New England Confederation

“ In this scheme of confederacy all power of taxation was expressly left to the several colonies. The scheme provided for a mere league, not for a federal union. The government of the Commissioners acted only upon the local governments, not upon individuals. The Board had thus but little executive power, and was hardly more than a consulting body. Another source of weakness in the confederacy was the overwhelming preponderance of Massachusetts. Of the 24,000 people in the confederation, 15,000 belonged to Massachusetts, while the other three colonies had only about 3,000 each. ”

“ Is it not a pitiful, a disgusting sight, that men are found, Northern men, New-England Yankees even, to kneel before the slaveocrats still, after the load of scorn and contumely already heaped upon them, and humbly cry, 'More—give us more contempt—our backs are made to bear the burden!'
God pity such creatures!
And these are the men who advocate a confederation of States with New England left out to shift for herself! New England left out? Fools! to [253] think it possible. Knaves! to deem it desirable, if it were possible. ”

“ Two defects were apparent in this constitution: the federal government had no authority to act directly upon individuals, and thus it had no coercive power; the equal number of votes allowed the members of the confederation in the federal council was a standing contradiction of the measure of contribution to the burdens of government. The confederacy contained a population of about twenty-three thousand five hundred souls, of which number fifteen thousand may be assigned to Massachusetts, three thousand each to Connecticut and Plymouth, and two thousand five hundred to New Haven. ”

“ Scarcely had the first New England colonies been established when it was found desirable to unite them into some kind of a confederation. It is worthy of note that the separate existence of so many colonies was at the outset largely the result of religious differences. The uniformity of purpose, great as it was, fell far short of completeness. ”

“ The cessions of western lands, which had been exacted by Maryland as her price for ratifying the Articles, were carried out by New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia until the title to all territory west of Pennsylvania and north of the Ohio was with the Confederation. Then, although nothing in the Articles authorized such action, Congress, in 1787, adopted an Ordinance establishing a plan for settling the new lands. ”

“ The people of New England perfectly understand the distinction between the Constitution and the Administration. They are as sincerely attached to the former as any section of the United States. They may be put under the ban of the empire, but they have no intention of abandoning the Union. And we have the pleasure explicitly to declare our full concurrence with your Honour, "that such suggestions are not less a libel upon the great body of the New England people, than on their patriotism." ”

“ It is that New England shall be expelled, and that the rest of the Free States shall come under the dominion of the Southern confederacy. But the leaders of this scheme seem to have forgotten the fact, that New England, to a vast extent, has peopled the Northwest, and carried there their love of free institutions. The descendants of the pilgrims are scattered [Pg 372] throughout the Northwest, and churches, and free schools, and love of liberty have gone with them. The scheme is as base and cowardly as it is impracticable. No! New England can never be expelled from this Union. ”

“ Gentlemen, if this congress do not adopt this army, before ten moons have set, New England will have a congress of her own, which will adopt it, and she will undertake the struggle alone—with a strong arm and a clear conscience. ”

“ I am not a New Englander by parentage, birth, or education, but if the other Free States of the North and Northwest should submit to the disgrace of uniting themselves with a Southern confederacy, I should remove to New England, and breathe an air uncontaminated by slavery or treason. And there are hundreds of thousands who would pursue the same course. When, in 1798, the great Washington feared that the South might be separated by traitors from the Union, he declared that, in such an event, he would remove to the North ”

“ Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Article I.—The stile of this Confederacy shall be, "The United States of America."
Art. II.—Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled. ”

“ While Congress was beginning to form these articles of confederation, and Washington was giving a new aspect to the war in New Jersey, the people of Great Britain, long accustomed to colonial complaints and quarrels, and attentive merely to their own immediate interests, paid no due regard to the progress of the contest or to the importance of the principles in which it originated. ”

“ The tariff wars, the constant bickering over boundaries, and the lack of unity in military affairs, which latter might easily prove fatal when opposed by a unified, centralized power like France, all seemed to point to a consolidation of the colonies as being a distinct step forward. New England, at least, formed a geographical unit, with a population fairly homogeneous in character; and a general government might be expected to work with not more friction than had been developed from the absorption of New Hampshire and Maine by Massachusetts. ”

“ In the race for land and power, her numbers, resources, and central position, all gave her immense advantages, to which was added the no mean one of an unscrupulous disregard for the prior rights of others. On the one hand, then, the weaker colonies might hope to gain from union some protection, not only from the Indian and the foreigner, but from the growing aggressiveness of Massachusetts. On the other, that colony might anticipate dominating the councils of the Confederacy, while free scope was still left for her own aggrandizement. ”

