A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming

history—and perhaps eliminate the South’s dread of a race war—was lost forever. President Thomas Jefferson’s silence is one of those hidden turning points that leave historians brooding over what might have been.

CHAPTER 7
    New England Preaches—and Almost Practices—Secession
    While average citizens welcomed the Louisiana Purchase with enthusiasm and began voting for Thomas Jefferson and his Republican Party (often called “Democratic-Republican” by modern historians), the leaders of the defeated Federalist Party remained unreconciled. In Boston’s Columbian Centinel , a Federalist spokesman voiced an angry fear of the future. “This unexplored empire, of the size of four or five European kingdoms,” would destroy the balance of the Union. Louisiana was currently “a great waste, unpeopled with any beings besides wolves and wandering Indians.” But in coming years it would be divided into states, all of whom would follow Virginia’s political leadership. 1
    When the treaty approving the purchase was submitted to Congress, Federalist representative Roger Griswold of Connecticut declared the Constitution had no provision for acquiring new territory, and Louisiana would have to be governed as a colony, the way the British ruled Jamaica. Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who had been secretary of state under President John Adams, went even further. He asserted Jefferson would needthe unanimous approval of every state in the Union to sign the treaty. Senator John Breckinridge of the new state of Kentucky replied that if Congress rejected the treaty, Kentucky and Tennessee would secede from the Union and form a separate country. 2
    The Jeffersonians ignored the Federalists and the treaty was approved, thanks to the majorities they commanded in both houses of Congress. But the Federalists, led by Senator Pickering and former Congressman Fisher Ames, the party’s leader in Massachusetts, continued to condemn the purchase of Louisiana. They predicted the prospect of cheap land would depopulate the East and lure badly needed workers from the new factories that were opening in New England. The only solution, as Ames saw it, was for the Federalists “to entrench themselves in the state governments and endeavor to make state justice and state power a shelter of the wise, the good and the rich from the wild destroying rage of the Southern Jacobins.”
    Pickering went further than Ames. He decided New England, and hopefully neighboring New York, to which thousands of New Englanders were emigrating, should secede from the Union, form a new country, and seek the protection and alliance of Great Britain to defend them against the Jacobinic Jeffersonians. He conferred with Vice President Aaron Burr, who had quarreled with the president and was unlikely to be on the ticket when Jefferson ran for reelection in 1804. Burr, a New Englander by blood, agreed to run for governor of New York with Federalist support. If he won, he would lead New York into the new nation.
    The conspiracy again revealed the intensity of New England’s conviction that they were the predestined leaders of an independent America. Their defiance of George III and his Parliament had triggered the American Revolution. Hadn’t John Adams, the “Atlas of Independence” in the Continental Congress, selected George Washington to lead the army and Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence? The Pilgrim fathers had seen Plymouth as “one small candle . . . [that] hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.” The Puritans who founded Boston had prophesied it would be a “city upon a hill watched by the world.” Now these arrogant Virginians were taking charge of the United States of America. It was intolerable! 3
    Here were the seeds of a primary disease of the public mind, which would soon fuse with antislavery to create a hatred of the