Did Federalists Want to Secede From the Union?

The proposition does not seem to have been communicated even to a majority of the Federalists in Congress.

Continuing The Hartford Convention,
with a selection from Great Events by Famous People, Volume 15 by Simeon E. Baldwin published in 1905. This selection is presented in 3.5 easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The Hartford Convention.

Time: 1814
Place: Hartford, Connecticut

“With these views I should certainly deem it unfortunate to be compelled to place any man at the head of the Northern interest who would stop short of the object, or would only use his influence and power for the purpose of placing himself at the head of the whole Confederacy as it now stands. If gentlemen in New York should entertain similar opinions, it must be very important to ascertain what the ultimate objects of Colonel Burr are. If we remain inactive, our ruin is certain. Our friends will make no attempts alone. By supporting Mr. Burr, we gain some support, although it is of a doubtful nature and of which, God knows, we have cause enough to be jealous. In short, I see nothing else left for us. The project which we had formed was to induce, if possible, the legislatures of the three New England States who remain Federal to commence measures which should call for a reunion of the Northern States. The extent of those measures, and the rapidity with which they shall be followed up, must be governed by circumstances.”

But the great men of the party looked coldly on the project of breaking up the Union, which they had done so much to form. The Adamses were scarcely approached, and Hamilton, when consulted, gave it no encouragement, although he probably agreed to attend a private meeting of the leaders at Boston, which, but for his own death, would have been held in the winter of 1804. Not a few regarded an ultimate separation as probable and perhaps as not very distant, but believed that it would come only after great suffering had been found to result from the measures inspired by Southern influences.

“If,” wrote Cabot to Pickering in reply to the letter of January, 18o4, from which we have quoted, “we should be made to feel a very great calamity from the abuse of power by the national Administration, we might do almost anything, but it would be idle to talk to the deaf, to warn the people of distant evils. By this time, you will suppose I am willing to do nothing but submit to fate. I would not be so understood. I am convinced we cannot do what is wished; but we can do much if we work with Nature — or the course of things — and not against her. A separation is now impracticable, because we do not feel the necessity or utility of it. The same separation then will be un avoidable when our loyalty to the Union is generally perceived to be the instrument of debasement and impoverishment. If it be prematurely attempted, those few only will promote it who discern what is hidden from the multitude; and to those may be addressed

 ‘Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land,
All fear, none aid you, and few understand.’ “

Fisher Ames writes to him a few weeks later in the same vein: “Nothing is to be done rashly; but mature counsels and united efforts are necessary in the most forlorn case. The fact is our people know little of the political dangers; the best men, at least, ought to be made to know them, and to digest at least the general outlines of a system.” Referring, playfully and possibly with an allusion to the personal hazards which might attend the prosecution of Pickering’s plans, to his failing health, he says that it is “not wholly to be despaired of. If Jacobinism makes haste, I may yet live to be hanged.”

Similar letters came back to Plumer from New Hampshire; and Hillhouse at least seems not to have pushed the movement further in Connecticut. The plan of a Northern confederacy, when deliberately examined, could have looked feasible only to the knot of politicians in the excitement of Washington life with whom it originated. The sober thought of men at home condemned it as impracticable, if not undesirable. Such a venture might seem attractive to the audacity of Burr or the heated partisanship of some better men, who were fighting a hopeless battle in opposition; but there were few to support it who had much to lose if it were tried and failed. The following of Colonel Pickering must have been mainly of the kind which went down after David to the cave of Adullam; and the whole movement was over and forgotten in a twelvemonth.

The proposition does not seem to have been communicated even to a majority of the Federalists in Congress. Among the Connecticut delegation of that day, Baldwin, Davenport, Goddard, Smith, and Tallmadge afterward publicly denied any knowledge of it whatever: and Senator Hillhouse made a guarded statement, to the effect that he never knew of any combination or plot among Federal members of Congress to dissolve the Union or to form a Northern or Eastern confederacy. Senator Plumer, however, on learning of this statement (in I829), wrote that he was much surprised at it, for, says he, “I recollect, and am certain that, on returning early one evening from dining with Aaron Burr, this same Mr. Hillhouse, after saying to me that New England had no influence in the Government, added, in an ani mated tone, ‘The Eastern States must and will dissolve the Union, and form a separate government of their own ; and the sooner they do this, the better.”’ As this story is corroborated by an entry in Mr. Plumer’s diary, made twenty years earlier, it is probably correct, but the remark reported may well be imputed to the warmth of an after-dinner conversation among old friends, and has not at all the sound of a conspirator’s declarations or even of an allusion to any formed and definite plan.

From Washington down, indeed, all the founders of the Republic had looked for its permanency more with hope than with assurance. We should do injustice to the tone of the political correspondence and conversation of the times, if we applied to it the standard of loyalty of the present generation. Both parties regarded the Constitution of 1787 —l ike that of 1781, or those which France was still forming and rejecting with such rapidity — as an experiment in government-making. The right of a State to repudiate a law of the Union, which it deemed unconstitutional, whether the courts of the Union upheld it or not, had been emphatically asserted by Virginia and Kentucky, under the lead of Madison and Jefferson, and, this granted, the right of secession seems necessarily to follow.

Simeon E. Baldwin begins here. John S. Barry begins here.

More information here and here, and below.

This is a good book. If you buy it, we get a commission. You can support History Moments by doing that or by doing this:
We want to take this site to the next level but we need money to do that. Please contribute directly by signing up at https://www.patreon.com/history