Yankee Confederates: New England Secession Movements Prior to the War Between the States

0:00In my office at home, I sit at my desk, I work at home a couple days a week, I do a lot of writing and right opposite my desk there's a marble bust of Thomas Jefferson and right above Jefferson is a portrait of John C. Calhoun and Calhoun has a big smile on his face and I always look at this situation over there in the corner with Jefferson sort of peering out the window and Calhoun is kind of looking down at him smiling and I think the reason why Calhoun is probably smiling there in my office is because he knew Jefferson said things like this when I start my paper out of this quote by Jefferson saying he says an insurrection once every 20 years is a wholesome feature of national life and that's the kind of thing I think Calhoun would smirk if he were to meet Jefferson and hear him say that and these two men if they were alive today I'm sure would be donors to the Mises Institute and would

0:48probably be on the board of directors but what I'm going to talk to is I'm going to disappoint those of you from Charleston if there's anyone from from Charleston or South Carolina here in that Charleston was not the birthplace of the secession movement in the United States. Of all places, it was Salem, Massachusetts, the heart of the Yankee Empire, so-called. Yes, there were three attempts at secession by the New England Federalists prior to the war between the states between 1800 and 1815. and they occurred around, among the main reasons were the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the National Embargo of 1807 that Jefferson imposed and Madison later had an Enforcement Act for that embargo and the War of 1812. These men were prominent men, these were among the founding fathers, the New England Federalists, some of them, most of them fought in the American Revolution were high-ranking officers in the Revolutionary Army, some of them signed the The Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and if these men had said the things in 1860

1:55and were from the South, that they said in New England in 1803, they would have been labeled by historians as maniacal fire-eaters and seditionists and would have gone down in infamy in history. Here are some of the things they said. Timothy Pickering, who was a U.S. Senator, I will rather anticipate a new Confederacy exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence and oppression of the aristocratic Democrats Professor of the South, he said. There will be a separation and the white and black population will mark the boundary. The eastern states must and will dissolve the union and form a separate government. That was Senator James Hillhouse. And Aaron Burr added, the northern states must be governed by Virginia or must govern Virginia and there's no middle ground.

2:41And so this was the kind of thing that was being said by the New England Federalists, which was the party that was overthrown by the Jefferson's party in the year 1800. Their cause was identical to the Southern Confederacy's cause 50 years later, states' rights, self-government and opposing the growth and tyranny of the federal government. They condemned the Jefferson administration as being plagued by, quote, falsehood, fraud and treachery which caused oppression and barbarity and ruin among the nations, according They made arguments identical to John C. Calhoun's arguments several decades later that they thought the South controlled the Congress and the South was using its power in the Congress to oppress the North and they thought centralized power was very disadvantageous to their region and therefore they thought secession was the only answer.

3:35Interestingly, one of the leaders of this movement was Theodore Dwight, who was John C. Calhoun's academic mentor at Yale. I don't know for sure, but I suspect Calhoun got some of his ideas from his mentor at Yale, who was among the New England Federalists who wanted to secede. When Jefferson was elected and his party took over, not only the presidency, but the Congress, it was a disaster for the Federalists, Jefferson was not only an opponent that had defeated the Federalists, but he was hated and despised by them. Here's what one historian says about the attitudes of the New Englanders toward Jefferson. He had been habitually denounced as an antichrist by the political preachers of his time, and in the New England states where the greater part of the ministers were militant Federalists, he was hated with an unholy hate.

4:23More false witness had been born by the ministers of New England and New York against Jefferson against Jefferson that had ever been born against any other American publicist. Among the other reasons that I've uncovered, among the reasons for this is Jefferson, as you all know, was one of the staunchest defenders of separation of church and state, and a lot of these Federalist leaders had in their minds some kind of idea of sort of state-sponsored Puritanism as being a prerequisite for a sound country, and they just truly hated Jefferson and all these stood for. Now, some of the ideas, you know, why did they think secession was desirable, ethnic homogeneity, they thought, was necessary for a nation to succeed. I'm not endorsing their views, I'm just saying this is what they said.

