The Last Ninety Days of the War in North-Carolina

by Cornelia Phillips Spencer

The war of 1812 with England was, in general, excessively unpopular in the New-England States. Their commerce was burned; their fisheries were broken up, and their merchants and ship-owners, who constituted the wealthiest and most influential class among them, were heavy losers. The Administration had always been unpopular with them, and now its policy of embargo, non-importation, non-intercourse, and finally of war, were sufficient to rouse them into active opposition. This was manifested in various ways; in the annual addresses of their governors; in reports of legislative committees; in laws to embarrass the action of the Federal Executive, as, for instance, forbidding it the use of any of their jails for the confinement of prisoners of war, and ordering all their jailers to liberate all British prisoners committed to their keeping; in refusing to contribute their quota of men for the support of the war, and even to allow them to march beyond the limits of their own State. The spirit of disaffection was diligently cherished by the leaders, and went on increasing in bitterness and extent till a convention was proposed and agreed upon. On the 15th of December, 1814, there assembled in the city of Hartford twelve delegates from Massachusetts, seven from Connecticut, four from Rhode Island, three county delegates from New-Hampshire, and one from Vermont. They sat with closed doors till the 5th of January, 1815, when they adjourned, having issued a report setting forth their grievances and aims. The following extract from a report of the proceedings of the Legislature will exhibit the spirit that prevailed through the State:

"We believe that this war, so fertile in calamities, and so threatening in its consequences, has been waged with the worst possible views, and carried on in the worst possible manner, forming a union of wickedness and weakness which defies, for a parallel, the annals of the world. We believe also that its worst effects are yet to come; that loan upon loan, tax upon tax, and exaction upon exaction, must be imposed, until the comforts of the present and the hopes of the rising generation are destroyed. An impoverished people will be an enslaved people." Of the right of the State to prevent the exercise of unconstitutional power by the General Government, they had no doubt. "A power to regulate commerce is abused when employed to destroy it, and a voluntary abuse of power sanctions the right of resistance as much as a direct and palpable usurpation. The sovereignty reserved to the States was reserved to protect the citizens from acts of violence by the United States, as well as for purposes of domestic regulation. We spurn the idea that the free, sovereign, and independent State of Massachusetts is reduced to a mere municipal corporation, without power to protect its people, or to defend them from oppression, from whatever quarter it comes. Whenever the national compact is violated, and the citizens of this State oppressed by cruel and unauthorized enactments, this Legislature is bound to interpose its power, and to wrest from the oppressor its victim. This is the spirit of our Union."

The manifesto of the Convention did not, could not, use stronger language. After proposing seven amendments to the Constitution, and giving reasons for their adoption, they disclaimed all hostility to that Constitution, and professed only to aim to unite all the friends of the country of all parties, and obtain their aid in effecting a change of Federal rulers. Should this be hopeless, they hinted at the "necessity of more mighty efforts," which were plainly set forth in their resolutions, and everywhere understood to refer to a secession of the five New-England States, their consolidation into an independent government of their own, or alliance with England.[11]

The time chosen for such a display of enmity to the Union was most opportune for the purposes of the traitors. A war with a foreign foe, and that foe the most powerful nation on earth, was in progress; the Administration was greatly embarrassed; the country was rent with fierce party factions. What would be the issue no human wisdom could foresee; but that the ruin of the country was not then effected, can not be attributed to the patriotism of the New-England States. Three commissioners, appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts, to whom Connecticut added two others, proceeded to Washington to lay their resolutions and applications before the Government. But, most happily, news of the treaty of Ghent and consequent peace arriving at the same time with these envoys, their mission became the theme of unsparing taunt and ridicule in the papers, and they returned home without disburdening themselves of their object. Thus the third rebellion was snuffed out by events; but its sparks were blown far and wide by viewless winds, and effected a lodgment where, though smothered for a generation or two, they yet burned in secret, and at length burst out in the great conflagration of 1860, which lit the whole horizon and dyed the very heavens with its crimson. The principles of the Hartford Convention were the seeds of nullification and secession.

