HARTFORD CONVENTION

HARTFORD CONVENTION. From 15 December 1814 to 5 January 1815, a convention of delegates from throughout New England met at Hartford, Connecticut, to plan regional opposition to the Republican Party's federal policies. Its members hoped to bring an end to a string of defeats for the Federalist Party in general and for New England Federalists in particular. In addition, they sought to gain increased governmental support for a New England destabilized by the ongoing War of 1812.

The convention numbered twenty-six delegates. They were sent by the legislatures of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, and by county caucuses in Vermont and New Hampshire. Some radical Massachusetts Federalists had lobbied for such an event since at least 1808, but more moderate men controlled the convention. British military successes in northern New England had prevented a fuller deputation from the newer New England states.

The agrarian, expansionist, anti-British cast of the Republican Virginia Dynasty's policies inured to the detriment of the New England states. Those states' economies relied heavily on foreign trade and an expanding manufacturing sector, and their self-conception was strongly shaped by the Puritan experiments at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Unlike Virginia, New England stood in federal politics for hostility to the French Revolution, for foreign trade, and for a stand-pat position on westward expansion.

Following President Thomas Jefferson's 1803 Louisiana Purchase, New Englanders began to fear that a huge new swath of territory would be settled by southerners and fall under permanent Republican control. What might have been a Republican interregnum now appeared to be only the onset of New England's permanent reduction to minority status in the Union. The Jeffersonian embargo on foreign trade in 1807, keystone of Jefferson's second presidential term, did great damage to New England's economy. What made it worse was that the Republicans in Congress, who less than a decade before had complained of the Alien and Sedition Acts' arbitrariness, gave the president extremely broad enforcement powers.

New England opposed the War of 1812, and this opposition went so deep that Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong refused to deploy his state's militia to defend the District of Maine against invasion. Part of the Hartford Convention's purpose, however, was to urge the federal administration to defend New England more vigorously, and in response to Strong's actions, Madison deployed volunteers to counter potential insurrection in Massachusetts. Nonetheless, one Hartford Convention delegate, former Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, expected Union forces to be defeated by the British in Louisiana regardless of what the convention might decide.

The convention met in secret, which aroused great hopes and anxieties, depending on the observer. In the end, it merely called for a second convention in June in case the war had not ended and proposed a set of amendments to the federal Constitution. It also lent its prestige to the notion of interposition, formerly associated primarily with the Republican Party.

On Christmas Eve 1814, in the midst of the convention, the Treaty of Ghent was concluded, and on 8 January 1815, Andrew Jackson's forces won their famous victory at New Orleans. Amidst the paroxysms of patriotism, the Hartford Convention's participants found themselves branded "traitors" and suspected of wanting to break apart the Union, something none of its members had considered in 1814. The Federalist Party, which had played a pivotal role in founding the Republic, was permanently wrecked by the Hartford Convention. By decade's end, it virtually had ceased to exist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

Ben-Atar, Doron, and Barbara B. Oberg, eds. Federalists Reconsidered. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

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: N. and J. White; Boston: Russell, Odiorne, 1833.

Ketcham, Ralph. James Madison: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

Rutland, Robert A. The Presidency of James Madison. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990.

K. R. ConstantineGutzman

See alsoFederalist Party ; Republicans, Jeffersonian ; War of 1812 .

Hartford Convention (1814–1815).The Hartford Convention was a conference of twenty‐six New England Federalists who met behind closed doors in the Connecticut state capital from December 1814 to January 1815 to channel opposition to the War of 1812. Rejecting extremist Federalist demands for resistance, nullification, and disunion, the convention pursued a moderate course.

