CHAPTER VIII.
In the tempest of war that raged over land and ocean during the months of August and September, 1814, bystanders could not trust their own judgment of the future; yet shrewd observers, little affected either by emotion or by interest, inclined to the belief that the United States government was near exhaustion. The immediate military danger on Lake Champlain was escaped, and Baltimore was saved; but the symptoms of approaching failure in government were not to be mistaken, and the capture of Washington, which was intended to hurry the collapse, produced its intended effect.
From the first day of the war the two instruments necessary for military success were wanting to Madison,—money and men. After three campaigns, the time came when both these wants must be supplied, or the national government must devolve its duties on the States. When the President, preparing his Annual Message, asked his Cabinet officers what were the prospects of supplying money and men for another campaign, he received answers discouraging in the extreme.
First, in regard to money. In July, Secretary Campbell advertised a second loan, of only six million dollars. He obtained but two and a half millions at eighty. His acceptance of this trifling sum obliged him to give the same terms to the contractors who had taken the nine millions subscribed in the spring at eighty-eight. Barker found difficulty in making his payments, and from both loans the Treasury could expect to obtain only $10,400,000, owing to the contractors’ failures.[314] The authorized loan was twenty-five millions. The secretary could suggest no expedient, except Treasury notes, for filling the deficit.
Bad as this failure was,—though it showed Secretary Campbell’s incapacity so clearly as to compel his retirement, and obliged the President to call a special session of Congress,—the Treasury might regard it as the least of its embarrassments. Commonly governments had begun their most desperate efforts only after ordinary resources failed; but the United States government in 1814 had so inextricably involved its finances that without dictatorial powers of seizing property its functions could not much longer be continued. The general bankruptcy, long foreseen, at length occurred.
The panic caused by the capture of Washington, August 24, obliged the tottering banks of Philadelphia and Baltimore to suspend specie payments. The banks of Philadelphia formally announced their suspension, August 31, by a circular explaining the causes and necessity of their decision.[315] The banks of New York immediately followed, September 1; and thenceforward no bank between New Orleans and Albany paid its obligations except in notes. Only the banks of New England maintained specie payments, with the exception of those in least credit, which took the opportunity to pay or not pay as they pleased. The suspension was admitted to be permanent. Until the blockade should be raised and domestic produce could find a foreign market, the course of exchange was fixed, and specie payments could not be resumed. The British navy and the Boston Federalists held the country firmly bound, and peace alone could bring relief.
Suspension mattered little, and had the National Bank been in existence the failure might have been an advantage to the government; but without a central authority the currency instantly fell into confusion. No medium of exchange existed outside of New England. Boston gave the specie standard, and soon the exchanges showed wide differences. New York money stood at twenty per cent discount, Philadelphia at twenty-four per cent, Baltimore at thirty per cent. Treasury notes were sold in Boston at twenty-five per cent discount, and United States six-per-cents stood at sixty in coin.[316] The Treasury had no means of transferring its bank deposits from one part of the country to another. Unless it paid its debts in Treasury notes, it was unable to pay them at all. No other money than the notes of suspended banks came into the Treasury. Even in New England, taxes, customs-duties, and loans were paid in Treasury notes, and rarely in local currency. Thus, while the government collected in the Middle and Southern States millions in bank-notes, it was obliged to leave them in deposit at the local banks where the collection was made, while its debts in Boston and New York remained unpaid. The source of revenue was destroyed. The whole South and West, and the Middle States as far north as New York, could contribute in no considerable degree to the support of government.
The situation was unusual. The government might possess immense resources in one State and be totally bankrupt in another; it might levy taxes to the amount of the whole circulating medium, and yet have only its own notes available for payment of debt; it might borrow hundreds of millions and be none the better for the loan. All the private bank-notes of Pennsylvania and the Southern country were useless in New York and New England where they must chiefly be used. An attempt to transfer such deposits in any quantity would have made them quite worthless. The Treasury already admitted bankruptcy. The interest on the national obligations could not be paid.
