New England States Opposes the War of 1812

The War of 1812 increased the general sense of injustice and wrong, but legislative protests were still kept within bounds.

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

In writing to Doctor Priestly in 1804, Jefferson alludes to the questions arising from the purchase of Louisiana, and then says:

Whether we remain in one confederacy or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the Western confederacy will be as much our children and descendants as those of the Eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country in future time as with this.”

It was not strange that some of the Federalists should learn a lesson from their opponents. Colonel Pickering thought that the embargo of 1807 presented a proper occasion for the application of the principles of the Virginia resolutions at the North. A letter sent from his seat in the Senate to the Governor of Massachusetts, for communication to the Legislature, looked so plainly to concerted resistance in New England to laws deemed unconstitutional, which were ruining its commerce, that the Governor declined to give it the publicity desired.

Adams was at this time Pickering’s colleague in the Senate, and was no stranger to his views on the question of separation. After resigning his seat, Adams, in November, 1808, writes thus from Boston to Ezekiel Bacon, one of the Massachusetts Representatives in Congress: “A war with England would probably soon, if not immediately, be complicated with a civil war and with a desperate effort to break up the Union, the project for which has been several years preparing in this quarter, and which waits only for a possible chance of popular support to explode. That this project has been in serious contemplation of those whom you describe as being called in England ‘Colonel Pickering’s Party,’ for several years, I know by the most unequivocal evidence, though it be not evidence provable in a court of law. To this project, as matured, a very small part of the Federal party is privy; the great proportion of them do not even believe in its existence.”

A few years later, in 1811, Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts declared upon the floor of the House of Representatives that should Louisiana be admitted as a State, it would be so flagrant a disregard of the Constitution as virtually to dissolve the Union, “freeing the States composing it from their moral obligation of adhesion to each other, and making it the right of all, as it would become the duty of some, to prepare definitely for separation — amicably if they might, violently if they must.” The Speaker ruled the concluding portion of the remarks out of order, but the House reversed his decision by a close vote, in which the majority was chiefly made up of Federalists. Many of Quincy’s political friends, and among them John Adams and Harrison Gray Otis, wrote to him in general commendation of the sentiments of this speech, though without alluding particularly to the threat of secession. It was probably little more than a rhetorical flourish, intended to impress upon the administration party the idea that the North was in earnest when it demanded that the balance of power be left unchanged. In a familiar letter to his wife, a few days afterward, Quincy writes: “You have no idea how these Southern demagogues tremble at the word ‘separation’ from a Northern man; and yet they are riding the Atlantic States like a nightmare. I shall not fail to make their ears tingle with it whenever they attempt, as in this instance, grossly to violate the Constitution of my country.”

The Washington Government was regarded at this time by a large part of New England much as a foreign conqueror is looked upon by the vanquished community. Its policy was unfavorable, almost destructive, to New England interests; and the leaders on both sides had nothing but distrust and dislike for each other. “New England,” said a Baltimore newspaper, “is the Vendée of the United States.” We shall look in vain, however, for any direct menace of secession in the action of any of her legislatures.

“The people of New England,” said the Senate of Massachusetts in 1809, in answer to the inaugural speech of Governor Lincoln, in which he had intimated that rumors of an intended separation were afloat, “perfectly understand the distinction between the Constitution and the Administration. They are as sincerely attached to the Constitution as any portion of the United States. They may be put under the ban of the empire, but they have no intention of abandoning the Union.”

The War of 1812 increased the general sense of injustice and wrong, but legislative protests were still kept within bounds. In the address of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts to the people of that State, adopted immediately after the declaration of war, and under the pressure of strong feeling, they explicitly denounce as unworthy of notice “the insinuations and assertions, so lavishly made, of a plot to dismember the Union”; and, while declaring that “the National Government has been induced to believe that your fears and dissensions, combined with your sober habits, and natural aversion from the appearance of opposition to the laws, are sufficient pledges for your tame ac quiescence in the abandonment of your local interests, and for your supporting at the expense of your blood and treasure a war, unnecessary, unjustifiable, and impolitic, which, under the pretense of vindicating the independence of our country against a nation which does not threaten it, must too probably consign your liberties to the care of a tyrant who has blotted every vestige of independence from the Continent of Europe”; and that “when a great people find themselves oppressed by the measures of their government, when their just rights are neglected, their interests overlooked, their opinions disregarded, and their respectful petitions received with supercilious contempt, it is impossible for them to submit in silence,” they propose and in deed admit of no other remedy, than a general resolution to let all party distinctions vanish, and unite as a “peace party,” in order by constitutional methods “to displace those who have abused their power and betrayed their trust.”

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

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