The final report of the Hartford Convention echoed long‐standing grievances of New England Federalists against ex‐ President Thomas Jefferson, incumbent James Madison, and the Republican congressional majority. Conceding their party's permanent minority status, the Hartford Federalists recommended constitutional amendments that would give a congressional minority a qualified veto over unwanted legislation and would check the Jeffersonian Republican party's rising ascendancy. Under the proposed changes, a two‐thirds congressional majority would be required to approve all future embargoes, war declarations, and admission of new states; presidents would be limited to a single term; the three‐fifths constitutional compromise that gave southern slave states additional congressman and electoral votes would be repealed; and commercial embargoes would be limited to sixty days. The convention also demanded that Congress allow the state governments to use federal taxes collected within their own boundaries for their own defense, and recommended that states “interpose” their authority if a militia conscription proposal took effect.

Within New England, the Hartford Convention probably helped to quiet extremism. Elsewhere it had no direct effect other than to discredit the Federalist party as obstructionist. Fortuitously, news of the Treaty of Ghent, which officially ended the war, and of Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans, arrived simultaneously in Washington with the Hartford delegation, and the proposed amendments died.

Historian Henry Adams once implied that the Hartford Convention's real purpose was to promote New England's secession. In reality, the principal leaders were moderate Federalists whose purposes were to protest the war, advance constitutional proposals, protect the New England coast, and preempt radical acts by extremist Federalists.
See also Constitution; Early Republic, Era of the; Embargo Acts.

Bibliography

James M. Banner Jr. , To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815, 1970.
Donald R. Hickey , The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, 1989.

Roger H. Brown

Hartford Convention Dec. 15, 1814–Jan. 4, 1815, meeting to consider the problems of New England in the War of 1812 ; held at Hartford, Conn. Prior to the war, New England Federalists (see Federalist party ) had opposed the Embargo Act of 1807 and other government measures; many of them continued to oppose the government after fighting had begun. Although manufacturing (fostered by isolation) and contraband trade brought wealth to the section, "Mr. Madison's War" (as the Federalists called the War of 1812) and its expenses became steadily more repugnant to the New Englanders. The Federalist leaders encouraged disaffection. The New England states refused to surrender their militia to national service (see Griswold, Roger ), especially when New England was threatened with invasion in 1814. The federal loan of 1814 got almost no support in New England, despite prosperity there. Federalist extremists, such as John Lowell and Timothy Pickering , contemplated a separate peace between New England and Great Britain. Finally, in Oct., 1814, the Massachusetts legislature issued a call to the other New England states for a conference. Representatives were sent by the state legislatures of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island; other delegates from New Hampshire and Vermont were popularly chosen by the Federalists. The meetings were held in secret. George Cabot , the head of the Massachusetts delegation and a moderate Federalist, presided. Other important delegates were Harrison Gray Otis (1765–1848), also a moderate, and Theodore Dwight , who served as secretary of the convention. The moderates prevailed in the convention. The proposal to secede from the Union was discussed and rejected, the grievances of New England were reviewed, and such matters as the use of the militia were thrashed out. The final report (Jan. 5, 1815) arraigned Madison's administration and the war and proposed several constitutional amendments that would redress what the New Englanders considered the unfair advantage given the South under the Constitution. The news of the Treaty of Ghent ending the war and of Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans made any recommendation of the convention a dead letter. Its importance, however, was twofold: It continued the view of states' rights as the refuge of sectional groups, and it sealed the destruction of the Federalist party, which never regained its lost prestige.

Bibliography: See J. T. Adams, New England in the Republic (1926, repr. 1960); J. M. Banner, To the Hartford Convention (1970).

Hartford Convention (1814–15) US political conference, held by FEDERALIST supporters to consider the problems of New England in the WAR OF 1812. Dominated by moderates rather than extremists, the Convention adopted the establishment of an inter-state defence machinery independent of federal government provision, the prohibition of all embargoes lasting more than 60 days, as well as a series of constitutional amendments. The Treaty of GHENT brought an abrupt end to its deliberations, and the adverse publicity which it attracted accelerated the decline of the FEDERALIST PARTY.

Hartford Convention (1814–15) Secret meeting of leaders from five New England states opposed to the War of 1812 because it disrupted trade. Convention resolutions sought to strengthen states' rights over conscription and taxation; some delegates favoured withdrawal from the Union.