The President’s second inquiry regarded men. The new Secretary of War, Monroe, gave him such information as the Department possessed on the numbers of the army. A comparative account showed that in June, 1813, the regular troops numbered 27,609; in December, 34,325. In January, 1814, the number was nominally 33,822;[317] in July the aggregate was 31,503, the effectives being 27,010.[318] Since July the recruits had declined in numbers. The three months of March, April, and May produced 6,996 recruits; the three months of July, August, and September were reported as furnishing 4,477.[319] The general return of September 30 reported the strength of the army at 34,029 men.[320] The government was not able to provide the money necessary to pay bounties due for the last three months’ recruiting.[321] The Secretary of War admitted the failure of the recruiting service, and attributed it to the high bounties given for substitutes in the militia detached for United States service.[322]
The smallness of the armies in the field showed worse results than were indicated by the returns. Macomb at Plattsburg claimed to have only fifteen hundred effectives. Izard carried with him to Buffalo only four thousand men. Brown’s effectives at Fort Erie numbered two thousand. Apparently these three corps included the entire force in the field on the Canada frontier, and their combined effective strength did not exceed eight thousand men. The year before, Wilkinson and Hampton commanded fully eleven thousand effectives in their movements against Montreal. Nothing showed that the victories at Niagara and Plattsburg had stimulated enlistments, or that the army could be raised above thirty thousand effectives even if the finances were in a condition to meet the expense.
Much was said of the zeal shown by the State militia in hastening to the defence of their soil, and the New England Federalists were as loud as the Kentucky and Tennessee Democrats in praise of the energy with which the militia rose to resist invasion; but in reality this symptom was the most alarming of the time. Both in the military and in the political point of view, the persistence in depending on militia threatened to ruin the national government.
The military experience of 1814 satisfied the stanchest war Democrats that the militia must not be their dependence. In Maine the militia allowed themselves with hardly a show of resistance to be made subjects of Great Britain. At Plattsburg volunteers collected in considerable numbers, but the victory was won by the sailors and the engineers. At Niagara, Brown never could induce more than a thousand volunteers to support him in his utmost straits. Porter’s efforts failed to create a brigade respectable in numbers, and at Chippawa his Indians outnumbered his whites. Four days after the repulse of Drummond’s assault on Fort Erie, at the most anxious moment of the Niagara campaign, Major-General Brown wrote to Secretary Armstrong,[323]—
“I very much doubt if a parallel can be found for the state of things existing on this frontier. A gallant little army struggling with the enemies of their country, and devoting their lives for its honor and its safety, left by that country to struggle alone, and that within sight and within hearing.”
A month afterward Brown succeeded in obtaining a thousand volunteers, and by some quality of his own made them assault and carry works that old soldiers feared to touch. The feat was the most extraordinary that was performed on either side in the remarkably varied experience of the war; but it proved Brown’s personal energy rather than the merits of a militia system. At Washington the militia were thoroughly tested; their rout proved chiefly the incompetence of their general, but the system was shown, before the battle, to be more defective than the army it produced. At Baltimore the militia were again routed, and the town was saved chiefly by the engineers and sailors. In Virginia, where more than forty thousand militia were in the field, they protected nothing, and their service was more fatal to themselves than though they had fought severe battles. Nearly all the Virginia militia summoned for the defence of Norfolk suffered from sickness, and the mortality when compared with that of the regular service was enormous; five militia-men sickened and died where one regular soldier suffered.[324] In Tennessee and Georgia the experience was equally unfortunate; the Georgia militia could do nothing with the Creeks, and Andrew Jackson himself was helpless until he obtained one small regiment of regulars.
Besides its military disadvantages the militia service was tainted with fraud. Habitually and notoriously in New England and New York, the militia-men when called out attended muster, served a few days in order to get their names on the pay-roll, and then went home. The United States government wasted millions of dollars in pay and pensions for such men. Another source of waste was in the time required to place them in the field. The government struggled to avoid a call of militia, even though risking great disasters by the neglect.
