I received a research request for information about anti-slavery sentiment in the Kennebunks. While the subject is broad enough to fill a thousand 330-word Throwback Thursdays, one example that I first learned from the diaries of Kennebunk Town Clerk, Andrew Walker, speaks volumes. Walker’s diaries are available through DigitalMaine.

Eunice Dorman (1803-1852) and her little sister Hannah (1812-1880) were abolitionists in the Kennebunks at a time when shipping fortunes were being made here on the backs of enslaved people in the West Indies and the southern United States. The sisters, founding members of Second Parish Congregational Church on Dane Street, were ostracized from their church for their anti-slavery sentiments. They were early followers of Boston Abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison and Maria Weston Chapman and their American Anti-Slavery Society. The usually sanctimonious Kennebunk Town Clerk Andrew Walker called the Dormans eccentric in their views and habits. When Eunice died in 1852 Walker’s sketch about her life curtly concluded with this prophetic phrase, “Time, the great expounder of events, will reveal whether her views coincided with justice.”

A letter written by Eunice Dorman to Maria Weston Chapman on Christmas Day 1842 is now protected by the Boston Public Library Rare Book Department in their Anti-Slavery Collection. In it, Eunice laments, “This is a dark portion of the earth. The people have cruel thoughts in their hearts and call them thoughts of mercy, and as it is with the people, so it is with their priests.” Eunice enclosed $2 dollars with her letter to be devoted to the Anti-Slavery cause, one dollar from herself and the other from her sister Hannah.

By the time Eunice’s sister Hannah died in 1880, she had long since been welcomed back by her beloved church family at Second Parish; not because her anti-slavery views had ever wavered but because time and The Civil War had indeed revealed the justice in them to her fellow parishioners.