Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans imagined a nation of farmers boldly opening the frontier of the Louisiana Territory. Massachusetts Federalists were tied to the Atlantic, and its mercantile trade. They were apprehensive about what was happening in the West.[1]
The West, to New England’s Federalists, represented their reduced status in national influence. The West was also less conservative and more Democratic-Republican than New England. Many of New England’s Federalists doubted that westward expansion would keep the nation united. For them, it was not a question of if the West would secede, but when.[2]
Nothing bothered the Federalists in New England more than the thought that the West and the South would come to dominate New England and the North. Federalists began to promote the notion of uniting North and South against the West.[3]
John Lowell, Jr. summarized the Federalist view, in a pamphlet entitled Thoughts in a Series of Letters. Lowell argued the United States should be divided at the Allegheny Mountain range. Size mattered. The states formed from the thirteen colonies were the correct size for a republic. The Louisiana Purchase, he wrote, not only encroached on the original agreement between the states, it also threatened the nation’s republican notion of government. The Alleghenies were a natural barrier. They protected the Eastern, Mid-Atlantic and Southern states from the West. In a republic governed by opinion, citizens needed to live in close-knit communities.
“…where general opinion governs, it is necessary that the people should be less extended, and more enlightened, and that there should be some similarity in the manners, habits and pursuits.[4]”
John Lowell, Jr.
Lowell feared the West would promote moving the capital, taxing the East and ignoring the East’s interests. He urged unifying North and South against the West. To sweeten the pot for Southerners, he urged New England to allow the three-fifths clause to remain in place.
What Other New Englanders Wrote About Disunion between the East and West
Look for it Monday, January 6
[1] James M. Banner, Jr. To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970) 110-111.
[2] Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 111-112.
[3] Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 112.
[4] John Lowell, Jr. Thoughts in a Series of Letters, quoted in Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 113.
