Wealthy, urbane and intellectual, Edward Kavanagh was an unusual man for the frontier State that was Maine in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Born in 1795 as the son of a wealthy landowner, shipbuilder and merchant in Damariscotta; he was a Roman Catholic who attended Jesuit colleges in Montreal and Washington D.C., graduating from St. Mary’s in 1813.
His political career began with his election to the Maine House in 1826. In 1830 he served as Secretary of the Senate, leaving to serve two terms in the U.S. Congress as an ardent Jacksonian.
His defense of Jackson on the Bank Issue was unpopular with his constituents and cost him his seat to a Whig opponent. Jackson however rewarded him by making him charge’d’affaires in Portugal, a post which he held until 1840.
Returning to Maine as a member of the State Senate he became chairman of the Joint Select Committee on the Maine Boundary and one of the four Maine Commissioners sent to negotiate with Webster and Ashburton.
His role as a Boundary Commissioner and defense of the unpopular Webster-Ashburton Treaty were to cause him a further loss of popularity but as a believer in representative government in its broader, more English concept, he had never been afraid to take positions opposed to those of his constituents.
As a result of being President of the Maine Senate he served as Governor from March 1843 until January 1844 upon the resignation of Governor Fairfield.
Twenty days later, he was dead and buried in the cemetery of the oldest standing Catholic Church in New England, which his father helped to erect in Damariscotta in 1808.
Always a champion of religious toleration, one of his college essays was used anonymously in committee in the Maine Constitutional Convention to defeat a clause debarring Catholics from holding public office.
Perhaps it was just as well that this sensitive Irish intellectual was not alive to see the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic fever hit its peak in Maine less than ten years after his death.