A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  Congressional ignorance or neglect of New England’s “true Interest,” Gerry warned, provided Great Britain “with a powerful Means by offering a participation in her Fisheries, to detach this State from the Confederation … and make it an Ally of her own.”22 In the end, the British did admit American participation in the Newfoundland fisheries by the Peace of Paris signed in 1783, but New England’s sensitivity to its maritime interests remained a live coal that Gardoqui could easily fan into flame.

  When James Monroe heard New England congressmen talking openly of secession in the boardinghouses and taverns of New York as early as December 1785, perhaps (like subsequent American historians) he regarded it as hyperbole—the exaggerated tirades of weary legislators after long hours of debate and a few pints of stout ale. When John Jay spoke with him privately about the impasse with Gardoqui, however, and then formally requested a secret committee to manage his negotiations, Monroe suddenly realized that the talk of a separate New England confederation was real. Although John Jay was probably not yet in league with the secessionists, the New England congressional delegation embraced Jay’s proposed surrender of the Mississippi as a means to jettison southern opposition by creating a regional confederacy and signing a separate commercial treaty with Spain.

  Who were these separatists in the spring and summer of 1786? The ringleaders were Massachusetts congressmen associated in Bay State politics with Salem and Boston mercantile conservatives known as the Essex Junto. Boston merchant and judge Nathaniel Gorham, forty-eight, was president of Congress. Attorney Nathan Dane, thirty-four, graduated from Harvard in 1778 and practiced law in Beverly, across the harbor from Salem in Essex County. “The Southern States have much to fear from a dissolution of the present Confederacy,” Dane advised Essex attorney Edward Pulling: “They surely must be alarmed even at the suggestion of a confederacy of the States north of the Potomac or even the Delaware.” Years later, Dane would also participate in the separatist Hartford Convention of 1814.23

  The rising genius of the New England separatists of 1786 was thirty-one-year-old Rufus King, who lived to carry the banner of Federalism into the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Born a hundred miles up the coast from Boston into a Tory mercantile family, King had graduated at the head of his Harvard class of 1777, read law in Salem with Theophilus Parsons, a senior member of the junto known to his students as “Theawfullest Parsons,” and begun his legal practice in the Essex County courts.

  Congressman Rufus King’s flirtation with separatism began in November 1785, when he was working with Caleb Davis, a Boston merchant and shipowner who was also speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, to circumvent the obvious weaknesses of the confederation government and find alternative ways to strengthen American trade (and the New England economy) in the face of aggressive foreign rivals. British merchants enjoyed both unrestricted access to markets in America and the continued protection of their Navigation Acts at home. Their American counterparts were suffering, so much so that Massachusetts and New Hampshire had recently retaliated with restrictions on foreign merchants, even though their policy had no chance of success unless it extended to all American ports of entry. The best way to achieve a level playing field would be for Congress to tear a page from the British play-book and restrict all of America’s trade “to her own ships and Mariners.” If only Congress could do that, Rufus King and his Bay State allies agreed, America would promptly benefit from “the great number of ships, which would be built, and the multitudes of men who would become mariners.”24

  As in all debates over protectionism and free trade, however, self-interest gave other Americans—in this instance the farmers and planters of the south and west—incentives to uphold the status quo. Congress, King told the speaker of the Massachusetts legislature, would be unable to act because “the Southern and Eastern states cannot and will not soon agree in vesting powers in Congress to regulate external and internal commerce”—and even if Congress was given the authority to regulate commerce, passage of the kind of legislation they sought was not assured.25

  Casting about for another way to make something happen, King looked to the states. Since each of them could, in theory at least, pass laws on subjects that were denied to Congress, a coordinated policy of retaliation against the British merchants might be enacted through the state legislatures. The challenge, in practice, was to get all thirteen clocks to strike at the same time, as they had in July 1776, in the face of the same diverging economic interests that frustrated Congress (not to mention the mercantile rivalries between New England and New York ports of entry and their respective customs services). All in all, Rufus King and the maritime interests of Massachusetts could not be optimistic about getting “uniform Acts passed by the several States.” With this realization—that they were stymied in and out of Congress—the maritime interests of Massachusetts took a creative first step toward separatism.26

  “The Confederation admits of Alliances between two or more States,” King wrote,

  provided the purpose and duration thereof are previously communicated to, and approved by, Congress. The seven Eastern states have common commercial interests … and are competent to give the Approbation of Congress to such sub-confederation, as they might agree upon … which would not only remedy all their Difficulties, but raise them to a degree of power and Opulence which would surprize and astonish.

