Yankee Confederates: New England Secession Movements Prior to the War Between the States

Via comment by swabby76 on War to Repossess the Southern Export Trade

 

An insurrection once every twenty years is a wholesome feature of national life.

- Thomas Jefferson

Contrary to standard accounts, the birthplace of American secessionist sentiment was not Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, but the heart of the New England Yankee culture -- Salem, Massachusetts -- more than half a century before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter. From 1800 to 1815, there were three serious attempts at secession orchestrated by New England Federalists, who believed that the policies of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, especially the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the national embargo of 1807, and the War of 1812, were so disproportionately harmful to New England that they justified secession.

If these New England Federalists had been southerners and said the things they said in 1861 rather than in 1803, they would have long ago been denigrated by historians as maniacal "fire eaters" or traitors. "I will rather anticipate a new confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence and oppression of the aristocratic Democrats of the South," wrote the prominent Massachusetts Federalist politician and U.S. Senator, Timothy Pickering, in 1803. "There will be ... a separation," he predicted, and "the white and black population will mark the boundary."¹ His colleague, Senator James Hillhouse, agreed, saying, "The Eastern States must and will dissolve the Union and form a separate government."² "The Northern States must be governed by Virginia or must govern Virginia, and there is no middle ground," warned the conspiratorial Aaron Burr, who joined the New England Federalists in a secessionist plot (discussed below).³

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