As the smoke cleared from Washington and the British fleet departed Baltimore, the question on most Americans’ minds remained, now what? Despite Prevost’s withdrawal from Lake Champlain and an uneasy stalemate along the Niagara, Admiral Cochrane’s fleet was sailing south to nip at yet another flank of the young republic. There was tremendous anxiety and uncertainty. More than two years of conflict had failed to wash away the reluctance to fight that many had felt at the outset. New England, in particular, was still an ambivalent partner in the war effort. The excitement with which Boston and its environs had once celebrated the victories of “Old Ironsides” over the Guerrière and Java had long since faded in the gloom of the ever-tightening British blockade.
Despite this widespread sentiment, in October 1814 Secretary of War James Monroe renewed the call for pushing the war into Canada, claiming that “this was the best way to secure the friendship of the Indians, protect the coast, and win peace.” Later, Monroe wrote to Major General Jacob Brown that “the great object to be attained is to carry the war into Canada, and to break the British power there, to the utmost practicable extent.”1
Clearly, John Randolph’s whip-poor-will was still cawing incessantly, but where, oh where, had Monroe been during the fizzled campaigns of the last three years? Even Major General George Izard, who had been hastily dispatched from Plattsburgh to the Niagara frontier just before Prevost’s approach, was forced to concede to Monroe a high degree of impotence on the issue of Canada. “I confess, sir, I am embarrassed,” Izard wrote the secretary after arriving at Niagara. “At the head of the most efficient army which the United States has possessed during this war, much must have been expected from me—and yet I can discern no object which can be achieved at this point, worthy of the risk which will attend its attempt.”2
But even breathing the word “Canada” made most Federalists see red. They had been saying from the outset that the war had been declared and was being waged for territorial gains and not in the interest of resolving disputes upon the high seas. Truth be told, of course, the Madison administration had indeed far more pressing matters with which to contend in the fall of 1814 than Canada. When President Madison summoned Congress into session in Washington on September 19—about a month earlier than planned—there was even considerable doubt that the burned-out city would remain the nation’s capital. The destruction that welcomed members of Congress only underscored the dismal sentiments many were hearing in their home districts. This last session of the Thirteenth Congress met in the Patent Office, which some congressmen were quick to call “confined, inconvenient, and unwholesome.”3
The chief concern was the economy. “We are in a deplorable situation,” Assemblyman Daniel Sargent told the Massachusetts General Assembly, “our commerce dead; our revenue gone; our ships rotting at the wharves…. Our treasury drained—we arebankrupts.”4 Not only had New England’s coasts felt the tread of British raiding parties, but the British had occupied Maine east of the Penobscot River and extorted Nantucket Island to the point that it almost became a British port of call. There was almost no national presence along the coast for defense, and what defensive measures were undertaken were done so by the individual states only at their own expense and over their loud objections.
