Essex Junto

ESSEX JUNTO

ESSEX JUNTO is a term coined by President John Adams in the late eighteenth century for a group of Federalists he deemed his adversaries. Jeffersonians then used the term to refer to Federalist opponents they believed to be advocating secession for New England during the War of 1812. Essex Junto has become a term synonymous with secession and treason.

A number of men, natives of Essex County, Massachusetts, have been named members of this group: Fisher Ames, George Cabot, Francis Dana, Nathan Dane, Benjamin Goodhue, Stephen Higginson, Jonathan Jackson, John Lowell, Theophilus Parsons, Timothy Pickering, Israel Thorndike, and Nathaniel Tracy. Most of the men were well educated and wealthy. They had common social and economic interests and some were related by marriage. They dominated politics in their home county during the 1770s, but in the period between the American Revolution and the early nineteenth century most relocated to Boston.

They were adversaries to John Hancock during the revolutionary period, and had opposed the Massachusetts Constitution, proposed in 1778, but from 1779 to 1780, they helped draft a new document. The members of the Essex Junto were not satisfied with the restrictions of the power of the people and did not really care for a system of checks and balances, but nonetheless they supported the Federal Constitution. They supported Alexander Hamilton and his financial program and sharply opposed Thomas Jefferson and his ideas. They were advocates of American independence, but believed in the inherent inequality of men. Disturbed by the social changes the Revolution had brought, they favored a patriarchal society and a nation ruled by an elected aristocracy of elites. They formed the nucleus of a conservative group among the Federalists, but by the turn of the century, most had withdrawn from politics. They did not have a domineering influence in Massachusetts's politics and the Federalist Party, as many historians have claimed. With the exception of Timothy Pickering, they did not support the New England secessionist movement in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, which many New Englanders feared would curtail their influence in the Union.

President Jefferson, in a letter to John Melish on 13 January 1813, used the label Essex Junto when he accused a group of younger Federalists of advocating anglomany, monarchy, and separation; Federalists had vented their anger with the dire effects the Embargo Act, the Non-intercourse Act, and the War of 1812 had on New England. Early in the war, Pickering and John Lowell Jr. (son of the above mentioned John Lowell) tried to crystallize the secessionist sentiment in New England, but other members of the Junto helped to curb their plans. During the War of 1812, New England dissatisfaction was vocalized in the Hartford Convention (15 December 1814–5 January 1815) in which only two moderate members of the original Essex Junto, Dane and Cabot (the latter was chosen president of the convention) participated. Pickering opposed the convention because he did not believe it would really advocate the dissolution of the Union, as he desired.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fischer, David H. "The Myth of the Essex Junto." The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Series 21 (April 1964): 195–213.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. "Dissent in the War of 1812." In Dissent in Three American Wars. Edited by Samuel Eliot Morison, Frederick Merk, and Frank Freidel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Michael Wala

See also Hartford Convention .