A separation, Pickering inferred, had become necessary; but when and how was it to be effected?
“If Federalism is crumbling away in New England, there is no time to be lost, lest it should be overwhelmed and become unable to attempt its own relief; its last refuge is New England, and immediate exertion perhaps its only hope. It must begin in Massachusetts. The proposition would be welcomed in Connecticut; and could we doubt of New Hampshire? But New York must be associated; and how is her concurrence to be obtained? She must be made the centre of the confederacy. Vermont and New Jersey would follow of course, and Rhode Island of necessity. Who can be consulted, and who will take the lead? The legislatures of Massachusetts and Connecticut meet in May, and of New Hampshire in the same month, or June. The subject has engaged the contemplation of many. The Connecticut gentlemen have seriously meditated upon it.... Tracy has written to several of his most distinguished friends in Connecticut, and may soon receive their answers. R. Griswold, examining the finances, has found that the States above mentioned, to be embraced by the Northern confederacy, now pay as much or more of the public revenues as would discharge their share of the public debts due those States and abroad, leaving out the millions given for Louisiana.”
Roger Griswold wrote a few weeks afterward to Oliver Wolcott in similar terms:[103]—
“The project which we had formed was to induce, if possible, the legislatures of the three New England States who remain Federal to commence measures which should call for a reunion of the Northern States. The extent of those measures, and the rapidity with which they shall be followed up, must be governed by circumstances. The magnitude and jealousy of Massachusetts would render it necessary that the operation should be commenced there. If any hope can be created that New York will ultimately support the plan, it may perhaps be supported.”
The first action, said he, must come from the Legislature of Massachusetts, which was not yet elected, but would meet early in June. Connecticut and New Hampshire were to follow; and to Pickering’s sanguine mind the Northern Confederacy seemed already established. “The people of the East,” he said, “cannot reconcile their habits, views, and interests with those of the South and West. The latter are beginning to rule with a rod of iron.”
Pickering knew that the Federalist majority in Massachusetts was none too great. The election in May, four months later, showed a Federalist vote of 30,000 against a Republican minority of 24,000, while in the Legislature Harrison Gray Otis was chosen Speaker by 129 votes to 103. Pickering knew also that his colleague, Senator Adams, was watching his movements with increasing ill-will, which Pickering lost no chance to exasperate. Nothing could be more certain than that at the first suggestion of disunion Senator Adams and the moderate Federalists would attack the Essex Junto with the bitterness of long-suppressed hatred; and if they could not command fourteen votes in the Legislature and three thousand in the State, a great change must have occurred since the year before, when they elected Adams to the Senate for the long term over Pickering’s head. Pickering concealed his doings from his colleague; but Tracy was not so cautious. Adams learned the secret from Tracy; and the two senators from Massachusetts drew farther and farther apart, in spite of the impeachments, which tended to force them together.
The Essex Junto, which sent Pickering to Washington, and to which he appealed for support, read his letter with evident astonishment. George Cabot, Chief-Justice Parsons, Fisher Ames, and Stephen Higginson, who were the leaders consulted,[104] agreed that the scheme was impracticable; and Cabot, as gently as possible, put their common decision into words.
“All the evils you describe,” he said,[105] “and many more, are to be apprehended; but I greatly fear that a separation would be no remedy, because the source of them is in the political theories of our country and in ourselves. A separation at some period not very remote may probably take place,—the first impression of it is even now favorably received by many; but I cannot flatter myself with the expectation of essential good to proceed from it while we retain maxims and principles which all experience, and I may add reason too, pronounce to be impracticable and absurd. Even in New England, where there is among the body of the people more wisdom and virtue than in any other part of the United States, we are full of errors which no reasoning could eradicate if there were a Lycurgus in every village. We are democratic altogether; and I hold democracy in its natural operation to be the government of the worst.
“There is no energy in the Federal party, and there could be none manifested without great hazard of losing the State government. Some of our best men in high stations are kept in office because they forbear to exert any influence, and not because they possess right principles. They are permitted to have power if they will not use it.... I incline to the opinion that the essential alterations which may in future be made to amend our form of government will be the consequences only of great suffering or the immediate effects of violence. If we should be made to feel a very great calamity from the abuse of power by the National Administration, we might do almost anything; but it would be idle to talk to the deaf, to warn the people of distant evils. By this time you will suppose I am willing to do nothing but submit to fate. I would not be so understood. I am convinced we cannot do what is wished; but we can do much, if we work with Nature (or the course of things), and not against her. A separation is now impracticable, because we do not feel the necessity or utility of it. The same separation then will be unavoidable when our loyalty to the Union is generally perceived to be the instrument of debasement and impoverishment. If it is prematurely attempted, those few only will promote it who discern what is hidden from the multitude.”
Cabot’s letter, more clearly than any writing of Alexander Hamilton himself, expressed the philosophy and marked the tactics of their school. Neither Cabot nor Hamilton was a lively writer, and the dust which has gathered deep on their doctrines dulls whatever brilliancy they once possessed; but this letter showed why Cabot was considered the wisest head in his party, to whose rebuke even Hamilton was forced to bow. For patient and willing students who have groped in search of the idea which, used by Hamilton and Jefferson, caused bitterer feeling and roused deeper terrors than civil war itself, Cabot’s long and perhaps pedantic letter on the policy of disunion was full of meaning. “We shall go the way of all governments wholly popular,—from bad to worse,—until the evils, no longer tolerable, shall generate their own remedies.” Democracy must end in a crisis, experience and reason pronounced it impracticable and absurd, Nature would in due time vindicate her own laws; and when the inevitable chaos should come, then conservative statesmanship could set society on a sound footing by limiting the suffrage to those citizens who might hold in their own right two thousand dollars value in land. Meanwhile disunion would be useless, and the attempt to bring it about would break up the Federalist party. “A war with Great Britain manifestly provoked by our rulers” was the only chance which Cabot foresaw of bringing the people of New England to a dissolution of the Union.