5:09William Smith Shaw said, the great grand cause of all our present difficulties may be traced to so many hordes of foreigners immigrating to America. and a widely quoted remark by William Stoughton. He said that God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness. So these almost uniformly British immigrants in New England thought that they were God's choice grain and that such things as the Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson was responsible for, which incorporated hordes of foreigners, including the Dutch and the French and Spanish, was an abomination to the New England Federalists. Josiah Quincy, the town of Quincy, Massachusetts, named after him, warned that the Louisiana Purchase obligated the nation to assimilate, quote, a number of French and Spanish subjects whose habits, manners, and ideas of civil government are wholly foreign to Republican institutions, and the Purchase meant that the bonds of this union are virtually dissolved.

6:14The states which compose it are free from their moral obligation, and that, as it will be the right of all, so will be the duty of some to prepare definitely for a separation amicably if they can, violently if they must. And these were Europeans. These were people who were immigrants or the sons of immigrants from Europe. And of course, to this day, we know that the violence and bloodshed, Europeans have been murdering each other on a massive scale for centuries. The Bosnia, we know about Bosnia today in the news, but these were men who knew that these cultural differences, many of which were incompatible to the Europeans, they feared the same sort of thing would happen over in the U.S. That was their opinion. It was at this point in history that the New England Federalists, 1803, began seriously discussing secession.

7:07And the ringleader was Timothy Pickering and to make the point that this was not a band of nuts out there in New England that were doing this, Pickering was a Colonel of the Essex County Massachusetts Militia at the outset of the American Revolution. He organized the Massachusetts Militia, later served as Adjutant General and Quartermaster General of the Revolution Army. After the American Revolution, he was a member of Congress, Secretary of War and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. In a letter to George Cabot, Pickery wrote of the depravity of Jefferson's plan of destruction, as he called it, and concluded that, quote, the principles of our revolution, that is, the revolution of 1776, point to the remedy, a separation, that this can be accomplished and without spilling one drop of blood, I have little doubt.

7:56The people of the East cannot reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and West. And so that was the opinion of not only Timothy Pickering, but many of the other New England Federalists. And he undoubtedly had in mind, I think, what is written now in a book entitled Albion Seed by David Hackett Fisher, who takes a look at the cultural differences between just the British immigrants to the United States up to about this time, and makes the case that there is very clear cultural differences that almost made it inevitable that there would There used to be violent clashes between these groups because there always had been violent clashes between these cultural groups back in England. And these were just the English immigrants. This didn't count the Dutch and the French and other immigrants.

8:42The Federalists were aware of this and they were stridently opposed to multicultural assimilation because of this. But they were not opposed to commerce between these groups. groups. They wanted a Switzerland or a Swiss style government, a highly decentralized Federalist system that has worked well for well over 150 years in that country. The type of system they wanted was they wanted the New England states to be one confederacy, the southern states another confederacy. They talked about a western confederacy also, but they thought So I thought that the best thing to do would be to have a Federalist system set up like this and have them avoid the cultural conflicts but thrive through free trade among these different sections.

9:30What one historian concluded was secession would, quote, render a friendly and commercial intercourse between the North and the South, where the Southern states would probably want to contract out for such things as naval protection by the Northern Confederacy, Well, the products of the South would be important to the navigation and commerce to the North. That was the historian Henry Adams who said that. You're probably all familiar with the episode regarding Aaron Burr. This was actually an attempt at secession, the Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton duel. The Federalists cut a deal with Aaron Burr in 1804. They pledged the support of the Federalist party and its money to get Burr elected governor of New York. New York. All the other New England states at the time were on the verge of seceding, but they needed New York.

10:17It was a big state, a wealthy state, and the deal was, we will help get you elected governor if in turn you have New York state secede. Because if New York secedes, all the other New England states will follow. And of course, Burr lost the election by seven votes, and Alexander Hamilton had denounced him as profligate, lacking in integrity, dangerous, intemperate, and dictatorial, and he challenged him to a duel and he killed Alexander Hamilton. And because Burr had been associated with the New England Federalists, that sort of put the damper on their movement for a while because Hamilton was widely revered by a lot of Americans and it was a big scandal. All throughout this time, up to this point, 1800 to 1804, no one had questioned the rights of any state to secede.

