The origin and objects of the Convention need no explanations. They are sufficiently spread on official records by its originators, and it is difficult to perceive why particular importance should attach to its secret proceedings, so long as they are not needed to furnish criteria of party motives, and so long as they concededly produced no practical results. In fact, we fully credit the statement in which all the explainers are fortunately enabled to substantially concur, that nothing important was officially done or determined beyond what has become public.'

the Pilgrims from whom they descended, and not unmindful of those who had achieved the independence of their country, they deliberated on the most effectual means of preserving for their fellow citizens and their descendants, the civil and political liberty which had been won and bequeathed to them."

Would anybody, after reading claims as lofty as these, and especially after reading Otis's legislative report of October 8th, 1814, expect to find this gentleman afterwards intimating that, after all, the members of the Hartford Convention were only, as children say, "playing pretend"-only suffering themselves to be made the "safety-valve" for the escape of the "steam" of a popular "fermentation;" and that in the legislative measures which instituted the Convention, they but acted the part of "unwilling agents?" In Mrs. Willard's History of the United States, published in 1843, is given (at p. 351) an "extract" from a letter, which she says was written to her by Otis in answer to her request to him "to give a brief view of the motives of those engaged in promoting the measure.' It is to be presumed that Otis was informed that his statements were desired for historical purposes, and consequently that they purport to give the spirit or substance of a complete explanation. The following is the extract entire:

"The Hartford Convention, far from being the original contrivance of a cabal, for any purpose of faction or disunion, was a result growing by natural consequences out of existing circumstances. More than a year previous to its institution, a convention was simultaneously called for by the people, in their town meetings, in all parts of Massachusetts. Petitions to that effect were accumulated on the tables of the Legislative chamber. They were postponed for twelve months, by the influence of those who now sustain the odium of the measure. The adoption of it was the consequence, not the source of a popular sentiment; and it was intended by those who voted for it, as a safety valve by which the steam arising from the fermentation of the times might escape, not as a boiler in which it should be generated. Whether good or ill, it was a measure of the people, of States, of Legislatures. How unjust to brand the unwilling agents, the mere committee of legislative bodies, with the stigma of facts which were first authorized, and then sanctioned by their constituted assemblies."

The character of the members favors this conclusion. They were rich men, indignant at the stoppage of their gains by commercial restrictions and war-colonists in spirit, who, like Tallmadge, thought a war against England was a war against religion and order-aristocrats dreaming of the restoration of those palmy days when political wisdom and rights sprung from hair-powder and shoe-buckles-sectional fanatics, unwil ling to have the "moral and religious" people of New England form part of any political compact which they could not control-politicians who were keen consolidationists when they were the Ins at Washington, but who regarded their own banishment from the theatre of national politics as a procedure which demanded the formation of a "confederacy" which would better appreciate their capacities for government. But even among the latter class, by far the most dangerous one, ran the conservatism of personal character, of caste, and of the cautious New England mind. There was not among the members one hopeless enough to be desperate, depraved enough to delight in blood and disorder, or warm enough in temperament to become a dangerous enthusiast.

The contemporaneous views on this subject of the best informed New England Republicans, and of those who personally and well knew the prime actors in the Hartford Convention, are shown in the stirring speeches of John Holmes in the Massachusetts Senate. We quote from two of them:

"You boast of forbearance: but you forbore only because afraid to go further. You complain of Southern aggrandizement, with ten members in the Senate, an undue proportion, according to your population. Massachusetts has become contemptible, s

Mr. Jefferson regarded the preliminary measures by which the Convention was introduced, and that assembly itself, with all the indignation which was generally felt for them by the Republicans, and by a great majority of the Federalists out of the three States represented in the Convention. But he never entertained a particle of alarm for the result, or a particle of distrust in the fidelity of the mass of the people, even in the represented States. He wrote to Mr. Short, November 28th, 1814, a little more than a fortnight before the meeting of the Convention :

"Some apprehend danger from the defection of Massachusetts. It is a disagreeable circumstance, but not a dangerous one. If they become neutral, we are sufficient for one enemy without them, and in fact we get no aid from them now, If their administration determines to join the enemy, their force will be annihilated by equality of division among themselves. Their Federalists will then call in the English army, the Republicans ours, and it will only be a transfer of the scene of war from Canada to Massachusetts; and we can get ten men to go to Massachusetts, for one who will go to Canada. Every one, too, must know that we can at any moment make peace with England at the expense of the navigation and fisheries of Massachusetts. But it will not come to this. Their own people will put down these factionists as soon as they see the real object of their opposition; and of this Vermont, New Hampshire, and even Connecticut itself, furnish proofs."