“ State rights from the earliest colonial days have been the peculiar pride and jealousy of New England. In every stage of national formation, it was peculiarly Northern, and not Southern, statesmen that guarded State rights as we were forming the Constitution. But once united, the loyal States gave up forever that which had been delegated to the national government. And now, in the hour of victory, the loyal States do not mean to trench upon Southern State rights. They will not do it, nor suffer it to be done. There is not to be one rule for high latitudes and another for low. ”

“ Not only has the great conception of New England been accepted as the fundamental principle of the Federal Union, but it has been adopted by every separate State; and more than this, during the one hundred and six years since the people of our Commonwealth wrote their Constitution, they have had as large a measure of liberty and safety under the law as men have ever known on earth. ”

“ Certain politicians proposed, as a means of ending the war, that a new confederacy or union should be formed, from which the New England States should be excluded because of their implacable hostility to slavery and their consequent obnoxiousness to the South. ”

“ The royal officials, disliked as their presence might be by the irreconcilables, actually and symbolically brought the colony into relations with the larger life of the empire. In her thought, her commerce, and her political relations, New England’s largest colony was at last forced out of that position of defiant isolation which her former leaders had chosen for her, and made to participate, so far as her provincial position allowed, in the main currents of the world’s activities. The new charter definitely marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. ”

“ We are now a new nation. Our trade, language, customs, manners, don't differ more than they do in Great Britain. The more a man aims at serving America, the more he serves his Colony. It will promote factions in Congress and in the States ; it will prevent the growth of freedom in America ; we shall be loth to admit new Colonies into the confederation. If we vote by numbers, liberty will be always safe. Massachusetts is contiguous to two small Colonies, Rhode Island and New Hampshire ; Pennsylvania is near New Jersey and Delaware ; Virginia is between Maryland and North Carolina. ”

“ Meanwhile, as we have seen—while the Ordinance of 1787 was being enacted in the last Congress of the old Confederation at New York—the Convention to frame the present Constitution was sitting at Philadelphia under the Presidency of George Washington himself. The old Confederation had proved itself to be "a rope of sand." A new and stronger form of government had become a necessity for National existence. ”

“ This done, the home government set to work to organize the royal domain which should be known as New England, or the Dominion of New England, and its plan for this provided for the annulment of the charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut, and the inclusion in the Dominion of these colonies, and New Hampshire, Maine, New York and the Jerseys, thereby restoring to New England all the territory, with the exception of Pennsylvania, that was included in the grant to the New England Council in 1620. ”

“ If Federalism is crumbling away in New England, there is no time to be lost, lest it should be overwhelmed and become unable to attempt its own relief; its last [162] refuge is New England, and immediate exertion perhaps its only hope. It must begin in Massachusetts. The proposition would be welcomed in Connecticut; and could we doubt of New Hampshire? But New York must be associated; and how is her concurrence to be obtained? She must be made the centre of the confederacy. Vermont and New Jersey would follow of course, and Rhode Island of necessity. ”

“ For twenty years, since the Restoration, that government had been endeavoring, by every means in its power, to settle the New England question in a way that would be satisfactory to all the colonists, regardless of creed, and would, at the same time, permit the maintenance of the trade-system upon which the Empire was based. Had Massachusetts at any time been willing to give up her illicit profits, she could very possibly have saved her charter. ”

“ On the 24th of June a fleet courier, employed by Hamilton, brought from Concord to Poughkeepsie, where the New York convention sat, news of the ratification of the Constitution by New Hampshire, the ninth state. "Now, indeed, the situation was changed. There was no longer a confederacy; the Union was already formed. ... The state must either join the new system or stay out of it. New York was not favorably situated for a separate nation. New England on the east, and New Jersey and Pennsylvania on the south, belonged to the new Union. Canada was on the north. ”

“ If the colonists preferred, as they undoubtedly did, an administration formed from their own citizens rather than from strangers, then the question before them was similar to that put by General Lee to those irreconcilables in Virginia, in 1867, who refused to vote for the Constitutional Convention. “The question is,” wrote the general, “shall the members of the convention be selected from the best available men in the State or from the worst? Shall the machinery of the State government be arranged and set in motion by the former or by the latter?” ”

“ The selfish attitude toward her neighbors, already shown upon the Penobscot, the Piscataqua, and the Connecticut, and which, unfortunately, was to become more aggressive and unscrupulous, also lost her the friendship of her sister colonies. The result was that, when the real struggle came with the English government, a generation later, Massachusetts, although, thanks to her geographical position and aggressive acquisitiveness, she had become the most powerful of the New England group, found herself with hardly a friend in the old country or the new. ”