Wars sometimes have a unifying effect on nations. Americans of a certain age remember World War II as the “good war” because, after the divisiveness of the Great Depression, it caused Americans to pull together in the common struggle against fascism.
But wars can have a divisive effect, too. The War of 1812, the first waged under the Constitution of 1787, split the two parties, the Republicans and the Federalists. It also split the South and the West, on one hand, from New England, on the other. New England Federalists opposed the war as a land grab by Republican Southerners and Westerners. They predicted that the war would go badly, and when it did they didn’t disguise their pleasure at being proved right.
The New Englanders had been cranky ever since John Adams lost the presidency to Thomas Jefferson. When the election of James Madison in 1808 made him the third Virginian out of four presidents, some asked themselves what future there was for their region in the Union. A bill to admit Louisiana as a state in 1811 prompted Josiah Quincy, a congressman from Massachusetts, to warn about the effect of its passage, which would shift the nation’s center of gravity south and west and marginalize New England even more. “I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion,” Quincy said, “that if this bill passes, the bonds of the Union are virtually dissolved, that the states which compose it are free from their moral obligations, and that as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for separation—amicably if they can, violently if they must.”
The bill passed, causing New Englanders to appreciate how little influence they had in national affairs. The declaration of war against Britain in 1812 rubbed the message in.
Daniel Webster was a promising lawyer in New Hampshire who was developing ambitions for politics. An antiwar rally in the town of Rockingham produced calls for Webster to summarize the complaints of the locals. His Rockingham memorial, sent to Madison, established him as a serious thinker on constitutional law and politics.
“We hold the right of judging for ourselves, and have never yet delegated to any government, the power of deciding for us what pursuits and occupations best comport with our interests and our situation,” Webster said of his neighbors and New England generally. Those pursuits and occupations included overseas trade, especially with Britain, which the war and the policies that produced it had ravaged. “It could not therefore be without alarm and apprehension that we perceived in the general government a disposition to embarrass and enthrall commerce by repeated restrictions, and to make war by shutting up our own ports.” Webster was referencing an embargo on trade approved by Congress.
When the New Englanders had complained, they were told to be quiet and accept the will of the Republican Congress and president. “We heard ourselves admonished finally to retire from the sea and ‘to provide for ourselves those comforts and conveniences of life for which it would be unwise ever more for you to recur to distant countries,’” Webster said. The insult was obvious. “We do not hesitate to say that we deem this language equally unconstitutional and arrogant.”
Webster characterized New England’s understanding of the Constitution. “We originally saw nothing, and can now see nothing, either in the letter or the spirit of the national compact which makes it our duty to acquiesce in a system tending to compel us to abandon our natural and accustomed pursuits.” Webster advisedly used the term “compact” for the Constitution. A compact was an agreement, in this case among the several states. The Constitution was composed of states, not of people. The implication was that what the states had made, the states might unmake.
“We regard the Constitution as an instrument of preservation, not of change,” Webster said. The Constitution didn’t create something that hadn’t existed. “We take its intention to have been to protect, by the strong arm of the whole nation, the interests of each particular section.”
Webster offered a warning. “We are, sir, from principle and habit attached to the union of the states,” he told Madison. “But our attachment is to the substance and not to the form. It is to the good which this union is capable of producing, and not to the evil which is suffered unnaturally to grow out of it. If the time should ever arrive when this union shall be holding together by nothing but the authority of law; when its incorporating, vital principle shall become extinct; when its principal exercises shall consist in acts of power and authority, not of protection and beneficence; when it shall lose the strong bond which it hath hitherto had in the public affections; and when, consequently, we shall be one, not in interest and mutual regard, but in name and form only; we, sir, shall look on that hour as the closing scene of our country’s prosperity!”
Webster hoped such a time would never come. “We shrink from the separation of the states as an event fraught with incalculable evils,” he said. Yet the present made it seem all too possible. “If a separation of the states ever should take place, it will be on some occasion when one portion of the country undertakes to control, to regulate and to sacrifice the interest of another; when a small and heated majority in the government, taking counsel of their passions, and not of their reason, contemptuously disregarding the interests and perhaps stopping the mouths of a large and respectable minority, shall by hasty, rash and ruinous measures, threaten to destroy essential rights and lay waste the most important interests.”
Webster said that New England would not be the instigator of disunion. “The government may be assured that the tie that binds us to the union will never be broken by us,” he said. But New England couldn’t let its interests be trampled. If they were, the government would be the party instigating disunion.
The government must do right by New England, Webster said. “It only remains for us to express our conscientious convictions that the present course of measures will prove most prejudicial and ruinous to the country; and our just expectation that the government will adopt such a system as shall restore to us the blessings of peace and of commerce.”
Webster would become the great defender of the Union against any who talked of secession. But at the beginning of his career he walked both sides of the street. New England wouldn’t break the Union, he said. Yet the compact of the states was valued for its substance, not its form. If the substance continued to erode, New England might declare the government had broken the Union. All bets would be off.
quote: “We originally saw nothing, and can now see nothing, either in the letter or the spirit of the national compact which makes it our duty to acquiesce in a system tending to compel us to abandon our natural and accustomed pursuits.”
That argument could also have been said by southern slave holders