government facilitated the private interests of its residents more than it facilitated the interests of the metropolitan state, a function it had performed since its inception as the government of the Massachusetts Bay Company when it buttressed private Puritan interests against Charles I and his ministers. The Bay Colony’s ingenuous strategy for maintaining autonomy from metropolitan interests, whether it be in resisting the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Anglican Church or the political control of the Ministry and Parliament, was to give considerable power to congregations and local communities, power that was protected through the right of the Massachusetts government after 1691 to incorporate them.

The French, Scots, and English all planted colonies in what is present-day Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, inaugurating a prolonged international struggle for control of the region. The French king, Henri IV, granted Pierre Du Gua, Sieur de Monts, a patent in 1603 to colonize Acadia, a region between forty and forty-six degrees north latitude. Wintering the first year on an island in the St. Croix River, he moved the settlement to Port Royal (later Annapolis Royal) where it survived for three years, was abandoned for three years, and then reestablished in 1610.