The eminent historian from Massachusetts records in glowing pages the stifling of the earliest throbs of civil and religious liberty on this continent in 1676. The earliest martyr in the Bacon Rebellion against monarchical tyranny was William Drummond, the first Governor of North-Carolina. His name is written on the beautiful sheet of water that lies within the tangled brakes of the great swamp on the borders of the land he loved and served so well. In that rebellion the women (as at this day) shared the popular enthusiasm. "The child that is unborn," said Sarah Drummond, "shall rejoice for the good that will come by the rising of the country." She would not suffer a throb of fear in her bosom, and in the greatest perils to which her husband was exposed, she confidently exclaimed, "We shall do well enough," and continually encouraged the people and inspired the soldiers with her own enthusiasm. When Edmund Cheesman was arraigned for trial, his wife declared that but for her he never would have joined the rebellion, and on her knees begged that she might bear the punishment. Yet these devoted people saw the cause for which they had risked and lost every thing in the dust, overthrown, and trampled upon with vindictive fury by the triumphant royalists. In the judicial trials that followed, a rigor and merciless severity were exhibited, worthy of the gloomy judge whose "bloody assize," ten years later, on the western circuit of England, has left an indelible blot on her history. Twenty-two were hanged; three others died of cruelty in prison; three more fled before trial; two escaped after conviction. Nor is it certain when Sir William Berkeley's thirst for blood would have been appeased if the newly convened assembly had not voted an address that the Governor "should spill no more blood." On Berkeley's return to England he was received with coldness, and his cruelty openly disavowed by the government. "That old fool," said the kind-hearted Charles II., "has taken more lives in that naked country than I for the murder of my father."[12]

"More blood was shed," adds the historian, "than, on the action of our present political system, would be shed for political offenses in a thousand years." Alas! for the sunny South, the scorched and consumed South, alas for her! that the prediction of the great American historian is not history!

Considering this rebellion in the perspective afforded by nearly two hundred years, it is easy for us to understand how the severity with which it was punished by the fanatic old royal Governor only drove the entering-wedge of separation between the mother country and her colonies in America deeper. The principles of Bacon and his party had obtained a great hold on the popular mind; and though for years all tendency to a popular government appeared to be crusted out and forever silenced, yet they were there, in the hearts of men, silently growing, nurtured by a deep sense of injustice and wrong, and biding their time. Just a century from the suppression of the "Baconists," the Declaration of Independence was adopted; Sarah Drummond's words were verified, and Bacon and Drummond and Cheesman and Hansford were amply avenged.

It is to such pages of history as these that I would turn the attention of our Northern friends now. Here they may see how the Father of his country dealt with his wayward children. How a prompt and dignified and successful assertion of the rights of the Federal Government were followed by leniency and generous and prudent forbearance such as a great government can afford to show, and by which it best exhibits its strength and its claims to the love and veneration of its people. Here they may see how a brutal gratification of vengeance, a lust of blood, like the tiger's spring, overleaps its mark. The hardest lesson to be learned is moderation in the hour of triumph; the greatest victory to be achieved is the victory over self.

Where now are the Bowdoins, the Hancocks, the Dexters, the Ames, the Websters of Massachusetts? Has she no statesman now capable of rising to the magnanimity which characterized her early history? Has thrice revolting and thrice pardoned Pennsylvania no representative man who can rise to the height of the great argument, and vindicate the cause of a country pillaged and plundered and peeled to an extent of which the history of civilized humanity affords us no parallel? Is there no one now to stand up and advocate for Southerners the same measure of forbearance and generosity that was shown by a Southern President to Northern rebels?

"O thou that spoilest and wast not spoiled, that dealt treacherously, and they dealt not treacherously with thee!" haste to the work of reconciliation and to build up the waste places! Even now on our thresholds are heard the sounds of the departing feet of those who in despair for their country, hopeless of peace or of justice, are leaving our broad, free, noble land for the semi-civilized haciendas of Mexico or of far-off tropical Brazil. Even now are their journals scattered freely among us—invitations, beckonings, sneers at the North, flattery of the South, fair promises, golden lures, every inducement held out to a high-hearted and fainting people to cast their lot in with them. Haste to arrest them by some display of returning fraternity and consideration, ere for them we raise the saddest lament yet born of the war: "Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him; but weep sore for him that goeth away, for he shall return no more, nor see his native country!"