11:03The only arguments they've ever made were utilitarian arguments, the time is not right, may be overestimating the economic benefits of secession, things like this, but no one questioned the inherent constitutional right. Jefferson himself, in his first inaugural address said this, if there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its Republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. Of course, the author Jefferson, as was mentioned last night, historians think he is probably the co-author with Madison of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which said, Where the powers were assumed by the national government, which had not been granted by the state, nullification is the rightful remedy, and also that every state has an original and natural right to nullify of its own authority all assumptions of power by others within its limits.

12:02So both political parties at this time believed in the inherent constitutional right of secession as an important ingredient, if not a central ingredient, to a free country. There's a section of my paper here that I call Calhounism because the New England Federalists of the early 1800s out Calhouned Calhoun. They made the same arguments he did, which is not too surprising because as I said, his teacher, Theodore Dwight, was part of this movement, his teacher at Yale, his mentor. And at the time, Calhoun was only about 20 years old and a student of Yale. But throughout the published letters of the New England Federalists, what they were complaining about was the same thing that Calhoun is most known for, that the centralized power of the Federal Government was unfairly, unjustly affecting the South.

12:54If you transpose the words North and South, the New England Federalists were making the same arguments exactly. For example, they were arguing that the government, quote, had fallen into the hands of infidel, anti-commercial, anti-New England Southerners. They believed there was a conspiracy among the, quote, Virginia faction. The Virginia faction wanted to, quote, govern and depress New England, according to Stephen Higginson. John Lowell Jr. said that in any conflict between their state and the federal government, listen to this, he said, said, It is our duty, our most solemn duty, to vindicate the rights and support the interests of the state we represent. Pickering added, along with this, in a letter exchange, there is a natural order to me towards Salem, Massachusetts first, then New England, and then the Union at large. And this struck me as virtually identical to what many of the Southern Confederates said in 1860, and it especially reminded me of the episode of where General Woodfield Scott offered Robert E. Lee command of the Union Army just a few

13:55A few days before the Virginias seceded, and Lee's response was, no, of course, no. Lee said, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people and save and defense will draw my sword on none, and it's virtually identical to what the New England Federalists were saying 50 years earlier. Roger Griswold, the governor of Connecticut, sounded exactly like John C. Calhoun if you were to transpose the words north and south. The balance of power under the present government is decidedly in favor of the southern states. The extent and increasing population of those states must forever secure to them the preponderance which they now possess. New Englanders were paying the principal part of the expenses of government without receiving commensurate benefits and he concluded from that that there can be no safety to the northern states without a separation from the Confederacy.

14:49His italics was the last part, without a separation from the Confederacy. is virtually identical to Calhoun's arguments several decades later. When Jefferson in 1807 declared an embargo, a national embargo, put an end to legal international trade and then his successor James Madison in 1809 imposed an enforcement act which was sort of a war on drugs style program where the army could board any merchant ship on the and the mere suspicion that they intended to trade internationally with the goods on it and they could seize and take the goods on the ship. This really radicalized the New England secessionists and they issued a public proclamation, which is sort of a spit in your face proclamation to the federal government really, and reminding the country that, quote, the U.S. Constitution is a treaty of alliance and confederation, they said, and that the central government was an association of states and whenever Whatever its provisions are violated or its original principles departed from by a majority of the states or their people is no longer an effective instrument, but that any state

15:56is at liberty by the spirit of that contract to withdraw itself from the Union. The Massachusetts legislature passed a law declaring the Enforcement Act not binding legally, so they nullified it. This was a nullification just like the famous South Carolina legislature's nullification of the Tariff of Abominations in 1832. The attitudes towards slavery was another issue regarding why the New Englanders wanted to secede. They were upset with the three-fifths clause of the Constitution that existed at that time that allowed that five slaves could be counted as three whites. They didn't want to count black people as equivalents of white people. They wanted black people to count as zero rather than three-fifths.

16:41That was their problem that they had. According to Quincy, the slave representation is the cause of all the difficulties we labor under. Because of this arrangement, the southern states have an influence in our national councils, all together disproportionate to their wealth, strength and resources. They never raised any moral objection to slavery, it was just that they were getting outvoted in the Congress and they didn't like that. And this shouldn't be too surprising because of their views on ethnic homogeneity, especially of the primacy of English immigrants. They did abolish slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s, but according to one historian, the response of the New England Federalists was to, they, quote, tighten their poor laws, warned more Negroes away from their boundaries, and established segregated schools and churches, and a lot of them warned black people to, in the words of Federalist cleric Jedidiah by Morris, quote, be contented in the humble station in which Providence has placed you.