These views are substantially repeated in a letter to Mr.

by-word of reproach. Your conduct has disgusted the people everywhere. In the great State of New York they have risen against your cabal and hurled defiance in your teeth. There is amongst us a reckless, daring and ambitious faction, who, I do not hesitate to proclaim, prefer the British Government, monarchy and all.

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"Afraid to overthrow the Constitution, you try to undermine it by pretence of amendment. You called it perfect while you were in pay. The friends of peace, declaring that the country could not be kicked into war, forced it on; and failing to repossess themselves of the administration, tried to destroy the government. unauthorized and unconstitutional assemblage at Hartford are to change a Constitution declared unfit for either war or peace, but which you dare not attack openly. The leading paper of your party, whose editor, as a member of this legislature, voted for the delegates, has openly and uniformly declared that there must be redress, even by violence and resistance. But violence is dangerous, and therefore you undermine by alterations. Opposition provoked the war and protracts it. The enemy takes possession of a large extent of your country. Instead of expelling him from it, you appoint a convention to divide the States, unless you are permitted to rule them. The Hartford Convention exploded in a mission to Washington. If Great Britain has not lost confidence in Massachusetts scolding, threatening, vaporing, evaporating, she prolongs the war. but that is all. She makes the war disastrous, and calls it disgraceful, which dishonors the enemy she courts. Amid all its atrocious Vandalism, which of you has ever doubted that England is in the right? If there is such a one, I am ready to ask his pardon. You accuse the late President Jefferson of causing the war and defending it. But why excuse his predecessor, President Adams, who still more vigorously defends the war, and whom you consider ten times worse than Jefferson. You object to defending Louisiana, which all your party wanted to take by force from Spain, to rush into invasion and war, but which, peaceably acquired by purchase, you will not defend. After duping England into the war, you continue to deceive her: you dupe her again by adulation of our common enemy and reproach of our General Government. The war has been as useful and glorious as that of the Revolution, and eventually will be so recognized. But Massachusetts must join it, or all the disgrace will be hers."

Mellish, of December 10th. On the 27th of the same month, and during the sitting of the Hartford Convention, he wrote the Abbé Correa, that the British Negotiators at Ghent were only insisting one cession of a part of Maine, as "a thread to hold by until they could hear the result, not of the Congress of Vienna, but of Hartford," but "when they should know, as they would know, that nothing would be done there, they would let go their hold and complete the peace of the world by agreeing to the status ante bellum." He wrote Governor Plumer of New Hampshire, January 31st, 1815, very warmly stigmatizing the "agitators and traitors," declaring them to be stipendaries of England and employed to destroy our Government; but he excepted a portion of the actors from these remarks, and expressed the usual contempt of the ability of the Convention to produce any important results.'

News of the treaty of Peace reached Washington, February 11th, and Monticello on the 13th. Mr. Jefferson wrote to Lafayette on the 14th:

"The Marats, the Dantons, and Robespierres of Massachusetts are in the same pay, under the same orders, and making the same efforts to anarchize us, that their prototypes in France did there. I do not say that all who met at Hartford were under the same motives of money, nor were those of France. Some of them are Outs, and wish to be Ins; some the mere dupes of the agitators, or of their own party passions, while the Maratists alone are in the real secret; but they have very different materials to work on. The yeomanry of the United States are not the canaille of Paris. We might safely give them leave to go through the United States recruiting their ranks, and I am satisfied they could not raise one single regiment (gambling merchants and silk-stocking clerks excepted) who would support them in any effort to separate from the Union. The cement of this Union is in the heart-blood of every American. I do not believe there is on earth a government established on so immovable a basis. Let them, in any State, even in Massachusetts itself, raise the standard of separation, and its citizens will rise in mass, and do justice themselves on their own incendiaries. If they could have induced the Government to some effort of suppression, or even to enter into discussion with them, it would have given them some importance, have brought them into some notice. But they have not been able to make themselves even a subject of conversation. either of public or private societies. A silent contempt has been the sole notice they excite; consoled, indeed, some of them, by the palpable favors of Philip. Have then, no fears for us, my friend. The grounds of these exist only in English newspapers, edited or endowed by the Castlereaghs or the Cannings, or some other such models of pure and uncorrupted virtue. Their military heroes by land and

In a letter to Monroe, then Secretary of War, January 1st, while specially men. tioning the existing "causes of uneasiness," Jefferson docs not even allude to the Con vention.

sea, may sink our oyster boats, rob our hen roosts, burn our negro huts, and run off. But a campaign or two more will relieve them from further trouble or expense in defending their American possessions."

