And so, in the final months of 1803, some of New England’s most influential political and cultural figures decided that there could only be one solution: the region should secede and create a new northern confederacy built on “the stable habits and the federalism of the eastern states”, in the words of Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire.
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This scheme, which was to be put into effect in 1804, was only the first in a series of Yankee contingency plans to save the American dream by separating New England from a union believed to have lost its way. During the War of 1812, the slavery crisis of the 1840s, and the final months before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, politicians, public intellectuals, and media commentators agitated for the creation of a New England-led nation free from the stain. of human slavery, hereditary aristocracy and crass frontier values.
Today, the Union finds itself again on the edge of a precipice, divided by political flaws both geographical and ideological. Eleven months ago, a University of Virginia poll found that 59% of Biden voters and 77% of Trump voters agreed that the red and blue states should split to form separate countries. Those numbers could be even higher now that the overthrow of Roe v. Wade has widened the chasm between states and now that efforts to hold former President Donald Trump accountable for the country’s laws have shown that many of his supporters think he should be above them. .
To be clear: a breakup would be a disaster of monumental proportions. This would transform North America’s central swath into an unstable region of rival and mutually hostile microstates and a stage for great-power rivalries and military conflicts. Successor nations would have to devise a huge range of institutions and policies in real time, including border control, customs defense and international diplomacy.
But if the United States fails, history suggests that New England or a Greater New England federation would emerge. In fact, it has been waiting in the wings every time the Union approaches the precipice.
“A fairer prospect of public happiness”
‘A fairer prospect of public happiness’
Since the mid-17th century, New Englanders have had a sense of belonging to a distinct nation. The early Puritans who colonized eastern Massachusetts in the 1630s and would bring most of the region under their effective control by the end of that century believed themselves to be a chosen people charged by a Calvinist God with creating a more perfect society in the New England wilderness. Read also : Appeal by Secretary Blinken with Colombian President-elect Petro – United States Department of State. . They were to accomplish this task collectively through locally controlled public institutions – the municipal assembly, the chapel, the taxpayer-funded public school – which imbued Yankee culture with a greater faith in the possibility of beneficent government than was present in other American countries. regions. His ideology prioritized the good of the community over the freedom of the individual, who in the revolutionary period had created one of the most literate and egalitarian societies in the transatlantic world.
Many New Englanders made the mistake of assuming that the rest of the Anglo-American colonies were like their own. They were decidedly not. Virginia and the southern parts of Maryland and Delaware were modeled on the conservative, aristocratic society of the English countryside, where lordly lords controlled politics, politics, and the administration of justice and expected total deference from their subordinates, including peasants in England and slaves. in America. The colonies of the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Caribbean were despotic oligarchies where enslaved armies worked to death to maximize private profits from sugar, rice, and cotton. The area settled by the Dutch around New York City was commercial, tolerant, and irreverent, and the Appalachian backcountry was dominated by Scots-Irish, warlike peoples whose cultural experience led them to distrust government and authority of all kinds. The differences between these regions – and the areas each of them later colonized – remain.
In the revolutionary period and early republic, New Englanders saw themselves as leaders of America and their region as a model for the American republic. As the region had most of the federation’s colleges, libraries, printers, and public intellectuals, it dominated the nation-building discourse. One, Worcester-born historian George Bancroft, would draw on his Puritan cultural heritage to essentially craft the national history of the United States as a people chosen by God to spread human freedom on a supposedly virgin continent and across the world.
In the early years of this country, it came as a shock to many New Englanders to discover that much of the rest of the federation had different ideas about what the United States should be and resisted Yankee ideas. Every time 19th century Southerners managed to gain control of the federal government and remake it in their image, New Englanders thought about creating a smaller federation where their values would dominate.
The secession conspirators of 1803 and 1804 were reacting to Virginian Thomas Jefferson’s narrow victory over John Adams of Massachusetts in the 1800 presidential election, made possible by the inflated Electoral College votes awarded to slave states by the “three-fifths” clause, whereby partially enslaved people counted for the political representation of these states. Jefferson and his allies then introduced the 12th Amendment, the immediate effect of which would be to deny the New England-dominated Federalists the vice presidency, shutting them out of executive power. The Jeffersonians then increased the political power of the slaveholders through the legally questionable annexation of the Louisiana Territory. By 1802, interregional tensions were so high that former Massachusetts congressman Fisher Ames predicted that an “American Peloponnesian War” could break out between New England and Virginia.
