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Escaping "Mr. Jefferson's Plan of Destruction": New England Federalists and the Idea of a Northern Confederacy, 1803-1804

2001; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3125268

1553-0620

Kevin Gannon,

Law, Rights, and Freedoms

Iam disgusted with the men who now rule, and their measures, Timothy Pickering seethed in a letter to Rufus King of New York. At some manifestations of their malignancy, am shocked. cowardly wretch at their head, he fulminated, feel an infernal pleasure in the utter destruction of his opponents.' In the early months of 1804, Pickering, a Federalist senator from Massachusetts, sent a barrage of letters similar in tone to leading Federalists in New York and New England. These letters uniformly expressed hostility and bitterness toward the policy and beliefs of President Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Republicans and lamented the decline in power suffered by the Federalists of New England since Jefferson's election to the presidency in 1801. What distinguished these letters from normal expressions of frustration by a member of a party at the margins of political power, though, was the solution to the Federalists' problems that Pickering proposed to his correspondents. For Pickering, the future augured nothing but continued marginalization for New England and the Federalist Party, as every action taken by the Jeffersonians seemed to be aimed at reducing their influence and undermining the polity that they had labored so hard to establish. The time had arrived for drastic, but necessary, measures. I do not believe in the practicability of a long-continued union, Pickering declared. Rather than endure further persecution and political impotence under the Jeffersonian yoke, he asserted, the Federalists of New England should 64 anticipate a new confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence and oppression of the aristocratic democrats of the South. Only through the creation of a Northern confederacy could New England Federalists return to prominence, and thus a fairer prospect of public happiness.2 For Pickering, better for the Union to be dissolved than to continue in its present corrupt course. Pickering was not alone in these sentiments. In late 1803 and early 1804, he was the leader of a conspiracy aimed at the creation of this Northern confederacy. Joining Pickering were several Federalist congressmen from New England and, eventually, Vice President Aaron Burr of New York. The conspirators hoped to elect Federalist majorities to the various state legislatures of New England and to see Burr victorious in the 1804 New York gubernatorial election. Then, by acts of their state legislatures, New England and New York would remove themselves from the Jeffersonian-tainted Union to form a separate and commercially powerful confederacy, where it was assumed that the Federalist vision of society and polity would dominate. Unfortunately for Pickering and his coconspirators, however, the plan would fail to generate the expected support among their constituents, the 1804 state elections in New England would return Republican majorities, Burr would be defeated in New York, and the conspiracy would collapse as a result.3 This failure has caused subsequent accounts of the conspiracy to depict it as a historical curiosity-the product of disgruntled, reactionary eccentrics who exaggerated both the threat to the nation's welfare posed by the Jeffersonians and their own chances of success in leading New England out of the Union. Timothy Pickering's biographer characterized the efforts of Pickering and his fellow Federalists as the products of hysteria and a quantum jump into political fantasy, a perception that is typical of most treatments of the conspiracy.4 But the conspiracy's failure should not obscure its importance. The secessionist conspiracy of 1803-04 fomented by Pickering and other Federalist members of Congress holds deep significance for an understanding of American political culture during this period. It was, at its root, a protest against what these New Englanders saw as the subversion of the principles of republicanism by Jefferson and his followers. …