And to General Dearborn, March 17th:

"Oh, Massachusetts! how have I lamented the degradation of your apostasy! Massachusetts, with whom I went with pride in 1776, whose vote was my vote on every public question, and whose principles were then the standard of whatever was free or fearless. But then she was under the counsels of the two Adamses; while Strong, her present leader, was promoting petitions for submission to British power and British usurpation. While under her present counsels, she must be contented to be nothing; as having a vote, indeed, to be counted, but not respected. But should the State once more buckle on her republican harness, we shall receive her again as a sister, and recollect her wanderings among the crimes only of the parricide party, which would have basely sold what their fathers so bravely won from the same enemy. Let us look forward, then, to the act of repentance, which, by dismissing her venal traitors, shall be the signal of return to the bosom and to the principles of her brethren; and if her late humiliation can just give her modesty enough to suppose that her southern brethren are somewhat on a par with her in wisdom, in information, in patriotism, in bravery, and even in honesty, although not in psalm singing, she will more justly estimate her own relative momentum in the Union. With her ancient principles, she would really be great, if she did not think herself the whole."

Some of these are doubtless to be regarded as the exaggerated expressions of a man indignant at disloyal conduct, and not, in private letters, chary of epithets towards those who were daily and publicly, on one theatre or another, heaping purely gratuitous insults on his own head. He employed the common party language and imputations of the day. But it is hardly probable that any member of the Hartford Convention, however obsequious his veneration for England, was literally in the pay of its Government. There certainly was no Marat or Danton in the number. A large proportion of the delegates were men of irreproachable private character,' and we believe they acted far more wisely and temperately than it was intended they should, by the real authors of the measure.'

1 Cabot, the President, though believed to be one of the most decided of that reactionary party who preferred a mixed government on the English model, to a purely representative one, was a virtuous and benevolent man in private life, and unquestionably honest in his political views. Thomas H. Perkins, one of the Commissioners to the General Government, appointed by Massachusetts, is reputed to have been an admirable man in his personal and business relations. Many other less conspicuous actors were equally estimable in private life.

2 It is not probable that they would have remained in session three weeks, if agreed at the outset. And as they made another appeal to Congress, a step which a report adopted by the Massachusetts Legislature in 1814 had expressly condemned, we are

So deep an odium fell upon the Hartford Convention, that a distinguished New England Federalist is said to have prosecuted a person for slander, for charging him with some connection with that assemblage.' There can be little doubt that the public condemnation fell less on its imputed object, unpopular as it was, than on the manner in which that object was sought to be attained. Had the real disunionists boldly avowed their purpose-had they candidly explained the causes and presented fair instead of false issues-had they not taken advantage of a dangerous war to dictate conditions to their country-had they not shown more sympathy for a foreign enemy than for portions of the American people-had they not throughout practised, or countenanced baser men in practising, a petty, trickish, mercenary, and annoying system of measures towards the Government, and an injurious one towards the nation-the mass of their countrymen might have condemned their aims, but they never would have heaped upon the members of the Convention that mountain weight of political scorn and detestation which was not, in a single instance, afterwards removed, or sensibly lightened, until the victim sunk into the grave. Who were the real designers, and who were the instruments or dupes in this apparent attempt to juggle a people into revolution, is still very imperfectly known. No satisfactory history has ever appeared of the rise and fall of the "Eastern Confederacy" scheme, which made some external demonstrations at three different periods, and which finally exploded in the Hartford Convention.

The Boston Convention which was to have been the sequel of that of Hartford, was not held, or in the language of President J. Q. Adams, it was "turned over to the receptacle of things lost upon earth." The constitutional amendments proposed by the Hartford Convention were passed by no States which were not formally represented in that body—and they were rejected by some' with strong expressions of contempt.

Turning to Mr. Jefferson's private affairs, and to his farmbook in 1815, it appears that the roll of negroes at Monticello,

strongly inclined to believe that the majority of business men in the Convention, voted down the political wire pullers who were expected to control them.

1 Daniel Webster is said thus to have prosecuted Theodore Lyman-the last a son of one of the members of the Hartford Convention.

2 For example, Pennsylvania.