The worst of all evils lay still further in the background. The militia began by rendering a proper army impossible, and ended by making government a form. The object of Massachusetts in praising the conduct of militia, and in maintaining its own at a high state of efficiency, was notorious. The Federalists knew that the national government must sooner or later abandon the attempt to support an army. When that time should come, the only resource of the government would lie in State armies, and Massachusetts was the best equipped State for that object. Her militia, seventy thousand strong, well-armed, well-drilled, and as yet untouched by war, could dictate to the Union. Whenever Massachusetts should say the word, the war must stop; and Massachusetts meant to say the word when the government fairly ceased to possess either money or arms.
That moment, in the belief of the Massachusetts Federalists, had come. Their course in the summer and autumn of 1814 left no doubt of their intentions. No act of open rebellion could be more significant than their conduct when Sherbrooke’s expedition occupied Castine. Then at last Governor Strong consented to call out the militia, which he refused to do two years before, because, he asserted, Castine and the other coast towns were sufficiently defended;[325] but the governor was careful to avoid the suspicion that these troops were in the national service. He acted independently of the national government in the terms of his general order of September, 1814,[326] placing his militia under the command of a major-general of their own, and making only a bare inquiry of the Secretary of War whether their expenses would be reimbursed,[327]—an inquiry which Monroe at once answered in the negative.[328] The force was a State army, and could not fail to cause the President more anxiety than it was likely ever to cause the Prince Regent.
At the same time the governor of Connecticut withdrew from the command of Brigadier-General Cushing the brigade of State militia then in the national service, and placed it under a major-general of State militia, with injunctions to obey no orders except such as were issued by State authority.[329] The evil of these measures was greatly aggravated by coinciding with the crisis which stopped the course of national government. Connecticut withdrew her militia, August 24; Washington was captured the same day; the Philadelphia banks suspended payment August 29; Castine was taken August 31; and Governor Strong called out the Massachusetts militia September 6. The government was prostrate, and New England was practically independent when Sir George Prevost crossed the frontier, September 3. So complete was the paralysis that Governor Chittenden of Vermont, on receiving official notice[330] that the British army and navy were advancing on Lake Champlain, refused to call out the militia, because neither the Constitution nor the laws gave him authority to order the militia out of the State.[331] He could only recommend that individuals should volunteer to assist in the defence of Plattsburg. Chittenden’s conduct was the more suggestive because of his undoubted honesty and the absence of factious motive for his refusal.
The full meaning of Governor Strong’s course was avowed a few days afterward. Having called a special meeting of the State legislature for October 5, he addressed to it a message narrating the steps he had taken, and the refusal of the President to assume the expenses of the militia called into service for the defence of the State.
“The situation of this State is peculiarly dangerous and perplexing,” said Governor Strong;[332] “we have been led by the terms of the Constitution to rely on the government of the Union to provide for our defence. We have resigned to that government the revenues of the State with the expectation that this object would not be neglected.... Let us then, relying on the support and direction of Providence, unite in such measures for our safety as the times demand and the principles of justice and the law of self-preservation will justify.”
The sense which this invitation was intended to bear could be best understood by appreciating the temper of the body thus addressed and the time when the appeal was made. The national government had for practical purposes ceased. The Boston “Centinel,” a newspaper of large circulation, said to reach six thousand copies, announced September 10, 1814, that the Union was already practically dissolved, and that the people must rise in their majesty, protect themselves, and compel their unworthy servants to obey their will. Governor Strong knew that the legislature was controlled by extreme partisans of the Pickering type, who wished, to use his phrase, to “let the ship run aground.” Even Josiah Quincy, one of the most vehement Federalists, was aware that the members of the General Court stood in danger of doing too much rather than too little.[333]
Strong’s message of October 5 was echoed by Pickering from Washington, October 12, in a letter which closed with the exhortation to seize the national revenues:—
“As, abandoned by the general government except for taxing us, we must defend ourselves, so we ought to secure and hold fast the revenues indispensable to maintain the force necessary for our protection against the foreign enemy and the still greater evil in prospect,—domestic tyranny.”[334]
The Massachusetts legislature could not fail to understand Governor Strong’s message as an invitation to resume the powers with which the State had parted in adopting the Constitution.
