ng Congress there had been thirty
Federalists and eleven Republicans.

That members of the Essex Junto would gladly have seized this
opportunity to remake the Federal Union by excluding the Western States
appears clearly enough in the correspondence of men like Timothy
Pickering. A new Union of the "good old thirteen States" on terms set by
New England was believed to be well within the bounds of possibility.
Radical newspapers referred with enthusiasm to the erection of a new
federal edifice. Little wonder that the harassed President was obsessed
with the idea that New England was on the verge of secession.

From the first, however, this movement in New England was kept well in
hand by men like Harrison Gray Otis, who always insisted that the object
of a convention was to defend New England against the common enemy and
to prevent radical action under the stress of popular excitement. If
this be true, it was unfortunate, to say the least, that these patriots
chose just this moment, when the Federal Government was about to succumb
to the common enemy, to propose alterations in the Constitution; and it
was equally unfortunate for the reputations of all concerned that they
should have held their deliberations in secret, giving an air of
conspiracy to their proceedings. The official journal of the Convention
at Hartford was not published until 1823. When the Convention adjourned
on January 5, 1815, all that the general public was permitted to know of
its deliberations was contained in its famous report.

The Convention was at no little pains to reassure a waiting world that
it did not contemplate or countenance secession. It was not yet ready to
concede that the defects in the Constitution were incurable nor that
multiplied abuses justified a severance of the Union, "especially in a
time of war." "If the Union be destined to dissolution, ... it should,
if possible, be the work of peaceable times, and deliberate consent."
But these philosophical considerations did not deter the author of the
report from a vicious and partisan attack upon "the multiplied abuses of
bad administrations."

President Madison must have read this document with mingled feelings,
for the Convention held, almost in the words of his Resolutions of 1798,
that the infractions of the Constitution were so "deliberate, dangerous,
and palpable" as to put the liberties of the people in jeopardy and to
make it the duty of a State "to interpose its authority