A Disease in the Public Mind

by Thomas Fleming

  The Jeffersonians ignored the Federalists and the treaty was approved, thanks to the majorities they commanded in both houses of Congress. But the Federalists, led by Senator Pickering and former Congressman Fisher Ames, the party’s leader in Massachusetts, continued to condemn the purchase of Louisiana. They predicted the prospect of cheap land would depopulate the East and lure badly needed workers from the new factories that were opening in New England. The only solution, as Ames saw it, was for the Federalists “to entrench themselves in the state governments and endeavor to make state justice and state power a shelter of the wise, the good and the rich from the wild destroying rage of the Southern Jacobins.”

  Pickering went further than Ames. He decided New England, and hopefully neighboring New York, to which thousands of New Englanders were emigrating, should secede from the Union, form a new country, and seek the protection and alliance of Great Britain to defend them against the Jacobinic Jeffersonians. He conferred with Vice President Aaron Burr, who had quarreled with the president and was unlikely to be on the ticket when Jefferson ran for reelection in 1804. Burr, a New Englander by blood, agreed to run for governor of New York with Federalist support. If he won, he would lead New York into the new nation.

  The conspiracy again revealed the intensity of New England’s conviction that they were the predestined leaders of an independent America. Their defiance of George III and his Parliament had triggered the American Revolution. Hadn’t John Adams, the “Atlas of Independence” in the Continental Congress, selected George Washington to lead the army and Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence? The Pilgrim fathers had seen Plymouth as “one small candle . . . [that] hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.” The Puritans who founded Boston had prophesied it would be a “city upon a hill watched by the world.” Now these arrogant Virginians were taking charge of the United States of America. It was intolerable!3

  Here were the seeds of a primary disease of the public mind, which would soon fuse with antislavery to create a hatred of the South and Southerners, with tragic consequences for America’s future.4

  • • •

  Nothing came of Senator Pickering’s plot. Slandered and smeared with special savagery by the Jeffersonian Republicans as a traitor to the party, Burr lost his race for governor of New York. Jefferson’s landslide reelection in 1804 soon swept the Republican Party into power in Massachusetts. But the seeds of discontent and suspicion of Virginia’s leadership had been planted in many minds. These burst into dangerous bloom in Jefferson’s second term, when he confronted the threat of war with Great Britain over London’s arrogant interference with American overseas commerce. The British insisted their blockade of France and her European allies entitled them to seize American ships and kidnap American sailors into the Royal Navy. The French were equally ready to assault American ships trading with Britain. Instead of war, the president declared an embargo against trade with Britain, France, and the rest of the civilized world.

  The embargo had a devastating impact on New England, home of most of America’s million-ton merchant fleet. Tens of thousands of restless, angry seamen were left idle in her ports. In Newburyport, once the third busiest harbor in Massachusetts, seventy ships rocked and rotted at their anchors. Merchants went bankrupt everywhere. One critic raged that it was like “cutting a man’s throat to cure a nosebleed.” In December 1808, on the first anniversary of the president’s decree, down-at-the-heel sailors dragged a mastless ship along Newburyport’s rundown streets, with a helmsman wearing a placard: “Which way shall I steer?”

  Massachusetts Federalists used the embargo’s distress to publish a warning: “A Separation of the States and its Consequences to New England.” Led by Senator Pickering (Fisher Ames had died), the Federalists regularly condemned President Jefferson’s supposed partiality to France. When some infuriated New Englanders began smuggling exports and imports to and from Canada in defiance of the embargo, the president asked Congress to pass a force bill, empowering him to make war on them with the U.S. Army and Navy.

  This policy only deepened New England’s sense of alienation. Connecticut’s legislature, in a special session, declared that the state had the power to reject both the embargo and the force bill as unconstitutional. The state had a duty “to interpose a protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people and the assumed powers of the federal government.” A Vermont grand jury expressed outrage at the idea of the U.S. Army and local law officers enforcing the president’s proclamation against trade with Canada. Rhode Island militiamen, called out by the governor, refused to arrest violators of the embargo. New England was giving the man who had said a state could nullify an act of Congress in 1798 (when the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts) a demoralizing taste of his own medicine.5

  In the House of Representatives, Virginia’s John Randolph, a Jefferson enemy, intoned that all of Europe—and most Americans—saw the United States as “a divided people, imbecile and distracted.” Aghast at the widespread disgust with the embargo, the Republicans repealed it on President Jefferson’s last day in office. It had accomplished little or nothing. But the Republican Party, still buoyed by the Louisiana Purchase, remained potent at the polls, electing James Madison as Jefferson’s successor.

  • • •

  The uproar over the embargo proved to be only a warm-up for the War of 1812. President Madison struggled to achieve peace with France and England, but the two belligerents declined to cooperate. Republican congressmen from Kentucky and Tennessee, led by a gifted orator named Henry Clay, began calling for war with Britain. They were infected by a disease of the public mind that has led to many of America’s wars: the illusion of an easy victory.

