In the Dec. 1 article “Fate of Kennebec County’s Melville Fuller statue debated” I (Adam, not David, as it mistakenly said in the story) was quoted as saying, “I think we should destroy it and melt it down and make plumbing fittings from it,” which was an off-the-cuff remark and left out the main point of my comments.
The point was that Fuller, in response to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the U.S., wrote: “The Emancipation Proclamation is predicated upon the idea that the President may so annul the constitutions and laws of sovereign states, overthrow their domestic relations, deprive loyal men of their property…”
Fuller thought that individual states had a right to determine whether black people were property or not. That terrible belief, and the rest of his well-established pattern of racist thought and behavior, is the reason why Kennebec County should not honor him with a statue nor move it to another prominent location.
Adam Turner
Augusta
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