The legislature referred the message to a committee, which reported only three days afterward through its chairman, Harrison Gray Otis:[335]—
“The state of the national Treasury as exhibited by the proper officer requires an augmentation of existing taxes; and if in addition to these the people of Massachusetts, deprived of their commerce and harassed by a formidable enemy, are compelled to provide for the indispensable duty of self-defence, it must soon become impossible for them to sustain this burden. There remains to them therefore no alternative but submission to the enemy, or the control of their own resources to repel his aggressions. It is impossible to hesitate in making the election. This people are not ready for conquest or submission; but being ready and determined to defend themselves, they have the greatest need of those resources derivable from themselves which the national government has hitherto thought proper to employ elsewhere.”
The report further showed that the United States Constitution had failed to secure to New England the rights and benefits expected from it, and required immediate change. The prescribed mode of amendment was insufficient:—
“When this deficiency becomes apparent, no reason can preclude the right of the whole people who were parties to it to adopt another.... But as a proposition for such a convention from a single State would probably be unsuccessful, and our danger admits not of delay, it is recommended by the committee that in the first instance a conference should be invited between those States the affinity of whose interests is closest.”
Thus, after ten years’ delay, the project of a New England Convention was brought forward by State authority, through the process of war with England, which George Cabot from the first declared to be the only means of producing it.[336] As Otis’s committee presented the subject, the conference was in the first place to devise some mode of common defence; and, in the second, “to lay the foundation for a radical reform in the national compact by inviting to a future convention a deputation from all the States in the Union.” The report closed by offering seven Resolutions, recommending the enlistment of a State army of ten thousand men, a loan of a million dollars at six per cent, and the appointment of delegates “to meet and confer with delegates from the States of New England or any of them” on the defence of those States and the redress of their grievances.
The Senate committee also made a strenuous argument against the President’s decision that State militia were in State service unless called for by a United States officer and placed under his direction,[337] and recommended that the subject should be referred to the next session. To the proposition for a conference of the New England States, and to Otis’s other Resolutions, the Senate and House assented, October 13, by large majorities, varying in numbers, but amounting to two hundred and sixty against ninety in the case of the proposed convention. The minority in both Houses presented protests, charging the majority with intending more than was avowed. “The reasoning of the report,” said the Protest signed by seventy-six members of the House,[338] “is supported by the alarming assumption that the Constitution has failed in its objects, and the people of Massachusetts are absolved from their allegiance, and at liberty to adopt another. In debate it has been reiterated that the Constitution is no longer to be respected, and that revolution is not to be deprecated.” The House refused to receive the Protest, as disrespectful. The minority withdrew from further share in these proceedings; and the majority then, October 19, chose twelve delegates “to meet and confer on the 15th December next with such as may be chosen by any or all of the other New England States upon our public grievances and concerns.” The choice was marked by a conservative spirit not altogether pleasing to Timothy Pickering. George Cabot and Harrison Gray Otis stood at the head of the delegation.
The remonstrances and threats of the minority made the majority cautious, but did not check them. The legislature of Connecticut immediately appointed seven delegates to meet those of Massachusetts at Hartford, December 15, for the purpose of recommending “such measures for the safety and welfare of these States as may consist with our obligations as members of the national Union.”[339] In this clause the legislature intended to draw a distinction between obligations to the Union and obligations to the Constitution. To the former the people avowed no hostility; to the latter they thought the war had put an end. On that point the committee’s report was clear.[340]
Besides Massachusetts and Connecticut the legislature of Rhode Island, by a vote of thirty-nine to twenty-three, appointed, November 5, four delegates to confer at Hartford upon the measures which might be in their power to adopt to restore their rights under the Constitution, “consistently with their obligations.”[341] These three States alone chose delegates. The governor and legislature of New Hampshire would probably have joined them had not the Republican council stood in the way. The legislature of Vermont, including its Federalist minority, unanimously declined the invitation.
