One hundred and ninety-two years ago this month, Connecticut almost seceded from the United States of America because of an unconstitutional, overseas war that was infringing on our liberties. Sound familiar?
Feb. 13, 1815 was the day Connecticut didn’t secede. The unimaginatively named War of 1812 had officially been over since Christmas but because the peace treaty had been signed in Ghent, Belgium, and because internet service in those times was spotty at best, it had taken almost two months for the news to reach our shores.
During that time, soon-to-be-president Andrew Jackson defeated the British in New Orleans in a stunning military victory that was entirely unnecessary. Neither side knew that the war was already over. The British retreated to Biloxi, Miss., where they captured Fort Bowyer on Feb. 12, a strategically important fort that Jackson had garrisoned with hundreds of officers, declaring that “ten thousand men cannot take it.” The British had less than 1,000 men. They took it.
Politicians still underestimate the power of the enemy, a fact we’re reminded of as we approach the four-year anniversary of the date when Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq.
Back to February 1815. New England had sent a delegation to Washington to “negotiate terms”—it was considering seceding from the Union. Connecticut had been independent for hundreds of years and still considered itself free, and it didn’t like what its federal government was doing. Connecticut had been a state for 37 years at that point.
Age is relative, and Connecticut has had several makeovers in the intervening decades. If we judge by when we adopted our current constitution (a little like judging age by the date of one’s last facelift, admittedly), then we are only 42 years old; we ratified our state constitution in 1965.
But let’s return to the weekend of Feb. 11 and 12, 1815. On the 13th, the news that the War of 1812 was over would be everywhere, but the weekend before, people felt as people feel now: we’ve been fighting too long for no reason and we’ve had too many of our liberties taken from us by the politicians we entrusted to protect them.
One of those lost liberties was our ability to export and trade overseas. “If you won’t sell to us,” the thinking goes, “we won’t sell to you. Ha!”
Trade restrictions have never worked. They always make the restricting country worse off. It hit Connecticut especially hard.
We still have trade restrictions, ranging from tariffs to import and export quotas to the various embargoes and sanctions we’ve had on Iraq, Iran, South Africa, etc., none of which worked, and all of which hurt Americans.
Even more poignant to Connecticut at the time was conscription. The war had dragged on for so long that citizens were being drafted to fight.
Connecticut wouldn’t stand for it. In 1814, it secretly convened delegations from the five New England states to determine what should be done. It came to be known as the Hartford Convention. It was so secret, we have still never found a single thorough record of the proceedings, other than the report and resolutions adopted on Jan. 5, 1815. Much of the debate centered on whether New England should secede. Had the federal government overstepped its constitutional authority so much that it should be thrown out?
This is exactly the question facing modern Americans, as the federal government has gotten monstrously large, mainly in the last few decades.
Yet, where is our Hartford Convention today? Where is the uproar over Iraq and over all of our freedoms that have been taken from us? Patriot Act I and II. The Military Commissions Act. Mountains of Executive Orders. “National security letters” that can force us to do things without a judge’s oversight. Warrantless wiretapping. The constant indignities we go through just to take a 30-minute airplane flight. Why aren’t we secretly convening delegates? Or are we?
The final report of the Hartford Convention proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution to prohibit any trade embargo lasting more than 60 days, and to require a two-thirds congressional majority to declare war or interrupt foreign trade in any way.
The conflict in Iraq was never even declared a war by Congress. Even without the Hartford Convention’s amendments, it is an unconstitutional conflict.
Why don’t we do anything? We have gotten hooked on federal handouts. You can at least in principle stop an addiction at any time by refusing to pay for the stuff you get. But the federal government has a sneakier setup. It doesn’t provide services for money. That would make ending those services too easy. Instead, it takes money directly from the people, and then doles it back out to them in the form of services, provided the people meet certain requirements.
You want federal funding for education? You have to comply with burdensome regulations and deal with the federal Department of Education.
You want federal funding to build supportive housing for the homeless? You have to go out and count the number of homeless people. Just last week we sent hundreds of volunteers into the streets of Fairfield County, not looking to help the homeless, but to count them.
It’s like a pusher who takes everybody’s money, whether they want the drugs or or not, and then gives free drugs to people who do personal favors for him. Our representatives spend far too much time bragging about how much money they “bring back” to the state, instead of doing their job to make sure the federal government doesn’t take it in the first place.
So what do we do now?
Once the New Englanders of 1815 had their resolutions in hand, they sent a team of negotiators to Washington to demand changes and threaten secession.
Those negotiators got to Washington in early February. On Feb. 13, newspapers announced that the war was over. The negotiators had no choice but to go home. They had no more leverage.
How can we stop the war now?
One lesson we learned from 1815 is that if you allow the federal government to grow, then, like any weed, it will.
But, just like it did nearly two centuries ago, New England is starting to stand up to the federal government. Maine recently rejected the federal Real ID Act, which would essentially create a national ID card, becoming the first state in the union to buck the feds. New Hampshire is now a destination for thousands of libertarians who are part of the Free State Project, which wants to bring freedom back to America one state at a time. Even Massachusetts nearly repealed its state income tax a few years ago to reduce the overall size of government.
Where is Connecticut in all this? Why aren’t we leading the charge once again for more freedom and less federal intrusion onto our liberties? We have one of the strongest libertarian histories of any state.
It’s time for another Hartford Convention.
phil@maymin.com
This article originally appeared in Fairfield County Weekly on February 15, 2007