17:43That is, don't try to become educated and successful. Stay where you are. That was in the North. Historian James Banner concludes that, you know, has studied this and has said that, quote, freed, it appeared, the Negro was more of a political threat than enslaved. What the Federalists wanted and what their assaults upon the Three-Fifths Clause were designed to gain was not the abolition of slavery but the abolition of Negro representation. Now when the War of 1812 came along, all the New England states voted against going to war. They all voted with John Randolph, who was from Virginia, who was a fierce opponent of the War of 1812, and they voted against John C. Calhoun. John C. Calhoun was for the War of 1812.

18:29All the New England states along with New York, New Jersey and Delaware were against it. Among the reasons why, they said, according to Governor George Morris of New York, if we do this, we are to be taxed beyond our means and subjected to military conscription. We cannot exist but in poverty and contempt without foreign commerce, Pickering answered, and he said, by a war of any continuance with Great Britain, that commerce will be annihilated. The Massachusetts legislature declared the war needless and unwise, and they instructed their people. quote, let there be no volunteers except for defensive war and whenever the US government came to conscript young men from New England, the Federalists would declare these young men as debtors and therefore, excuse me, the property of their creditors and the Federalist courts would rule that they therefore could not leave the state because they were the The US Treasury was literally bankrupted by the War of 1812 very quickly, and so James Madison responded by doubling tariffs on all goods, virtually destroying any kind of international trade that was taking place, and they didn't raise much money because there was no international trade to speak of, so it really didn't matter.

19:57And this policy of protectionist extremism that was being followed, which at this time the North, the New England states, thought they were being disproportionately harmed by. 20 or 30 years later, it was the South whose cotton exports accounted for about 80 percent of all exports from the United States. Things changed dramatically in the next 20 or 30 years. But what happened was, with the cutting off of international commerce, there were a lot There were a lot of domestic industries that started being subsidized and propped up by the federal government to produce the goods that had been purchased previously from England and elsewhere. And the economist Frank Pelsig said that, quote, the men who brought about the war felt in a measure responsible for its results. And what he means by that is that for the next several decades, the men who supported the War of 1812 thought that we're responsible for its results and its response were these protected industries.

20:52And so we need to continue protecting them. In other words, they spawned an entire collection of protectionists. Is that a machine gun? What is that? I thought there was a bug up there. That's not very nice, is it?

21:19That's better. I'll just yell. Anyways, they created these protectionist industries, and arguably this led to the tariff of abominations because they created a whole clack of special interest groups who lobbied for protectionism and higher tariffs. It led to the nullification crisis and you could argue that it also contributed to the war between the states because protectionism was a primary cause. One of the biggest complaints of the South was interference in free trade by the central government. There was a convention, the Hartford Convention. The New England public was fed up that the War of 1812 was the last straw. There was even starting to get violence over this and demanding something be done. and the Federalist fathers convened a convention in Hartford.

22:09The bottom line behind the Hartford Convention is that they got together and they did not secede through this convention, but they issued a number of proclamations regarding eliminating the Three-Fifths Clause and so forth. The reason why they did not go through with this at this time in seceding was summarized by John Lowell of Massachusetts, and his explanation was that, quote, separation would have severed these men's, their last chance for preferment at the national level. These were men who had high hopes someday that they would gain power again in Washington, and so even though they talked for years about seceding, apparently the group that dominated the Hartford Convention ended up making nothing of it.

23:00So they effectively seceded during the War of 1812 and they laid the groundwork for arguments for secession and all throughout these episodes from 1800 to 1814 historian Edward Payson Powell has written quote, the right of a state to withdraw from the Union was not disputed. This was a national debate over this. This was not a secret argument among the Federalists and no one argued over the inherent right of a state to or states to secede at this time because after all the Declaration of Independence talks about this as one of the inviolable rights of the American people. And an interesting thing, the final part of my paper I talk about what I call the secessionist legacy of the New England Federalists because these ideas about the Declaration of Independence and the inherent right of secession as a right of the American people did not die in the North. In fact, I think they were revitalized in the North and clarified in the North because of all the actions of the New England Federalists. There is a very fat book entitled Northern