Immediately after these steps were taken, the autumn elections occurred. Members of Congress were to be chosen, and the people were obliged to vote for or against the Hartford Convention as the issue expressly avowed. President Madison might safely assume that no man voted for Federalist Congressmen in November, 1814, unless he favored the project of a New England Convention. The result was emphatic. Massachusetts chose eighteen Federalists and two Republicans; Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut chose only Federalists. In all, New England chose thirty-nine Federalist Congressmen and two Republicans[342] for the Fourteenth Congress. In the Thirteenth Congress, chosen in 1812, when the feeling against the war was supposed to be strongest, the Federalist members from New England numbered thirty, the Republicans eleven.[343]
Beyond New England the autumn elections were less significant, but were still unsatisfactory to the Administration. New Jersey returned to her true sympathies, and as far as her Congressmen expressed her opinions gave unanimous support to the war; but Pennsylvania, owing to local quarrels, elected five Federalist members; and Maryland elected five Federalists and four Republicans. In spite of the great loss in Federalist members which had occurred in the spring elections in New York, the Federalists numbered sixty-five in the Fourteenth Congress; in the Thirteenth they numbered sixty-eight. The Administration had hoped, and freely asserted, that a strong reaction in favor of the war had followed the burning of Washington and the avowal of England’s designs against Maine and the Northwestern territory. The elections showed no such reaction. The war was no more popular than before.
The public apathy was the more alarming because, whatever was the true object of the Hartford Convention, all Republicans believed it to be intended as a step to dissolve the Union, and they supported the Administration chiefly because Madison represented the Union. Federalists might deceive themselves. Probably the men who voted for the Hartford Convention saw its necessary consequences less clearly than they were seen by the men who voted against it. The Republican vote represented the strength of Union sentiment more closely than the disunion sentiment was represented by the Federalist vote. Yet the States from Maryland to Maine chose a majority of Congressmen who were not Republicans. The New England States, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland returned much more than half the members of Congress,—one hundred and eight in one hundred and eighty-two; and of these fifty-seven were Federalists, while only fifty-one were Republicans. The unpopularity of the Administration was not easily overestimated when Madison could win no more support than this, at a time when the public believed a vote for Federalism to be a vote for disunion.
“I give you the most serious assurance,” wrote Randolph in an open letter to James Lloyd, of Massachusetts,[344] remonstrating against the Convention, “that nothing less than the shameful conduct of the enemy and the complection of certain occurrences to the eastward could have sustained Mr. Madison after the disgraceful affair at Washington. The public indignation would have overwhelmed in one common ruin himself and his hireling newspapers.”
Randolph’s political judgments were commonly mistaken, but in this instance he proved himself to be at least partially right; for at the next election, six months later, when the current had turned decidedly in Madison’s favor, Randolph after a sharp contest defeated Eppes and recovered control of his district. Virginia could hardly have chosen a representative less calculated to please Madison.
The President himself betrayed unusual signs of distress. Nothing in Madison’s character was more remarkable than the placidity with which he commonly met anxieties that would have crushed a sensitive man; but the shock of defeat at Bladensburg, the flight from Washington, and the anxieties that followed broke him down. William Wirt visited Washington October 14, before the action of the Massachusetts legislature was yet completed. After viewing the ruins of the White House, a “mournful monument of American imbecility and improvidence,” he called upon the President at Colonel Tayloe’s Octagon House, which Serurier had occupied, but which Madison took for his residence after his return.
