In later times the Hartford Convention was often and vigorously defended by writers whose works were friendly to the national government, and whose influence was popular.[428] The wisdom, loyalty, and patriotism of George Cabot and his associates became the theme of authors whose authority was above dispute. Nearly always the defence rested on the argument that popular opinion went beyond the convention’s report, and that the convention risked its credit by refusing to advise instant withdrawal from the Union.[429] This view was apparently correct. The efforts of the moderate Federalists to praise the moderation of the report, and the labored protests of the extremists against the possible suspicion that they objected to its moderation,[430] showed that the convention was then believed to have offered resistance to what Governor Smith stigmatized as “rash councils or precipitate measures.” The tone of the press and the elections bore out the belief that a popular majority would have supported an abrupt and violent course.
The tone of the minority at the time showed a similar belief that Massachusetts favored disunion. During all the proceedings of the State legislatures and the convention, the loyal press and citizens never ceased to point out the dangerous, treasonable, and absurd results to be expected from the course pursued. In the Massachusetts Senate John Holmes of Maine attacked the convention and its doings in a speech that gave him wide reputation.[431] Threats of civil war were freely uttered and defied. Among the least violent of Federalists was James Lloyd, recently United States senator from Massachusetts; and to him as a man of known patriotism John Randolph addressed a letter, Dec. 15, 1814, remonstrating against the Hartford Convention that day to meet. Lloyd replied in a letter also published, advising Randolph and the Virginians to coerce Madison into retirement, and to place Rufus King in the Presidency as the alternative to a fatal issue.[432] The assertion of such an alternative showed how desperate the situation was believed by the moderate Federalists to be.
A long letter of a similar kind was written, Nov. 26, 1814, by Jonathan Mason to Wilson Cary Nicholas.[433] The opinion of the men among whom Mason lived was expressly declared by Mason to the effect that “Great Britain will not treat with Mr. Madison. He must retire, or the country and the Union are at an end.... This is plain language, but in my soul I believe it true. We shall not be destroyed to-day or to-morrow, but it will come; and the end of these measures [of the Administration] will be disunion and disgrace.”
In the Republican party the belief was universal that the Hartford Convention could lead only to a New England Confederation; and the belief was not confined to partisans. An anecdote that George Ticknor delighted in telling, illustrated the emotion that then agitated men far beyond the passing and fitful excitements of party politics. Ticknor, a young Federalist twenty-three years old, wished for letters of introduction to Virginia, and asked them from John Adams, then a man of eighty, whose support of the war made him an object of antipathy to the party he had led.
“When I visited him in Quincy to receive these letters,” related Ticknor,[434] “I had a remarkable interview with him, which at the time disturbed me not a little.... Soon after I was seated in Mr. Adams’s parlor,—where was no one but himself and Mrs. Adams, who was knitting,—he began to talk of the condition of the country with great earnestness. I said not a word; Mrs. Adams was equally silent; but Mr. Adams, who was a man of strong and prompt passions, went on more and more vehemently. He was dressed in a single-breasted dark-green coat, buttoned tightly by very large white metal buttons over his somewhat rotund person. As he grew more and more excited in his discourse, he impatiently endeavored to thrust his hand into the breast of his coat. The buttons did not yield readily; at last he forced his hand in, saying, as he did so, in a very loud voice and most excited manner: ‘Thank God! thank God! George Cabot’s close-buttoned ambition has broke out at last: he wants to be President of New England, sir!’”
Whether George Cabot wanted it or not, he was in danger of becoming what John Adams predicted. He was far from being the first man who had unwillingly allowed himself to be drawn into a position from which escape was impossible. After going so far, neither leaders nor people could retreat. The next and easy step of sequestrating the direct and indirect taxes was one to which the State stood pledged in the event of a refusal by President Madison and Congress to surrender them. After such an act, the establishment of a New England Confederation could hardly be matter of choice.
If so considerable a mass of concurrent testimony did not prove the gravity of the occasion, as it was understood by the most intelligent and best-informed men of the time, ample evidence could be drawn from other sources. William Wirt described the painful anxiety of Madison as early as the month of October. Throughout Virginia the depression was akin to despair. John Randolph and Wilson Cary Nicholas gave expression to it in letters to prominent New Englanders; but Jefferson in private was still more pronounced in his fears. “The war, had it proceeded, would have upset our government,” he wrote to Gallatin a year later,[435] “and a new one, whenever tried, will do it.” George Ticknor, after obtaining at Quincy his letter of introduction from John Adams to Jefferson, delivered it at Monticello at a time when the anxiety for the safety of New Orleans was acute. He found Jefferson convinced that the city must fall, and Jefferson expressed the expectation that the British would hold it indefinitely.[436] Pickering felt the same conviction, and regarded the event as a dissolution of the Union.
The “Federal Republican” of Baltimore published, January 5, the day when the Hartford Convention adjourned, a letter from Washington announcing “an explosion at hand; that the President would be called on to resign; and there must be peace by that or a future Administration.” The fall of New Orleans was to be the signal for a general demand that Madison should resign, and the Federalist press already prepared the ground by insisting that “Mr. Madison has scarcely raised his little finger to preserve New Orleans,” and would finally determine to abandon the State of Louisiana.[437] That Madison’s authority could survive two such blows as the capture of Washington and the loss of Louisiana seemed improbable; but that he should resign was impossible, though the alternative was a collapse of government.
When the month of February arrived, government and people were waiting with keen apprehension for some new disaster, and the least probable solution was that England knowing the situation would consent to any tolerable peace. The “Federal Republican” of January 28, commenting on the expected bank veto, summed up the consequences, not unfairly from its point of view, in few words:—
“It is impossible, as Mr. Giles said in his luminous and eloquent argument upon the measure [of a national bank], that the government can stand these reiterated shocks.... The interest upon the public debt remains unpaid, and there exists not the means, without making the most ruinous sacrifices, to pay it. The government is in arrears to the army upward of nine million dollars; to the navy, about four millions.... The condition of our finances is known to the enemy; and is it possible he will be such a fool as to give us peace, after the mortal blow we aimed at him, when he knows we cannot pay the interest on the public debt, that we cannot pay our army or our navy, and when he finds us unable to defend any part of the country at which he strikes?”