24:10Editorials on Secession by the historian Howard Perkins, and he gathered up all the editorials It must have been written around 1860 and 1861 in northern newspapers, so if you want an idea of what public opinion in the north was on the eve of the war between the states, you should take a look through Northern Editorials on Secession. I would bet a lot of money that the library here at this school has this in their library, and most libraries do, major universities anyway. And it's fascinating to me to read through what some of the editorial The New York Atlas and Argus, editorial writers were saying, because Howard Perkins says that the big majority of editorial writers in the North were all in favor of allowing the South to secede. Public opinion was all in favor that the minority was in favor of opposing the Southerners in 1860.

24:59And I'd like to read to you some of the things that the Northern newspapers were saying. November 10th, 1860, a little more than a month before South Carolina seceded. The New York Atlas and Argus editorialized that, We sympathize and justify the South because their rights have been invaded to the extreme limit possible within the forms of the Constitution. The Chicago Daily Times and Herald, 11 days later, said, Like it or not, the cotton states will secede, the government will not then go to pieces, but Southerners will be allowed to regain their sense of independence and honor. On November 24th, 1860, the New Hampshire Democrat Standard complained about the, quote, fanatics and demagogues of the North. That should bring an applause, right? Who had waged war on the institutions of the South and appealed for concession of the just rights of our southern brethren.

25:50The New York Journal of Commerce, which is a very influential paper, condemned what they call the, quote, meddlesome spirit of the people of the North who have a tendency to seek and regulate and control people in other communities. Reminds me of the anti-smoking Nazis in my state right now that just passed a smoking ban. But on November 13th, 1860, the Bangor-Maine Daily Union defended the southern secessionists by explaining that a union, quote, depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their union is gone. is gone. If military force is used, then a state can only be held as a subject province and can never be a co-equal member of the American Union. The Davenport Iowa Democrat in News argued against secession on the following grounds. It says, we are apparently in the minority in the North, but where many of the leading and most influential papers of the

26:50Union say that any state of the Union has a right to secede. So there were papers that The Cincinnati Daily Press said we believe that the right of any member of this confederacy to dissolve its political relations with others and assume an independent position is absolute. In other words, if South Carolina wants to go out of the Union, she has the right to do so and no party or power may justly say her name. They surmised that this after all is what the Declaration of Independence means when and it says that whenever government becomes destructive of the protection of lives, liberties and the pursuit of happiness, then, quote, it is the right of the people to alter, abolish their government and to institute a new government. New York Daily Tribune, which was very influential at this time, added that if any tyranny and despotism justified the American Revolution of 1776, Then, quote, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southerns from the Federal Union in 1861.

27:52Once South Carolina seceded in 1860, dozens of Northern editorialists just viewed it as a confirmation of the principle of sovereignty and self-government. Because Yuri Maltseff is here, I have an article from the Kenosha Wisconsin Democrat. Yuri lives in Kenosha. In January 11, 1861, your paper said that secession was the very germ of liberty and declared that the right of secession inheres to the people of every sovereign state. The New York Journal of Commerce, same day, warned that by opposing secession, northerners would be changing the nature of government from a voluntary one in which the people are sovereigns to a despotism where one part of the people are slaves, such as the logical deduction from the policy of the advocates of force.

28:39And one that will be a favorite in this crowd, the New York Tribune on February 5th, 1861, said Lincoln's latest speech is characterized by the arguments of the tyrant, force, compulsion and power, was what they said. The Daily Tribune also said that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration is that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed. Therefore, if the southern states want to secede, they have a clear right to do so. And the New York Times on March 21st said, There is a growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf states go. And so what all this tells me is that if you survey public opinion in the North, it was Abe Lincoln and a small handful of people who wanted to go to war to force the South to not secede from the Union.

29:32And if public opinion means anything to you, and if these men reflected all public opinion in the North, and I consider this, I call this the secessionist legacy of the New England Federalist, because from the time of the Declaration of Independence, it was understood, as Professor Wilson said last night, that secession is a very important feature of a free nation. And we understood this until the war between the states, but we have forgotten it since then. and my time is about up and I think I covered almost everything I wanted to say. Thank you for your patience and have a nice day.