The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

by Hilary A. Herbert

This project did not assume serious proportions.

John Fiske in his school history says: "John Quincy Adams, a supporter of the embargo act of 1807, privately informed President Jefferson (in February, 1809) that further attempts to enforce it in the New England States would be likely to drive them to secession. Accordingly, the embargo was repealed, and the non-intercourse act substituted for it."

The spirit of nationality was yet in its infancy, threats of secession were common, and they came then mostly from New England. These threats were in no wise connected with slavery; agitators had not then made slavery a national issue; the idea of separation was prompted by the fear that power in the councils of the Union would pass into the hands of other sections.

Massachusetts was heard from again in 1811, when the State of Louisiana, the first to be carved from the Louisiana purchase, asked to come into the Union. In discussing the bill for her admission, Josiah Quincy said: "Why, sir, I have already heard of six States, and some say there will be at no great distance of time more. I have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the east of the contemplated empire.... It is impossible that such a power could be granted. It was not for these men that our fathers fought. It was not for them this Constitution was adopted. You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men on the Missouri, or with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask in the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi.... I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion that, if this bill passes, the bonds of the Union are virtually dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation—amicably, if they can; violently, if they must."

June 15, 1813, the Massachusetts legislature endorsed the position taken in this speech.[5]

Later, in 1814, a convention of representative New England statesmen met at Hartford, to consider of secession unless the non-intercourse act, which also bore hard on New England, should be repealed; but the war then pending was soon to close, and the danger from that quarter was over.

But secession was not exclusively a New England doctrine. "When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton, on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason, on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment, entered into by the States, and from which each and every State had the right to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised."[6]

As late as 1844 the threat of secession was to come again from Massachusetts. The great State of Texas was applying for admission to the Union. But Texas was a slave State; Abolitionists had now for thirteen years been arousing in the old Bay State a spirit of hostility against the existence of slavery in her sister States of the South, and in 1844 the Massachusetts legislature resolved that "the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation; but that it is determined, as it doubts not other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth," and that "the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested at the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union."

This was just seventeen years before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to arm her sons to put down secession in the South!

The Southern reader must not, however, conclude from this startling about-face on the question of secession, that the people of Massachusetts, and of the North, did not, in 1861, honestly believe that under the Constitution the Union was indissoluble, or that the North went to war simply for the purpose of perpetuating its power over the South. Such a conclusion would be grossly unjust. The spirit of nationality, veneration of the Union, was a growth, and, after it had fairly begun, a rapid growth. It grew, as our country grew in prestige and power. The splendid triumphs of our ships at sea, in the War of 1812, and our victory at New Orleans over British regulars, added to it; the masterful decisions of our great Chief Justice John Marshall, pointing out how beneficently our Federal Constitution was adapted to the preservation not only of local self-government but of the liberties of the citizen as well; peace with, and the respect of, foreign nations; free trade between the people of all sections, and abounding prosperity—all these things created a deep impression, and Americans began to hark back to the words of Washington in his farewell address: "The unity of our government, which now constitutes you one people, is also dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize."