occupied by an active and restless population. Pressed upon the north by England, and upon the south by Spain, the new communities of the West were courted by agents of both these powers. Great Britain sought to detach the West from the Union by promises of assistance in compelling Spain to open the lower Mississippi to Western enterprise and commerce; Spain, by offers to relax in favor of the West the severity of her colonial regulations, and to divide with it her monopoly of the splendid traffic of the Mexican Gulf. The Western people were by no means insensible to these advances.* And the enterprise of Burr, although it failed of success, pointed plainly to a new peril for the incipient Union-a peril which Mr. Jefferson by no means conceived himself finally to have conjured, but simply to have modified when the rupture of the peace of Amiens induced the First Consul of France to abandon his projects upon Louisiana, the cession of which he had obtained from Spain, and to transfer the magnificent territory of the Mississippi to the Union.†

The political opponents of Mr. Jefferson, in the Eastern States regarded the annexation of Louisiana as an ample justification of the secession of those States.

* Mr. Blount, a senator from Tennessee, was expelled from the Senate in 1797, for conspiring with British agents against the Spanish possessions.

Mr. Jefferson considered himself to have done much for his country even in the event of a separate American republic growing up in the Louisiana territory. "If it should become the great interest of these nations to separate from this, if their happiness should depend upon it so strongly as to induce them to go through that convulsion, why should the Atlantic States dread it? . . . The future inhabitants of the Atlantic and Mississippi States will be our sons. We leave them in distinct but bordering establishments. We think we see their happiness in the Union, and we wish it. Events may prove it otherwise; but if they see their interest in separation, why should we take sides with our Atlantic rather than our Mississippi descendants? It is the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep them in union, if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better." -Jefferson's Works, vol. iv., p. 499.

32

LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN.

Propositions which had been entertained towards the end of the administration of John Adams, by distinguished New England statesmen, for the formation of an "Eastern Confederacy," to be bounded by the Hudson or the Delaware, and to be exempt from the operations of the "infamous Virginia policy," were revived and seriously discussed.* It was but natural that a party which had vainly endeavored to retain power in a confederacy confined to the States of the Atlantic, should shrink from the possibilities of a future so immense and indefinite as was thrown open to the politics of America by the acquisition of a new empire beyond the Alleghanies. The States of the South, on the other hand, dominant in the federal councils, and seeing in the geographical position of the new territory a guaranty of vast and direct advantages to accrue to themselves from its acquisition, hailed the treaty of cession as loudly as the people of the West.

The sectional hostility thus developed, was still further embittered by the measures which were adopted by the govern

* Randall's Life of Jefferson, (vol. iii., p. 363 ;) Appendix, No. XXIV. In reply to a letter of inquiry from Harrison Gray Otis and others, President Adams wrote, Dec. 30, 1828: "This design had been formed in the winter of 1803-4, immediately after, and as a consequence of the acquisition of Louisiana. The plan was so far matured, that the proposal had been made to an individual to permit himself, at the proper time, to be placed at the head of the military movements which it was foreseen would be necessary for carrying it into execution.' President Adams, in a subsequent letter to Gov. Plumer, states, that "three projects of boundary" for the New England Confederacy had been prepared. These were, "1. If possible, the Potomac. 2. The Susquehanna. 3. The Hudson." Plumer was an avowed disunionist. He `wrote to New Hampshire from Washington, Jan. 19, 1804: “What do you wish your senators and representatives to do here? We have no part in Jefferson, and no inheritance in Virginia. Shall we return to our own homes, sit under our own vines and fig-trees, and be separate from the slaveholders?" He records, also, in his journal, a conversation with Timothy Pickering, in which the latter spoke of disunion as desirable; and when it was suggested that Washington had feared and deprecated such an event, added by way of assent and of criticism, 'Yes, the fear was a ghost that for a long time haunted the imagination of that old gentleman!”

ment of Mr. Jefferson in defence of the American flag and of neutral rights, against the Commercial Decrees of the Emperor Napoleon, and the Orders in Council of the British government. New England regarded the Embargo Act of 1807, as a combined attack of the Southern and Western upon the Eastern States; "domestic convulsions" were threatened as its consequence by New England senators at Washington; and although that act was soon repealed, such was the vehemence of the sectional feeling which it had combined with other causes to excite, that Mr. Quincy, of Massachusetts, in opposing, four years afterwards, the admission of Louisianą as a State into the Union, was called to order for making the deliberate declaration, that by the admission of Louisiana the Union would be virtually dissolved.*

From the peace of Versailles to the annexation of the Louisiana territory, exactly twenty years had elapsed. During that time, the first experiment of union in America had utterly failed; and the real history of the second experiment was now about to begin under conditions and in circumstances seriously unlike those amid which its basis had been laid.

The overthrow of the Federal party coinciding in point of time with the acquisition of the vast territories of the Mississippi, had thrown open a new continent to the progress of new principles. The great development of American commerce and industry now began, and with it the growth of such a material prosperity as was calculated to educate coming generations in an increasing indifference to questions of pure politics. A tendency to centralization, involving in itself the seminal principle of absolutism, was rapidly to become paramount in the governments of the Union, and that efficient distribution of authorities among powers limiting, controlling, and

"It will free the States from their moral obligations; and, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some to prepare for separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must."-Journal, H. of R., January 14, 1811.

supporting one another, upon which the wisest framers of the American Constitution had relied for the stability of their work, was to be gradually undermined both in the practice of affairs, and in the affections of the people.

The results of Mr. Jefferson's foreign policy ripened, under his successor, into the second war with England. The States which had most strenuously opposed that policy and upon which its previous consequences had most heavily weighed, were roused by the crowning calamity of war into a fever of indignation and disgust. Influential orators, upon the platform and in the pulpit; able writers in the press; and men whose official station gave special weight to their words, united in calling upon the people of New England to refuse their support to the Federal government in the prosecution of "an unholy and unrighteous war." The menace of disunion was revived. The triumph of the party of Jefferson was attributed to that article of the Constitution which authorized a partial representation of the Southern negroes in Congress, and the institution of slavery was for the first time made the object of fierce sectional denunciations for a political purpose.

Early in the year 1814, a project which had been first publicly advanced in 1783, in the Congress of the Confederation, and which on several subsequent occasions had temporarily occupied the minds of leading men in New England, was carried into effect. A convention of delegates from all the New England States met at Hartford, in Connecticut, in response to a call from the legislature of Massachusetts, "for the purpose of devising proper measures to procure the united efforts of the commercial States to obtain such amendments and explanations of the Constitution as might secure them from further evils."* In this convention, among other things,

"Men of the North! will you go on and for twelve long weary years see the commerce of the nation bound, her agriculture arrested, her coffers lavished, and her glory trampled in the dust by the very men whom Southern slaves have lifted into office?' -Connecticut Journal, 1802.

it was proposed to deprive the slave States of the partial representation of their slaves and to make a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress necessary to the admission of any new State into the Union. The question of the dissolution of the Union was fully and ably discussed, and the general conclusion to which the convention came was, that if the political power of the agricultural and exporting States could be so reduced under the Constitution as to deliver the commercial States from the fear of a preponderance hostile to their interests it would be expedient that the Union should continue to exist. But "whenever it shall appear," said the convention in their report, "that the causes of our calamities are radical and permanent, a separation, by mutual arrangement, will be preferable to an alliance by constraint among nominal friends but real enemies."

The action of the Hartford Convention was considered at the time, both by those who approved and by those who disapproved it, as a distinct and deliberate movement towards the disruption of the Union and the formation of a new Confederacy. John Adams treated it as the retaliation upon the Southern States of the conduct of the latter during his own administration. Harrison Gray Otis, of Massachusetts, who neither then, nor at any subsequent time, could be regarded as an enemy of slavery upon moral or social grounds, assumed the public responsibility of this ultimatum addressed to the South; and Gouverneur Morris, who had finally revised the phraseology of the Federal Constitution in the convention of 1787, openly encouraged New England to persevere in the course upon which she had entered, declared that New York must join with her, and maintained that the question of

Such extracts might be indefinitely multiplied, but one will suffice to show that the true animus of these early sectional assaults upon the institution of slavery was less detestation of slavery itself than jealousy of the political power which it was supposed to confer upon the slaveholder.

*Life and Works of John Adams, vol. x., p. 48.