  In short, as Rufus King read the Articles of Confederation, with seven out of thirteen votes in Congress, the eastern and commercial states had the power to give constitutional sanction to a sub-confederation composed of the very same seven eastern and commercial states.27

  The more Rufus King thought about a sub-confederacy the more he liked the idea, for even “if Congress had the power to regulate Trade,” King feared that “they would be without the Disposition to do it.” He doubted that “the Southern States will relinquish their partial [i.e., onesided], and unfederal, policy concerning commerce, until they find a decided disposition in the Eastern States to combine for their own security.” Only if the northern states banded together to form a commercial sub-confederation, he concluded, would “the southern states … sensibly feel their weakness, and accede to such measures as may be adopted by the majority of the Confederacy”28

  In his November 1785 correspondence with the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Rufus King planted the seeds of the first New England separatist movement. The months ahead only confirmed his forecasts and his calculations of sectional voting patterns in Congress. Although by February 1786 ten states did agree to expand the commercial regulatory powers of the whole Congress, without the consent of Delaware, Georgia, and South Carolina that reform died on the vine—as did a parallel plan for a requisition system to address the national government’s chronic poverty. With the failures of these measures in the spring of 1786, Massachusetts politicians could “easily see … a dissolution of the federal Government and with that an end to all our National importance and happiness.”29

  As things stood in the spring of 1786, the country seemed to have four options: the continued decline of the existing government, the creation of a limited sub-confederation for commercial purposes, the creation of a separate confederation of like-minded northern commercial states, or the vague prospect that something useful might come out of Virginia governor Patrick Henry’s invitation to discuss the nation’s commercial problems at Annapolis, Maryland, on the first Monday in September.30 Of these four policy options, the congressmen from New England had favored the second and had worked hard to strengthen the Confederation, but as prospects for success grew slim in the spring and summer of 1786, it was not difficult for the skillful Spanish diplomat Diego de Gardoqui, a man with twenty years of experience in transatlantic commerce, to entice the New Englanders toward the third option: a separate northern confederacy and a commercial treaty with Spain.31

  In politics, Rufus King was a protégé of the dour puritan Timothy Pickering, whose
Salem ancestors included a “hanging judge” in the Salem witchcraft trials. Pickering, forty-one, had spent his political career scheming to protect puritan virtue and high Federalism—one and the same in his constricted mind—from a variety of enemies, foreign and domestic. From 1786 through 1814, except when his party held sway in national affairs, Pickering was the inveterate New England separatist. After President John Adams dismissed him from his cabinet for undermining American foreign policy on the brink of war in 1799, Pickering’s friends in the Essex Junto arranged the former secretary of state’s election to the Senate. There he became the leading voice of New England separatism from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to the Hartford Convention of 1814, until his thirty-year obsession died along with Lieutenant General Sir Edward Michael Pakenham in the middle of a muddy battlefield below New Orleans on the afternoon of January 8, 1815.

  Geographically, Theodore Sedgwick, forty, was the odd man out among the congressional separatists of 1786. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, Sedgwick had studied theology and law at Yale and hung out his shingle in the Berkshire mountain towns of Great Barrington and Sheffield. Rising through the state legislature to a seat in the Confederation Congress, Sedgwick would preside as speaker of the House of Representatives during the Sixth Congress (the last ever to see a Federalist majority).

  Seeking support from other northern states, Gorham, Dane, King, and Sedgwick talked openly of separating New England from the southern states and the prospective southwestern states of the Ohio River Valley. Thus “in conversations at which I have been present,” James Monroe heard hopes for “a dismemberment so as to include Pen[nsylvani]a.” Occasionally they also hoped for Delaware, and perhaps even Maryland. “Sometimes,” Monroe said, they talked of gathering into a northern confederation “all the states south to the Potowmack.”32

  Savvy men did not entrust sensitive matters to the common mail, and because they saw each other almost every day in Congress, Gorham, Dane, King, and Sedgwick had little call to write to one another about their scheme—except if one of them went out of town. When Nathan Dane went home for a visit, he wrote guardedly to assure Rufus King that “all the men I have conversed with appear to have adopted ideas similar to ours.” King replied with equal discretion that he was “happy to lea[r]n that prudent and discreet men concur with us in Opinion concerning the Spanish negotiation,” adding that “it would appear strange to me if a contrary Opinion was entertained by any sensible man North of the Potomack.”33

  Theodore Sedgwick was less circumspect in a letter home to conservative state senator Caleb Strong, of Hampshire County in the Connecticut River Valley of central Massachusetts. “It well becomes the eastern and middle States … seriously to consider what advantages result to them from their connection with the Southern States,” Sedgwick wrote in August 1786. “They can give us nothing,” he thought, and

  even the appearance of a union cannot… long be preserved. It becomes us seriously to contemplate a substitute; for if we do not controul events we shall be miserably controuled by them. No other substitute can be devised than that of contracting the limits of the confederacy to such as are natural and reasonable.34

  “Controul” or “be miserably controuled”—that was the question. Whether t’was better for New England to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune within the union, or to adopt separatist measures against its sea of troubles.

