Buffalo, N. Y., May 3, 1906.
Mr. Trotwood Moore,
Dear Sir: We all read your monthly and are very much pleased with it. Wish you success. In the May number you speak of New England sitting sullenly, secretly aiding the enemy and watching for a chance to secede. As a descendant of New England parents, I must protest. Whatever may have been the sins of New England, secession was not one. Not all of New England favored the War of 1812, but that isn’t secession. Men were killed in Baltimore, Md., because they opposed the war, but no one accused Baltimore of secession. Write for the whole country and not for a section.
Yours truly,
E. D. PRESTON.
Fortunately, we know Dr. Preston, the writer of the above, and remembered most pleasantly that he stopped off once to see us in his journeyings South. He is a gentleman and a man of much intelligence, and we must make good our assertions or acknowledge we have erred.
When Thomas Jefferson was elected to the Presidency in 1800, New England regarded it just as the South did Lincoln’s election sixty years later—as a fit cause for secession. John Quincy Adams published a statement over his own signature in which he said that in the winter of 1803, a plot was formed in New England to separate from the Union: “The plan,” he says, “was so far matured, that a proposal had been made to an individual to permit himself, at the proper time, to be placed at the head of military movements which, it would be foreseen, would be necessary to carry the project into successful execution.” Again, he says: “The separation of the Union was openly stimulated in the public prints, and a convention of delegates of the New England States, to meet at New Haven, was proposed.” This is the same gentleman who was the sixth President of the United States, but who, before that event, was forced to retire to private life by his New England constituency for voting with the Jefferson Administration in laying an embargo on all shipping in American ports in retaliation for the insults of England. “The great damage fell upon the maritime States of New England, and there the vials of Federalist wrath were poured forth with terrible fury upon Mr. Jefferson and the embargo. But the full measure of their ferocity was reserved for the Adams,” etc. (Appleton’s Enc. of Am. Biography, Vol. I., p. 25.)
Governor Wolcott, of Connecticut, said: “I sincerely declare that I wish the Northern States would separate from the Southern the moment Jefferson is elected.”