  The British were locked in global combat with Napoleon Bonaparte, the ruler of Europe. The Congressional “War Hawks” argued it would be a simple matter to declare war and seize Canada’s vast, mostly empty acres, which had only a miniscule British army to defend them. In 1812, Congress agreed—with almost every New England Federalist representative and senator voting against the declaration. As the Federalists saw it, Britain was defending the values of liberty and human rights against Napoleon Bonaparte’s military dictatorship.

  Within a few weeks, the Federalists in Congress, most of them New Englanders, issued “an address . . . to their Constituents on the subject of War with Great Britain.” It was a blast of vituperation and condemnation of President Madison’s government that might as well have been written by the prime minister of Britain. An abridged version of this ferocious document appeared in every major newspaper in the nation. The denunciation portrayed the Federalists as the party of peace, and the Jeffersonian Republicans as reckless warmongers.

  On the heels of this assault came a broadside from the legislature of the state of Massachusetts, voicing even more hostile sentiments. The war was denounced as “outrageous to public opinion, [and] to the feelings and interests of the people.” The conflict was motivated, the legislators declared, by President Madison’s intent to “aggrandize the southern and western states at the expense of the Eastern section of the Union.” The governor of Massachusetts followed this accusation with a call for a fast day, giving the state’s clergymen a chance to join the chorus of deprecation and contempt. Connecticut’s governor promptly imitated the Bay State.

  Huge meetings in Boston and other towns and cities endorsed “without a single dissenting vote” the searing opinions voiced by the legislature. In Essex County, home of Timothy Pickering and other “high” or ultra Federalists, a new danger was denounced: a standing army. For good measure they threw in “mob rule.”6

  In Baltimore, Republicans soon validated the latter charge. They attacked a Federalist newspaper whose editor was equally vituperative in opposing the war. A handful of Federalists tried to protect the editor from physical harm. One of them was the editor’s close friend, Henry Lee, the man President Washington had chosen to help suppress the Whiskey Rebelli
on. Lee had served three terms as the Federalist governor of Virginia.

  Baltimore city officials persuaded the editor and his protectors to give up their weapons and retreat to the local jail before the mob erupted. A few hours later, an even bigger mob invaded the jail and beat and kicked the Federalists, killing one of them and seriously injuring Henry Lee, leaving him a semi-invalid until he died in 1818. His son, Robert E. Lee, undoubtedly never forgot this example of how American politics could explode into mindless violence.7

  Massachusetts Federalists called for the formation of committees of correspondence in all seventeen states to coordinate resistance to the “wanton, impolitic and unjust war.” But the opposition to the war remained almost entirely in New England. There it soon became a serious matter. The governor of Connecticut refused to place the state’s militia under the command of a federally appointed major general to defend the seacoast against an attack from a British fleet offshore. Massachusetts soon followed this example, refusing to summon forty-three companies of militiamen to defend the seacoast of their state and Rhode Island.8

  The performance of the three federal armies that President Madison ordered to invade Canada in 1812 did not help matters. They were all repulsed; one army retreated to Detroit and surrendered to a much smaller enemy force. At home, Connecticut thwarted army recruiters by offering more money to volunteers who joined its state forces, which the governor refused to send beyond its borders.

  • • •

  Things did not go much better for American attempts to invade Canada in 1813. The British, sensing an opportunity to divide the Americans, decided not to blockade the ports of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, or New Hampshire. A thriving trade in British imports was soon in full swing, making Yankee merchants (and British exporters) rich. The Yankees rationalized this flirtation with treason by continuing to condemn the war as wanton and impolitic.

  The British soon extended their divisive policy to the West Indies and Bermuda. The governors of these islands were ordered to limit imports from America to ships from New England. President Madison denounced the practice as an attempt to “dismember our confederated Republic.” But no one in New England paid any attention to “Little Jemmy,” the Federalist newspaper nickname for the nation’s chief executive.

  The embattled president had another weapon, which he soon utilized: an embargo on all trade, reinforced by the American navy. To no one’s surprise, Massachusetts’s governor declared it unconstitutional. In resolutions passed by the legislature and numerous towns, the law was also condemned as “slavery”—an echo of the accusation that the patriots of 1776 flung at the British.9

  • • •

  The Bay State’s legislature now produced a report that took the slide to disunion in a new and more definite direction. Chaired by Harrison Grey Otis, one of the younger generation of Federalists, the committee declared that an “ardent attachment to the union” still beat in the hearts of the state’s citizens. But since 1800 it had been “destroyed by a practical neglect of Constitutional principles.” They traced this destruction to a desire to “harass and annihilate that spirit of commerce . . . the handmaid of civil and religious liberty.” The villains did not have to be named: they were the Jeffersonian Republican citizens of the South and the West, who prospered largely through agriculture. There was no point in issuing more denunciations, Otis’s committee declared. It was time to summon a convention “of the wise and good” of the oppressed New England states to decide what they should do about this situation.10

  Meanwhile, the federal government was going broke. When it tried to float a loan of $25 million, the Federalists in Congress opposed it because the money was to fund “a war of invasion and conquest.” New England banks, overflowing with cash thanks to the British imports trade, refused to lend them a penny. To cap the government’s humiliation, the British fleet landed a small army, which routed American militia and burned Washington, DC.

  Then came news that Napoleon Bonaparte had abandoned his invasion of Russia, which would have made him absolute master of Europe, and had retreated to Paris, where he confronted an overwhelming coalition of national armies and abdicated. That meant the United States now faced a war with a triumphant British fleet and army, untrammeled by commitments elsewhere.

  The illusions behind the 1812 declaration of war had exploded in President Madison’s face. Massachusetts called for his resignation. The demoralized Congress suggested transferring the fire-ravaged American capital elsewhere—perhaps back to Philadelphia. From New Orleans came reports that the British were preparing to assault the city with a fleet and army. If they captured it, they would control the Mississippi Valley.

  On December 15, 1814, the New England convention met in Connecticut’s capital, Hartford. In spite of the passionate rhetoric that summoned them, New Hampshire and Vermont decided not to attend. While delegates from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and the host state met in secret sessions, an anxious President Madison and his advisors feared that the outcome would be secession and an alliance between New England and Great Britain. Federal troops were withdrawn from the Canadian border with orders to resist such a move and regard those who supported it as traitors. Civil war seemed a real possibility.11

  • • •

  Seldom has a new year begun with gloomier prospects for the United States of America than in 1815. But within two seemingly miraculous months, the storm clouds were transformed to sunshine and celebrations by news from distant quarters. First came the arrival of a treaty of peace, signed by American and British negotiators in Ghent, Belgium. Instead of demands for a swath of the Midwest and most of Maine—London’s harsh opening terms—the British accepted a peace that left all America’s borders intact. A few days later, a messenger arrived from New Orleans to tell the president that Major General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee had won a decisive victory, routing an army of British veterans with the loss of only seven men.

  No one was more surprised than a delegation from the Hartford Convention, who had arrived in Washington with a set of demands that would give New England a special status within the Union, enabling them to defy or dismiss laws passed by the federal government. If the president refused to negotiate with them, a second convention would be called, which would vote to secede. President Madison, suddenly ten feet tall politically, never had to deal with this ultimatum. The delegates slunk out of Washington, DC, while parades and speeches celebrated the end of the war in an aura of improbable victory.12

  Two years later, another Virginian, James Monroe, became president. It was the death knell of the Federalist Party and the start of what a wry Yankee newspaperman called “the era of good feelings.” Not all the feelings were entitled to that adjective, however. Triumphant Jeffersonian Republicans, both in New England and beyond its borders, made sure the men who had summoned the Hartford Convention were painted as would-be traitors and renegades in the newspapers. Their political careers came to an abrupt and unforgiving close. Henceforth New Englanders would have to find another way, outside of politics, to regain their lost leadership.

  • • •

  In this atmosphere of Jeffersonian Republican ascendancy, Southerners launched a campaign to solve the nation’s largest remaining problem: slavery. The American Colonization Society appeared on the scene in 1816, backed by a chorus of approval from a who’s who of the nation’s politicians, including President James Monroe, ex-President James Madison, Henry Clay, John Randolph, and Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington, the late founder’s nephew, who agreed to be its first president.

  The ACS was proposed by two Presbyterian clergymen, Paul Finley and Samuel Mills, but their idea was obviously rooted in Thomas Jefferson’s assumption that blacks could never achieve acceptance and true equality in America. The society proposed to raise money to purchase enough land in Africa to found a new nation for free blacks, to be called Liberia.13

  They had no trouble selling the idea to mostly southern political leaders and their alli
es in the North. From 1800 to 1810, the number of free blacks in America had almost doubled, to 186,446. Philadelphia had the most thriving and prosperous black community. One of its leaders was James Forten, who had been born free and educated at a Quaker-funded school for blacks.

  Forten had served aboard an American privateer during the Revolution. The warship had been captured and he had barely survived a year on one of the disease-ridden British prison ships in New York’s harbor. Back in Philadelphia, he went to work for a sailmaker, who steadily promoted him and eventually sold him the business.

  Although Forten had cordial relations with many white Philadelphians in the business world, he was attracted to the idea of returning to Africa. Blacks were not welcome in many white Philadelphia homes, and they were barred from public schools. On the Fourth of July and other holidays, drunken patriots often beat them up and broke the windows of their homes. Forten was also acutely conscious of the huge number of blacks still enslaved in nearby Maryland and the other states of the South. He had organized an angry protest when Congress passed the act empowering federal marshals to pursue and arrest runaway slaves.

  Forten’s conversations with the American Colonization Society’s spokesmen slowly disillusioned him. He sensed a racist undertone in the ACS approach. Their plan called for emancipating slaves only if they agreed to leave the country for the proposed refuge in Africa. Many of the leaders, notably Henry Clay and John Randolph, saw free blacks as potential fomenters of slave insurrections, and they did not conceal an eagerness to get them out of America. Perhaps most disturbing, the ACS did not say a word in their charter about eventually eliminating slavery.