John Quincy Adams on the Hartford Convention

Joshua Horn

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Apr 9, 2012
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Wake Forest, NC
I just stumbled across some interesting commentary by John Quincy Adams on the Hartford Convention. It's in Documents relating to New England Federalism, available here: http://books.google.com/books?id=BR5-P7Ti47oC. Here is one interesting paragraph:

"This representative convention of several State legislatures was in itself an incident organization of a new confederacy. The leaders of the party, by whom it had been devised, had been struggling seven years to organize such an assembly. And it was undoubtedly the measure indispensable for effecting the dissolution of the Union. The Hartford Convention was to the Northern confederacy precisely what the Congress of 1774 was to the Declaration of Independence. The Convention itself could not be held but by an agreement between two more more States, which is an express violation of the Constitution, - a violation which would have been still more flagrant, had a second convention been elected according to one of the closing recommendations of that assembly." p. 245

There is a long section on the Hartford Convention from page 283-330.

John Quincy Adams, by the way, during the debates over the annexation of Texas, said that if the annexation went through the Northern states could, and should, secede.
 
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