SECESSION THREATENED IN NEW ENGLAND

By James Schouler.

ATTENDED by delegates from Massachusetts, headed by Harrison Crap Otis, its originator; Connecticut and other New England States, the Memorable Hartford Convention Was in session from December 15, 1814, to January 5, 1815. Its deliberations were secret, and it has been charged with being treasonable in designing the dissolution of the Union. As a fact, the object of the Convention was to devise means not only of defense against foreign powers, but for safeguarding the rights of the separate States against alleged encroachments of the Federal government. No treasonable intention could be proved.

This account is from Schouler's "History of the United States" (Dodd, Mead & Company), the best and fullest narrative of the period in American history between the Revolution and the Civil War.

Following it are the resolutions adopted by the Hartford Convention, which were submitted to the Legislatures of the States represented.

WHEN the invader appears honest citizens must choose sides. Forced at length to defend their own homes and firesides, Massachusetts and Connecticut now felt the recoil of unpatriotic behavior. Instead of trusting their governors with the local defense as the administration had done with States which upheld the war, the President now insisted upon retaining the exclusive control of military movements. Because Massachusetts and Connecticut had refused to subject their militia to the orders of the War Department, Monroe declined to pay their expenses. The cry was raised by peace men in consequence that the National government had abandoned New England to the common enemy. Upon this false assumption for false, candor must pronounce it, inasmuch as government was maturing all the while a consistent plan of local defense the Massachusetts leaders made hasty proclamation that no choice was left between submitting to the enemy, which could not be thought of, and appropriating to the defense of the States the revenues derived from her people, which had hitherto been spent elsewhere. The Massachusetts Legislature appropriated $1,000,000 to support a State army of 10,000 men. And Otis, who inspired these measures, brought Massachusetts to the point of instituting a delegate convention of Eastern States this convention to meet at Hartford. A Hartford convention was no new project to Otis's own mind.

The day for assembling was fixed at December 15th. Twelve delegates were appointed by the Massachusetts Legislature, men of worth and respectability, chief of whom were Cabot and Otis. In Connecticut, whose Legislature was not slow to denounce Monroe's conscription plan as barbarous and unconstitutional, a congenial delegation of seven was made up Goodrich and Hillhouse, hoary men of national renown, at the head. Rhode Island's Legislature added four more to the list. So deep-rooted, however, was the national distrust of this movement that Vermont and New Hampshire shrank from giving the Convention a public sanction. New Hampshire had a Republican council; while in Vermont the Plattsburg victory stirred the Union spirit; Chittenden himself having changed in official tone after the war became a defensive one. Violent county conventions representing fractions of towns chose, however, three delegates, two in New Hampshire and one in Vermont, whose credentials being accepted by the convention, the whole number of delegates assembled at Hartford was twenty-six.

This Hartford Convention remains famous in American history only as a powerful menstruum in national politics. What its most earnest projectors had hoped for was left but half done; but that half work condemned to political infamy twenty-six gentlemen highly respectable. Lawyers, they were, of State eminence, for the most part, and all of high social character, but inclined, like men of ability more used to courts than conventions, to treat constituencies like clients, and spend great pains over phraseology. Perhaps, indeed, these had been selected purposely to play the lion's part, that moderate fellow-citizens, Unionists at heart, whose conversion was essential, might not quake at the roar of the Convention.

What bold measures were possible? One may ask. Pickering's Confederacy of 1804 would have embraced New York, perhaps Pennsylvania. But these Eastern Federalists, with that clannishness at which Hamilton himself had marveled, were now circumscribed within the limits of New England, and of that section, moreover, but three States out of five had delegations at Hartford worthy of the name. The first effort to assemble a New England convention was, we have seen, in 1808-9. The second, if John Quincy Adams may be believed, was in 1812, immediately after the declaration of war against Great Britain, and that project Dexter defeated by a speech in Faneuil Hall. The third, and present, though partially successful, by bringing delegates into conference, was, like the Stamp Act Congress, or the Annapolis Conference of 1786, an instrument necessarily for later and riper designs. The American Confederacy, the American Union, are each the product of begetting conventions; nor without prudence were States now forbidden to enter into agreements or compacts with one another without the consent of Congress. The Hartford Convention may well have justified dire forebodings, for it did not dissolve finally, as a mass-meeting might have done, upon a full report, but contingently adjourned to Boston.

Organized on the appointed day in Hartford, then a town of four thousand inhabitants, by the choice of George Cabot as president, and Theodore Dwight as secretary, the present convention remained in close session for three continuous weeks. Of irregular political assemblies the worst may be suspected when proceedings are conducted in secrecy; and never, certainly, were doors shut more closely upon a delegate, and professedly a popular convention, than upon this one; not even doorkeeper or messenger gaining access to the discussion. Inviolable secrecy was enjoined upon every member, including the secretary, at the first meeting, and once more before they dispersed, notwithstanding the acceptance of their final report. The injunction was never removed. Not before a single State legislature whose sanction of this report was desired, not to any body of those constituents whose votes were indispensable to the ultimate ends, if these ends were legally pursued, was that report elucidated. Four years afterward, when the Hartford Convention and its projectors bent under the full blast of popular displeasure, Cabot delivered to his native State the sealed journal of its proceedings, which had remained in his exclusive custody; but that when opened was found to be a meager sketch of formal proceedings, and no more; making no record of yeas and nays, stating none of the amendments offered to the various reports, attaching the name of no author to a single proposition, in fine, carefully suppressing all means of ascertaining the expression or belief of individual delegates.