Things weren’t much better in the south. From the Chesapeake country southward, commodity prices plummeted as exports of cotton, tobacco, wheat, and other agricultural products sat bottled up on wharves, compliments of the British blockade. Even Thomas Jefferson wrote to fellow Virginian William Short complaining about the abundance of crops. “For what can we raise for the market,” Jefferson asked Short rhetorically. “Wheat? We can only give it to our horses, as we have been doing ever since harvest. Tobacco? It is not worth the pipe it is smoked in. Some say whiskey; but all mankind must become drunkards to consume it.”5
And the only reason that Pennsylvania, New York, and the West were not in similar straits, but were in fact enjoying some degree of prosperity, was that the federal government was pouring millions of dollars into their economies to build roads and military installations and to feed and clothe troops. It was not lost on folks in other parts of the country that many in the west who had championed the war were now reaping its rewards. “The war-hawks,” grumbled the Federalist United States Gazette, “are thriving and fattening upon the hard earnings of the industrious and peaceable part of the community.”6
But such expenditures for defense also left the federal government decidedly short of cash. “Something must be done and done speedily,” Secretary of the Navy William Jones wrote Pennsylvanian Alexander J. Dallas shortly before Dallas took over the Treasury Department, “or we shall have an opportunity of trying the experiment of maintaining an army and navy and carrying on a vigorous war without money.”7 By the time the new secretary made his first report to Congress later that fall, Dallas was estimating a revenue shortfall for the year of more than $12 million. Things only got bleaker looking ahead to 1815. Projecting expenditures of $56 million, including $15.5 million to service the national debt, Dallas calculated revenues—even with certain new taxes—to be only $15.1 million. Somehow, through a variety of loans and treasury notes, the government was going to have to raise more than $40 million to cover the difference.8
Many of Madison’s Republicans in Congress were as aghast as were the Federalists. The story is told that Virginia Republican John W. Eppes of the House Ways and Means Committee read Dallas’s report and threw it on the table with disgust. “Well, sir,” he said to Federalist William Gaston of North Carolina, perhaps only half in jest, “will your party take the Government if we will give it up to them?” Gaston’s response underscored the gravity of the underlying issue. “No, sir,” he replied, “not unless you will give it to us as we gave it to you!”9
The Republicans remained in control and Congress passed a bill to rebuild Washington despite the entreaties of New York and Philadelphia. Another congressional measure authorized the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of some ten thousand books. These volumes would begin to replace the original Library of Congress that now lay in ashes. What could not be replaced, however, was President Madison’s almost obsessive preoccupation with New England as the source of his problems. “You are not mistaken,” Madison wrote long-time political ally Wilson Cary Nicholas, “in viewing the conduct of the Eastern states as the source of our greatest difficulties in carrying on the war; as it certainly is the greatest if not the sole inducement with the enemy to persevere in it.”10
Great Britain had other reasons besides New England’s discontent for continuing the war, but one thing was certain. In New England it was still very much Mr. Madison’s war. The final straw was the administration’s inability to protect its coasts proactively or at the very least reimburse the costs of the New England states doing so themselves. Why not keep federal taxes in the state to begin with, the Salem (Mass.) Gazette asked editorially, and while they were at it, make a separate peace with Great Britain by some measure of “Nantucket neutrality” extending to the entire state of Massachusetts? The newspaper went on to urge its neighboring states to join “a convention of alliance, amity, and commerce.”11
It was not the first time that the New England states had heard such a call. The Louisiana Purchase, Alexander Hamilton’s national banking system, and Jefferson’s dread embargo had all fostered regional discontent. But now after two and a half years of an unpopular war that appeared to promise no early end, the Massachusetts legislature issued a call for a regional convention to weigh the differences and determine whether their resolution might call for so radical a solution as secession from the Union. Connecticut not only accepted the proposition, but also invited delegates to convene in Hartford. Massachusetts sent twelve delegates; Connecticut, seven; and Rhode Island, four. While the legislatures of New Hampshire and Vermont declined to sanction the convention officially, two delegates from a county in New Hampshire and one from a county in Vermont were seated, bringing the total to twenty-six.12
Were these twenty-six men really willing to dissolve the Union? “Through the whole Revolution,” ex-Federalist John Adams, who had broken with his party over the necessity of war, wrote a friend, “the Tories sat on our skirts and were a dead weight obstructing and embarrassing all our efforts. They have now the entire dominion of the five states of New England.”13 But even among those who gathered at Hartford on December 15, 1814, that dominion was far more moderate than Adams or even Madison and his fellow Republicans feared.
The delegates to what came to be called the Hartford Convention were hardly revolutionaries—just New Englanders with a grudge. And some of them didn’t even hold much of that. Their first act was to elect George Cabot of Massachusetts their presiding officer. Respected throughout New England, Cabot had made his money privateering during the Revolution, served a stint in the United States Senate, and at sixty-two explained his presence at the convention thusly: “We are going to keep you young hotheads from getting into mischief.” One of Cabot’s fellow Massachusetts delegates, Nathan Dane, was an equally elder statesman who years before had been instrumental in inserting the antislavery clause into the Ordinance of 1787 that established the Northwest Territory. Dane acquiesced in attending the Hartford Convention only because “somebody must go to prevent mischief.”14
Other moderates included Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, who had worked to defeat Madison’s reelection in 1812, Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, another of those who had marched against Quebec in 1775, and Roger Minot Sherman of Connecticut, whose father had helped to draft the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, the only avowed secessionist in the group appears to have been Timothy Bigelow, former speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Theodore Dwight, a columnist for the Connecticut Mirror, was chosen secretary of the convention, but even his acerbic lines penned against Republicans over the years had stopped short of urging secession.
