The state of Maine, in the New England region of the United States of America, contains the sites of some of the earliest attempts at permanent European settlements in North America. In 1604, the French established a colony on Saint Croix Island, and a few years later, in 1607, the English attempted a colony at Popham. Further development and additional settlements would follow in the coming centuries, motivated largely by the local availability of white pine (Pinus strobus), which was deemed ideal for masts for the British Royal Navy. Indeed, the Great Seal of the State of Maine, adopted in 1820 after the state seceded from Massachusetts, features a pine tree in the centre, flanked by a farmer resting on his scythe and a sailor resting on an anchor.

The maritime and agricultural basis for Maine's development prevailed into the nineteenth century. The region's industries complemented each other well, and it was not uncommon to see workers engaged across a number of areas. Charles Scontras argued that much of the work within the state was hybrid: ‘one might farm and be [a] part-time lumberman, or farm and fish, or farm and perhaps make a voyage to the West Indies or Grand Banks’. In the early nineteenth century the workers who engaged in this type of productive labour, as opposed to those who drew upon the labour of others, increasingly came to identify together as ‘producers’, and early workers’ advocate newspapers in the state sought to link those producers from various professions around common concerns. Alan Taylor noted, for example, that, ‘during the nineteenth century, hard-pressed workers and farmers sustained a producers’ ideology to damn the rich and defend the workingman's right to the property his labor created’. Such rhetoric helped build a sense of solidarity among workers and producers throughout the nineteenth century.

Although mass unionism had not developed in Maine before the American Civil War, the state's workers and producers were not blind to the social divisions that permeated society.