Those favoring radical action, Timothy Pickering and John Lowell, did not take part in the Hartford Convention. George Cabot planned to urge a moderate course. He said that he went to Hartford “to allay the ferment and prevent a crisis…We are going to keep…young hot-heads from getting into mischief.”[1]
Nathan Dane also worried about mischief. As he traveled to Hartford he said “Somebody must go to prevent mischief.” Later he wrote, “…moderate men saw the excitement was going too far and that it was leading to evils far greater than the war itself…This convention, as intended, moderated and checked an inflamed, growing opposition to the administration of federal affairs…[it] might, in the then violence of party spirit, have in time embarrassed and shaken the Union.”[2]
After the Convention, Harrison Gray Otis recalled that calls for a convention “[were] the consequence, not the source of a popular sentiment; and it was intended by those who voted for it, as a safety valve by which the steam arising from the fermentation of the time might escape, not as a boiler in which it should be generated.”[3]
[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) 332.
[2] Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 332.
[3] Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 332.