What appears to have gotten this group of mostly moderates into trouble and alarmed not only their fellow New Englanders, but particularly President Madison and his administration, was their decision to hold their meetings in secret. Now, to be sure, there were ample precedents for this—the Constitutional Convention among them—but given the climate of the times, this secrecy only fueled wild public speculation about what treasonous whispers might be going on behind closed doors. While the National Intelligencer scoffed at the whole concept of closed meetings, saying that “they are valueless, and experience has convinced the nation that Congress has never kept a secret one week,” the delegates to the Hartford Convention seem to have taken their pledge of secrecy to heart. The lack of even idle gossip emanating from the deliberations—what later news reporting would attribute to “a high-ranking administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity”—only fueled suspicions.15
High on the list of issues this closed-door group debated were the right of a state to preempt the federal collection of taxes within its borders for defense purposes and the right to nullify federal legislation that adversely affected its citizens. In this case, the issue was conscription. Could the federal government draft citizens into its armed forces and require state militia to serve under federal command, or could states nullify such laws to protect their citizens? Such debates, however, were taking place not only behind closed doors in Hartford, but also in Congress. A week before the Hartford delegates convened, a Federalist congressman from New Hampshire named Daniel Webster argued in the United States House of Representatives that states might in fact have the right to find certain “measures thus unconstitutional and illegal” to protect their citizens from “arbitrary power.”16
Webster’s comments that day in 1814 were only the opening round in a congressional debate over nullification that would rage for decades. Almost fifteen years later, Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina stood on the floor of the United States Senate and delivered an impassioned plea for states’ rights, including nullification of certain tariff provisions odious to the South. Ironically, when Hayne had finished, it was that same Daniel Webster, now a senator from Massachusetts, who rose to defend the Union as “one and inseparable.” Nullification, Webster said then, could only lead to disunion or even civil war.
But if disunion was on the minds of some of the Hartford delegates, they left no formal record of it. In fact, Theodore Dwight went to great lengths some nineteen years later when writing his History of the Hartford Convention to stress that secession had not been on anyone’s mind. (Of course, by that time, 1833, it was New England that stood firmly with the West against the nullification rumblings of the South.) What was on their minds—after the tax preemption and nullification debates—were seven proposed amendments to the United States Constitution. They were hardly subversive, nor for that matter even directly related to the conduct of the current war. Rather, they were indicative of New England’s long-held disaffection for Thomas Jefferson and anything Virginian and the region’s reluctance to accept its declining national influence as the country expanded westward. If the Hartford Convention had its way:
1. Representation and direct taxes would be apportioned only on the population of free persons—thus, by not counting African-American slaves as three-fifths of a person for such purposes, the South would lose seats in the House of Representatives.
2. New states could be admitted to the Union only with a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress rather than a simple majority—that would slow the rush of new western states with their two senators each of equal footing.
3. Congress could not pass an embargo lasting more than sixty days—that left no doubt what New England thought of Mr. Jefferson’s foreign policy.
4. Two-thirds of both houses had to consent to any interdiction of commerce with a foreign country—meaning even a sixty-day embargo could not be passed by only a simple majority.
5. Except in the case of invasion, two-thirds of both houses would be required to declare war—a provision that would have likely avoided the current conflict.
6. Only native-born citizens and those already naturalized could serve in Congress or hold civilian offices—this one was aimed at Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, Jefferson and Madison’s secretary of the treasury.
