Hartford Convention

The Secret Journal of the Hartford Convention, published 1823.

The Hartford Convention was an event in 1814 in the United States during the War of 1812 in which New England's opposition to the war reached the point where secession from the United States was discussed. The end of the war led to the collapse of the Federalist Party.

Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson's anti-foreign trade policies, particularly the Embargo Act of 1807 and Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, were very unpopular in the northeastern United States, especially among merchants and shippers. Jefferson's successor, President James Madison, was even less popular in New England, particularly after his prosecution of the War of 1812, which ended legal trade with England. The opposition Federalist Party, formerly quite weak, regained strength especially in New England, and in New York where it collaborated with Mayor DeWitt Clinton of New York City and supported him for president. When Madison defeated Clinton in the fall election the furor in New England intensified. The war turned against the Americans, and the British effectively blockaded the entire coastline. Almost all maritime activity (apart from smuggling) was stopped and New England interests suffered.

On October 10, 1814, the Massachusetts state legislature called for the Hartford Convention, ostensibly to discuss several constitutional amendments necessary to protect New England's interests. On December 15, 1814, delegations from the then-five New England states (Maine at this point was still part of Massachusetts) met in Hartford, Connecticut. Official delegations were sent by Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Delegations from New Hampshire and Vermont were from dissident counties; these two states were not as dependent upon foreign trade, or as culturally tied to Boston. Meetings continued in secret through January 5, 1815.

In all, 26 delegates attended. Largely due to the sensitive nature of what was being discussed, no records of the proceedings were kept. In January, a final report was issued, containing language to the effect that New England had a "duty" to assert its authority over unconstitutional infringements on its sovereignty — a doctrine that echoed the policy of Jefferson and Madison in 1798 (in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions), and which would later reappear in a different context as "nullification."

The Hartford Convention's final report proposed several amendments to the United States Constitution. These attempted to combat the policies of the ruling Republicans by: 1) Prohibiting any trade embargo lasting over 60 days; 2) Requiring a two-thirds Congressional majority for any declaration of war, admission of a new state, or interdiction of foreign commerce; 3) Removing the three-fifths representation advantage of the slaveholding South; 4) Limiting future Presidents to one term; 5) Requiring each future President to be from a different state than his predecessor. (These last provisions were aimed directly at the ruling Virginia Dynasty.)

The Republican-dominated Congress would never have recommended any of New England's proposals for ratification. Hartford Convention delegates intended for them to embarrass the President and the Republicans in Congress—and also to serve as a basis for negotiations between New England and the rest of the country.

Some Hartford Convention delegates may have been in favor of New England's secession from the United States, and forming an independent republic. No such resolution was adopted at the convention; however, Massachusetts actually sent three commissioners to Washington, D.C. to negotiate these terms. When they arrived in February, 1815, news of Andrew Jackson's success at the Battle of New Orleans, and the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, preceded them and, consequently, their presence in the capital seemed both ludicrous and subversive. They quickly returned to Massachusetts. Thereafter, both the Hartford Convention and the Federalist Party became synonymous with disunion and secession, especially in the South. The Federalist Party was ruined as a national party, and survived only in a few localities for several more years before vanishing entirely.

Schouler's History

SECESSION IN NEW ENGLAND— THE HARTFORD CONVENTION (1814-1815)

from JAMES SCHOULER, History of the United States vol 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. 1891; copyright expired; subheads not in original text)

Introduction

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.

Delegations

The day for assembling was fixt 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 most 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. Quincy was not there, nor the stout-hearted Pickering—of whose readiness to become a rebel unless the Constitution could be altered, flagrante bello, to suit his views, there can be little doubt. Delegates like the present were prudent rather than earnest, better talkers than actors; men by no means calculated for bold measures.

Limitations

What bold measures were possible? one may ask. Pickering's Confederacy of 18042 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, tho 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.

Accountability

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.

Casual letters of contemporaries are preserved sufficient to show that representative Federalists labored with these delegates to procure a separation of the States, but how many more of the same strain President Cabot may have torn up one can only conjecture. That twenty-six public men should have consented to leave no ampler means of vindicating to their own age, and to posterity, themselves and their motives, may evince a noble disinterestedness, sublime confidence in the rectitude of their own intentions, a comforting reliance upon "the Searcher of Hearts," but certainly an astonishing ignorance of human nature in this our inquisitive republic. Assembling amid rumors of treason and the execration of all the country west of the Hudson, its members watched by an army officer who had been conveniently stationed in the vicinity, the Hartford Convention, hardening into stone, preserves for all ages a sphinxlike mystery. The labors of this convention, whatever they were, ended with a report and resolutions, signed by the delegates present, and adopted on the day before final adjournment. Report and resolutions disappointed, doubtless, both citizens who had wished a new declaration of independence, and citizens who had feared it. Neither Virginia nor Kentucky could, with propriety, condemn the heresies of State sovereignty which supplied the false logic of this report, and an imperfect experience of this Federal Union may excuse in Otis and his associates theoretical errors which Jefferson and Madison while in the opposition had, first inculcated. Constitutional amendments were here proposed which, not utterly objectionable under other circumstances, must have been deemed at this time an insult to those officially responsible for the national safety, and only admissible as a humiliation of the majority. It requires little imagination to read, in report and resolutions, a menace to the Union in its hour of tribulation, a demand for the purse and sword, to which only a craven Congress could have yielded, and a threat of local armies which, with the avowed purpose of mutual aid, might in some not remote contingency be turned against foes American not less than British.

References

• Lyman, Theodore, A short account of the Hartford Convention: taken from official documents, and addressed to the fair minded and the well disposed; To which is added an attested copy of the secret journal of that body. Boston: O. Everett, 1823.
• Adams, James Truslow. New England in the Republic, 1776-1850 (1926)
• Banner, James M. Jr. To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815 (1970).
• Buckley, William Edward. The Hartford Convention. New Haven: Yale University Press (1934)
• The Report of the Hartford Convention from the Avalon Project