The secession plan that New Englanders prepared involved elections in 1804. They sought to gain pro-secessionist control of the New England legislatures and see outgoing Vice President Aaron Burr become governor of New York and lead that state to outside the Union with them. It was not a fringe movement – it was led by Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who had been secretary of state to John Adams; Senator Plumer of New Hampshire; four congressmen from New Hampshire and Connecticut; and both Connecticut senators. Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong was reportedly on board, and Burr, briefed on the plot, agreed to his role, though excited conspirators later realized that the vice president had never said whether he was for or against the project. Final. Pickering believed that if New York joined the plot, Vermont would follow “and Rhode Island by necessity”.
“A Northern Confederacy would unite sympathetic characters and present a fairer prospect of public happiness; while the southern states, having a semblance of habits, may be left to ‘manage their own affairs in their own way,’” explained Pickering. “That it can be done, and without shedding a drop of blood, I have little doubt.”
The plot fell apart when the intended candidates lost their elections. Burr’s defeat came after Alexander Hamilton caught a whiff of the scheme and personally lobbied against his candidacy, which spurred Burr towards the duel in which he would kill Hamilton.
Secession reared its head again during the War of 1812, a conflict fought by another Virginian, President James Madison, that was economically devastating to New England. Boston bankers refused to borrow money from the US government to fight the war. Massachusetts officials thwarted federal efforts to free the eastern half of the District of Maine from British occupation – they did not want federal troops there – and Massachusetts Governor Strong sent an emissary to British Nova Scotia to secretly discuss the possibility of making a separate peace. .
Resistance culminated in the Hartford Convention of 1814, where New Englanders threatened to secede unless their demands were met by constitutional reforms that would, in effect, restore the Yankees’ power and influence over the federation. Unfortunately, the delegation they sent to Washington to deliver these demands came to the news that the war was over and American forces had triumphed over the British in New Orleans. The New England Federalists never recovered from the humiliation.
No compromises with tyranny
As Southerners turned from apologizing for slavery to defending it, New England became the center of the abolitionist movement. In 1843, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society resolved that “the pact which exists between the North and the South is a pact with death and a pact with hell involving both parties in atrocious criminality, and must be immediately annulled.” The group’s influential leader, William Lloyd Garrison, burned a copy of the Constitution at a rally in Framingham on July 4, 1854, under the watchful eye of fellow abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips, and Henry David Thoreau. This may interest you : Rewards for Justice – Reward Offer for Information on Russian Interference in US Elections – United States Department of State. (“So perish all pledges to tyranny!” Garrison proclaimed as the document burned to ashes.) He arranged for a National Convention of Disunity to be held in 1857, but a national financial collapse that year forced its cancellation.
In early 1861, following the separation of the Deep Southern states, many observers expected the United States to peacefully split into three confederations plus a city-state around New York City. The country’s largest newspaper, the New-York Tribune, promoted a plan for the northern tier of states to merge with British Canada to create “one great homogeneous nation of free ground, stretching from Ohio to the North Pole.” But the South Carolina attack on Fort Sumter that April rallied the middle states to get the rebels to their feet.
Today, as in the 1850s, signs of disunity abound. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sought to create his own military force separate from the National Guard. The Texas Republican Party’s new platform calls for a referendum to determine whether the state “should reassert its status as an independent nation.” And 13 New Hampshire lawmakers recently tried to pass a bill that would cause their state to leave the Union. Last November, a Dartmouth University poll found that 37% of Americans, 44% of Southerners, 66% of Southern Republicans and more than a third of Northeasterners supported the idea of splitting up to establish a new union of states in their homeland. region.
A breakup would be terrible. Americans must fight to keep the United States united under the terms and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence: the inherent equality of human beings and their natural rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and representative self-government. Without the United States, liberal democratic ideals could perish from the earth at the hands of their adversaries.
But if tragedy strikes and we fail to rescue America, there will almost certainly be a movement towards an independent New England or Greater New England. In fact, such a movement arose each time the Republic was under internal threat.
Colin Woodard is the author of six books, including “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America” and “Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood”. He is a visiting senior fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I.
Located in the northeast corner of the US, New England is made up of six diverse US states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Discover New England is the region’s official cooperative marketing organization.
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| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Height | 6 feet 0 in (1.83 m) |
| Position(s) | Goalkeeper |
| club information | |
| current team | New England Revolution (head coach) |
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