“P—— and I called on the President,” wrote Wirt in a private letter.[345] “He looks miserably shattered and woe-begone. In short, he looked heart-broken. His mind is full of the New England sedition. He introduced the subject and continued to press it, painful as it obviously was to him. I denied the probability, even the possibility, that the yeomanry of the North could be induced to place themselves under the power and protection of England, and diverted the conversation to another topic; but he took the first opportunity to return to it, and convinced me that his heart and mind were painfully full of the subject.”
No misconduct of New England alone would have so unmanned a Virginia President. Madison’s worst troubles lay nearer home; Massachusetts made only the last straw in his burden. Jefferson, with his usual kindliness, tried to console and encourage him; but Jefferson’s consolations proved only the difficulty of finding words or arguments to warrant satisfaction with the past or hope for the future.
“In the late events at Washington,” wrote Jefferson, September 24,[346] “I have felt so much for you that I cannot withhold the expression of my sympathies. For although every reasonable man must be sensible that all you can do is to order,—that execution must depend on others, and failures be imputed to them alone,—yet I know that when such failures happen they affect even those who have done everything they could to prevent them. Had General Washington himself been now at the head of our affairs, the same event would probably have happened.”
Jefferson’s estimate of Washington’s abilities was lower than that commonly accepted; and his rule that a President’s responsibility ceased after giving an order, besides ignoring the President’s responsibility for the selection of agents, seemed to destroy the foundation of the public service. “I never doubted that the plans of the President were wise and sufficient,” wrote Jefferson to Monroe.[347] “Their failure we all impute, (1) to the insubordinate temper of Armstrong, and (2) to the indecision of Winder.” The rule that an administrator might select any agent, however incompetent, without incurring responsibility for the agent’s acts, was one which in private affairs Jefferson would hardly have accepted.
Yet Jefferson’s opinions probably expressed Republican sentiment in Virginia, and showed better than any other evidence the course of thought among Madison’s friends. In that respect his expressions retained permanent value. The Virginians were willing to throw off responsibility for public disaster; and they naturally threw it on New England, since New England challenged it. Writing to his friend William Short, Jefferson spoke of the threatening attitude of Massachusetts:[348]—
“Some apprehend danger from the defection of Massachusetts. It is a disagreeable circumstance, but not a dangerous one. If they become neutral, we are sufficient for one enemy without them, and in fact we get no aid from them now.”
Probably most Virginians shared this belief, at least so far as concerned the aid rendered by Massachusetts to the war. In truth, Massachusetts gave little aid, and made a profession of her wish to give none at all; but the difficulty did not end there. Massachusetts and Virginia were States of the first class. The census of 1810 allotted to Massachusetts, including Maine, a population of about seven hundred thousand; to Virginia, a white population of five hundred and fifty-one thousand, and a colored population of four hundred and twenty-three thousand,—nine hundred and seventy-four thousand in all. In the ratio of representation Massachusetts counted for twenty, Virginia for twenty-three. The quota of Massachusetts in the direct tax was $316,000; that of Virginia was $369,000. On the scale furnished by these data, Virginia should have contributed in support of the war about one eighth or one seventh more men and money than were required from Massachusetts. The actual result was different.
The amount of money contributed by Massachusetts could not be compared with that contributed by Virginia, partly because of the severe blockade which closed the Virginian ports. The net revenue from customs derived from Virginia in 1814 was $4,000; that from Massachusetts was $1,600,000.[349] Unlike the customs revenue, the receipts from internal revenue were supposed to be reasonably equalized, so that each State should contribute in due proportion. According to the official return, dated Nov. 24, 1815, the total internal duties which had then been paid to the collectors for the year 1814 in Massachusetts was $198,400; in Virginia it was $193,500. The total amount then paid to the Treasury was $178,400 in Massachusetts, and $157,300 in Virginia.[350] The direct tax was fixed by Congress and was assumed by the State in Virginia, but regularly assessed in Massachusetts. One paid $316,000; the other, $369,000. The total revenue derived from Massachusetts was therefore $2,114,400 in the year 1814; that from Virginia, $566,500. Of the loans effected in the same year, Massachusetts took a small part considering her means,—hardly a million dollars. Virginia took still less,—only two hundred thousand.[351]
In money, Massachusetts contributed four times as much as Virginia to support the war, and her contributions were paid in Treasury notes or paper equivalent to coin,—not in the notes of banks worthless beyond the State. In men, the estimate was affected by the inquiry whether the militia were to be considered as protecting the national government or the State. Owing to the presence of the British in the Chesapeake, Virginia kept a large force of militia on foot, some of which were in garrison at Norfolk, and a few were on the field of Bladensburg. Massachusetts also was obliged to call out a considerable force of militia to protect or garrison national posts.