  From December 1785 (when James Monroe first heard the New Englanders talking of separation) until late August 1786, congressional rules about the secrecy of its deliberations, rules intended to protect freedom of debate, created a greenhouse environment for political intrigue. Nevertheless, the conflict between New England and the southern states over the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations did not escape notice by the French charge d’affaires, Louis-Guillaume Otto—in part because he had been approached as a possible mediator. “The negotiations relating to the treaty of commerce with Spain,” Otto reported to French authorities, “have … been the constant subject of the deliberations of congress.” The southern states were attempting to dissuade Pennsylvania and New Jersey from joining “the league of the North” and join their insistence on opening the port of New Orleans “as a commercial entrepôt for all the commodities of the interior.” Their efforts, however, encountered “serious opposition from the states of the North.” Northern congressmen felt that “the navigation of the Mississippi [was] … far from being advantageous to the confederation.” Opening the Mississippi, the New Englanders believed, would sever the “interior country” from its dependence upon the Atlantic states. “The inhabitants of Kentucky,” Otto explained, would no longer feel the need for commercial connections with the maritime states, and “would only think of rendering themselves wholly independent of Congress as of a sovereign body from which they could derive no benefit.” Not that these New England congressmen were terribly concerned about the fate of settlers in the Ohio River Valley. What did concern them was a prospective exodus of Yankee farmers and sailors to the fertile lands along the Ohio River—an exodus “of the most industrious inhabitants of the northern states” that would cripple the fleets, send land values plummeting, and consign New England to a minority role in national affairs. “Who would not hesitate an instant,” Otto reflected, “to exchange the arid rocks of Massachusetts and of New Hampshire for the smiling plains of the Ohio and the Mississippi”?35

  As the representative of the court of Versailles, Louis-Guillaume Otto was no republican. Still, as a man of the Enlightenment he knew his Montesquieu as well as any of the Americans, for whom the great Frenchman and John Locke were demigods of republicanism. “It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist,” wrote Montesquieu:

  In an extensive republic the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views. … In a small one, the interest of the public is more obvious, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen.36

  Sprawling from Maine to Georgia, the United States was “already of too great extent,” the New Englanders contended, “and … their territory ought to be reduced rather than augmented beyond all proportion.” Hence it was necessary “to recall the ultimatum which proposed the opening of the Mississippi as a condition sine qua non” for a commercial treaty with Spain.

  “Mr. Gardoqui,” Otto continued, “affects the greatest indifference about these negotiations…. He has often said to me that… it would be impossible to prevent contraband trade and other disorders which the Americans would not fail to cause.” Carlos Ill’s main objective was simply to discourage “establishments on the Mississippi which might one day become neighbors so much the more dangerous for the Spanish possessions.”

  Montesquieu’s maxim was accepted wisdom in the age of the Enlightenment. Classical history proved that republics were naturally suited to small territories. Sparta had endured by maintaining the “same extent of territory after all her wars,” while Athens and Rome demonstrated the dangers of imperial expansion: decadence, despotism, and eventual collapse. Even as they invoked his theory about the dangers of an extensive republic, however, American congressmen were engaged in exactly the kind of self-interested politics Montesquieu had warned about, when “the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views.”

  The depth of sectional division did not escape Louis-Guillaume Otto’s notice, either. “I have had the honor thus far of explaining to you merely the ostensible arguments of the two parties,” Otto reported to Louis XVI and his ministers, “but a long acquaintance with the affairs of this country authorizes me, perhaps, to divine the secret motives of the heat with which each state supports its opinion.” The southern states were “not in earnest” when they contended that closing the Mississippi would force the western frontiersmen to “seek an outlet by way of the [Great] lakes, and … throw themselves into the arms of England.” American patriotism, born of the Revolution, ran deeper in Kentucky than the New Englanders knew. And the rivers that
lead to Canada looked more inviting to easterners studying their maps than to farmers loading heavy barrels of flour, salt pork, beef, and other bulky commodities aboard makeshift rafts that floated better downstream than up.

  “The true motive” of the vigorous contention between the northern and southern states, Otto believed, was rooted in calculations of sectional political and economic self-interest within a union that was at best only a dozen years old (counting from the First Continental Congress of 1774). The northern states, Otto knew, were “eager to incline the balance toward their side,” while the southern states “neglect no opportunity of increasing the population and importance of the western territory, and of drawing thither by degrees the inhabitants of New England, whose ungrateful soil only too much favors emigration.” This westward movement of population was a two-fisted blow to New England, Otto observed,

  since on the one hand it deprives her of industrious citizens, and on the other it adds to the population of the southern states. These new [western] territories will gradually form themselves into separate [state] governments; they will have their representatives in congress, and will augment greatly the mass of the southern states.

  Otto’s analysis did not miss much. Southerners insisted upon access to the Mississippi and New Orleans for the good of themselves and “their establishments in the West.” A treaty containing “only stipulations in favor of the northern fisheries” threatened to increase the prosperity, commerce, and “preponderance of the northern states” in national politics. The French diplomat did not expect the congressmen from either region to give ground, and he knew that Gardoqui would stand firm. Grateful that this diplomatic mess was not in his portfolio, Otto noted that “the conduct of this thorny negotiation is in the hands of Mr. Jay.”