Hartford Convention

HARTFORD CONVENTION

The Hartford Convention was a gathering of leading New England Federalists during the War of 1812 (1812–1815). Held between 15 December 1814 and 5 January 1815 in Hartford, Connecticut, it featured twenty-six attendees from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Its members included many of New England Federalism's leading lights.

background and motives

This assemblage was many years in the making. It went back to the election of 1800, which swept Federalists out of power and installed Thomas Jefferson, the chief of the rival Democratic Republican Party, as president. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Federalist strategists feared that this territory would add new states to the Democratic Republicans' power base in the South and West. Moreover, these states would enjoy added representation in the U.S. House of Representatives and, consequently, the electoral college, under the Constitution's clause counting three-fifths of the slave population. Despairing of ever regaining national power, leading Federalists adopted a sectionalist strategy, hoping to retain their strength in New England and make it the last bastion of Federalism. They appealed to a northern audience, seeking repeal of the three-fifths clause. Some talked of seceding from the Union to form a "Northern Confederacy." Yet in 1803 and 1804, only Connecticut and Massachusetts called for the abolition of slave representation, and the "Northern Confederacy" plot went nowhere.

Federalist popularity rose in 1808 after passage of Jefferson's embargo of trade with Britain, which proved devastating to the New England economy, but it was the War of 1812 that produced a formidable, organized opposition to the federal government in New England. For Yankee Federalists, the war was the latest and worst Republican measure meant to destroy their region's commerce and political power. They also believed that it was immoral, partly because the United States took the offensive by invading Canada. Furthermore, the British invaded New England early in 1814 and seemed poised to strike again even harder later in that year.

Faced with a defense crisis and burning with sectional and partisan antagonism, citizens organized town meetings throughout Massachusetts in 1814. These gatherings petitioned the state legislature to protect their towns in the federal government's place and to remedy the political ills that had produced the war in the first place. The petitioners called for an assembly of New England states to consider how to wrest the Constitution back from its usurpers, the slaveholders of the South and the upstarts of the West. These remonstrances typified the charged atmosphere that produced the Hartford Convention.

Massachusetts state legislators heard this call. Acknowledging that they were responding to the town memorials, the lawmakers voted by large margins on 18 October 1814 to invite other states to a convention. Other state legislatures followed Massachusetts's lead, but they all appointed delegates who were calculated to cool the passions that produced the convention. The men they appointed were moderate Federalists unlikely to take rash measures despite the harsh rhetoric swirling around wartime New England.

the report

The Hartford Convention's main product was a report encapsulating New England's grievances and calling for constitutional amendments to redress them. Its introduction dwelt at length on matters of defense and introduced the proposed amendments as meant "to strengthen, and if possible to perpetuate, the union of the states, by removing the grounds of exciting jealousies, and providing for a fair and equal representation, and a limitation of powers, which have been misused" (Dwight, History of the Hartford Convention, p. 370). It rejected disunion, much to the dismay of some Federalist hotheads and the surprise of Democratic Republicans who had painted the secretive conference as traitorous.

The report proposed seven constitutional amendments. The first two sought to remove perceived structural supports for Republican power. The first abolished slave representation. This was in part a response to the Massachusetts towns, whose memorials consistently listed the abolition of the three-fifths clause first among their demands. The second required a two-thirds vote in Congress, rather than a simple majority, for the admission of new states. This proposal resonated with a long-standing Federalist complaint and was only aggravated by the admission of Louisiana as a state on the eve of the war.

The next few were aimed at specific Republican policies. The third and fourth limited embargoes to sixty days and required a two-thirds vote for their passage. The fifth made a two-thirds vote a condition for waging offensive war. The sixth barred those of foreign birth, even if naturalized, from holding any national office, including a seat in either chamber of Congress. This was a jab at the likes of foreign-born Albert Gallatin, longtime secretary of the Treasury under Republican presidents. The final amendment sought to prevent a repetition of the successive two-term presidencies of Virginians Jefferson and James Madison, limiting presidents to one term and declaring that no two presidents in a row could hail from the same state. The report was sent out to all states as a means of starting the amendment process.

legacy

Both the end of the war and the stigma attached to the Hartford Convention weakened its political force. It adjourned just as word reached America of the Treaty of Ghent (December 1814), which ended hostilities. From beginning to end, the convention was so tied up with questions of defense and wartime grievances that word of peace halted its impetus. The legislatures of Connecticut and Massachusetts directed their states' congressional delegations to present the report to Congress. But they complied only perfunctorily, and Congress took no action.

Although the convention thus ended with a whimper, in the long term it became more like a hiss and a byword. Despite the relatively moderate nature of its report, the Hartford Convention became the symbol for sectionalism and disunionism. That disrepute sealed the national demise of the Federalist Party and lasted for decades. Well into the 1840s, northerners and southerners of all parties occasionally branded their antagonists with the Federalist label or compared their actions to that of the infamous Hartford Convention. The Hartford Convention, symbol and apex of New England Federalism, failed to enact any of its proposed amendments, at least until slavery was abolished and with it slave representation. But that hardly meant it had no impact, for Federalists and their convention stalked American politics long after their fall from the national stage.

See alsoEmbargo; Federalist Party; War of 1812 .

bibliography

Adams, Henry, ed. Documents Relating to New-England Federalism, 1800–1815. Boston, Little, Brown, 1877. Reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969.

Adams, James Truslow. New England in the Republic, 1776–1850. Boston: Little, Brown, 1926.

Ames, Herman V. The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States during the First Century of Its History. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897. Reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970.

——, ed. State Documents on Federal Relations: The States and the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1906. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1970.

Banner, James M., Jr. To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815. New York: Knopf, 1970.

Dwight, Theodore. History of the Hartford Convention, with a Review of the Policy of the United States Government Which Led to the War of 1812. New York: White, 1833. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1970.

Fischer, David Hackett. The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Hickey, Donald R. "New England's Defense Problem and the Genesis of the Hartford Convention." New England Quarterly 50 (1977): 587–604.

——. The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Mason, Matthew. "'Nothing Is Better Calculated to Excite Divisions': Federalist Agitation against Slave Representation during the War of 1812." New England Quarterly 75 (2002): 531–561.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765–1848. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913.

Stagg, J. C. A. Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Matthew Mason