The relative numbers of regular troops were also somewhat doubtful; but the paymaster of the army reported Oct. 26, 1814, that he had distributed in bounties during the year $237,400 for Massachusetts, and $160,962 for Virginia.[352] During the year, six regular regiments—the Ninth, Twenty-first, Thirty-third, Thirty-fourth, Fortieth, and Forty-fifth—recruited in Massachusetts. Three—the Twelfth, Twentieth, and Thirty-fifth—recruited in Virginia. Perhaps the military aid furnished by the different sections of the seaboard could be better understood by following the familiar divisions. New England furnished thirteen regiments. New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania furnished fifteen. The Southern States, from Delaware to South Carolina inclusive, furnished ten. Of all the States in the Union New York alone supplied more regular soldiers than Massachusetts, and Massachusetts supplied as many as were furnished by Virginia and the two Carolinas together.
Judged by these standards, either Massachusetts had done more than her share, or Virginia had done less than hers. The tests were material, and took no moral element in account; but in moral support the relative failure of Massachusetts was not beyond dispute. Public opinion in New England was almost equally divided, and the pronounced opposition to the war was much greater in the Eastern States than in the Southern; but in the serious work of fighting, New England claimed a share of credit. In the little army at Niagara New York supplied the Major-General, Virginia and Massachusetts the two brigadiers; but Winfield Scott’s brigade was chiefly composed of New England men; and when, nearly half a century afterward, Scott in his old age was obliged to choose between his allegiance to his State and allegiance to the Union, the memory of the New England troops who had won for him his first renown had its influence in raising his mind above the local sympathies which controlled other Virginia officers. Without reflecting on Virginia courage or patriotism, the New England Republicans were warranted in claiming that not the Virginia regiments, but the Massachusetts Ninth, the Vermont Eleventh, the Massachusetts Twenty-first, and the Connecticut Twenty-fifth routed the Royal Scots at Chippawa, and bayoneted the British artillery-men at Lundy’s Lane, and stormed Drummond’s intrenchments at Fort Erie. They could add that without their sailors the war might have been less successful than it was; and they would have been justified had they asked Jefferson to glance at his latest newspaper as he wrote that Massachusetts gave no aid to the war, and read the despatch of Johnston Blakeley reporting that the New England crew of the “Wasp” had sunk the “Avon” in the middle of a British fleet.[353] Virginians did not take kindly to the ocean; and on land, owing to the accidents of war, no Virginia regiment was offered a chance to win distinction.
These comparisons were of little weight to prove that New England was either better or worse than other parts of the Union, but they showed that the difficulties that depressed Madison’s mind were not merely local. He might have disregarded the conduct of the State governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut had he enjoyed the full support of his own great Republican States, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Except New York, Kentucky, Tennessee, and perhaps Ohio, no State gave to the war the full and earnest co-operation it needed. Again and again, from the beginning of the troubles with England, Madison had acted on the conviction that at last the people were aroused; but in every instance he had been disappointed. After the burning of Washington, he was more than ever convinced that the moment had come when the entire people would rally in their self-respect; but he was met by the Hartford Convention and the November elections. If the people would not come to the aid of their government at such a moment, Madison felt that nothing could move them. Peace was his last hope.