7. Presidents could serve only one term, and no state could have two presidents in succession—so much for James Monroe and the Virginia line of succession to the presidency.17
The convention adjourned on January 5, 1815, and a report of its recommendations was published the following day in the Connecticut Courant. At first there was a collective sigh of relief—from Federalists and Republicans alike. The New York Evening Post opined that all would “read with vast satisfaction this masterly report, and rejoice to find [their] fears and alarms groundless.”18 But then, relieved that the Union was not being torn asunder, the two parties returned to the root of their differences. If President Madison meant to yoke the New England states with taxes and conscription, the Boston Gazette declared, he would need a swifter horse than he had ridden at Bladensburg. “He must be able to escape at a greater rate than forty miles a day, or the swift vengeance of New England will overtake the wretched miscreant in his flight.”19
For their part, Republicans seemed more interested in focusing on what might have happened behind closed doors, rather than on the convention’s written report. While “no mischief had been accomplished,” Nathan Dane did say afterward that “if certain persons could have had their own way, and carried the measures which they proposed, I know not where we should have been.”20 And it was that possibility that Republicans rushed to condemn. Harrison Gray Otis became the principal defender of the gathering, and it cost him considerable public prestige. Only Massachusetts and Connecticut approved the recommended constitutional amendments, and eight states voted resolutions against them. The New York legislature espoused the Republican position, as well as that of growing public sentiment that the only effect of the amendments would be “to create dissentions among the different members of the union, to enfeeble the national government, and to tempt all nations to encroach upon our rights.”21
In response to this growing suspicion of what might have happened at Hartford, the Federalists said little. Years later, historian Henry Adams succinctly summed up the resulting dilemma. “If any leading Federalist disapproved the convention’s report, he left no record of the disapproval. In such a case, at such a moment, silence was acquiescence.”22
And, of course, it didn’t help the Federalists’ image that some of them were predicting privately that “what might have been” was still going to occur. Timothy Pickering, an ardent Federalist not adverse to secession, wrote to John Lowell, who was of equal mind, that “with regard to the admission of new states into the Union, events with which the present moment is teeming may take away the subject itself.” In other words, with certain British successes, there might not be half a continent available for expansion. “If the British succeed against New Orleans,” Pickering went on, “and if they have tolerable leaders I see no reason to doubt of their success—I shall consider the Union as severed. This consequence I deem inevitable.”23
Several years after Pickering’s pronouncement—and after the fate of New Orleans had been resolved—Andrew Jackson wrote to James Monroe, who, despite New England’s objections, had by then continued Virginia’s hold on the presidency. Had Jackson “commanded the military department where the Hartford convention met,” Old Hickory asserted, “if it had been the last act of my life I should have punished three principle [sic] leaders of the [Federalist] party…and am certain an independent court martial would have condemned them.” Perhaps forgetting, or more likely attempting to blot out, his earlier association with Aaron Burr, Jackson went on to say that “these kind of men although called Federalists, are really monarchists, and traitors to the constituted government.”24
In the end, the Hartford Convention was not so significant for what it did, as for what it failed to do—rally discontent from more than a handful of reactionaries. The moderates, it seems, just weren’t biting. “I can affirm with confidence,” Noah Webster wrote Daniel Webster in 1834, “that no body of men, of like number, ever convened in this country, has combined more talents, purer integrity, sounder patriotism and republican principles, or a more firm attachment to the constitution of the United States.” That statement was made with the advantage of hindsight, but Noah Webster went on to characterize the taint the wild suspicions of “what might have been” had had on the entire Federalist Party. “The history of this convention,” Webster asserted, “presents full proof that party spirit [Republican] may impose misrepresentations, upon a whole people, and mislead a great portion of them into opinions directly contrary to facts” [Webster’s italics].25
The Federalist Party, long on the ropes, never recovered from the stigma of treason and disunion—no matter how unsupported by facts—that was attributed to it by the Hartford Convention. That is the real significance of the Hartford Convention. As historian Glenn Tucker opined, “The Federalist party died behind the closed doors at Hartford.”26
Meanwhile, of course, the war went on.