Carey compared the state of Massachusetts with Georgia. He noted “The state [Massachusetts] enslaved by faction, whines, and scolds, and murmurs, and winces, and curses the administration for not defending it, although every possible exertion was made to enfeeble the administration and render it incapable of defence.” In contrast, “Georgia…is assailed by the most powerful combination of Indians…She neither winces—nor whines—nor curses the government—nor threatens a separation. She rises in her strength.”[1]
After attacking Massachusetts in general, Carey zeroed in on John Lowell, Jr. the Federalists’ chief publicist. [2] In his rush to publish the Olive Branch, Carey failed to check on the author of “The Road to Ruin,” one of fifteen articles in the Examiner, published by Barent Gardenier in New York. Carey did not know that Judge John Lowell Sr. had died in 1802. In the Olive Branch, Carey mistakenly referred to the author of the articles as “Judge Lowell.”
Referring to him as a “blind leader of the blind” Carey criticized Lowell for bemoaning the loss of commerce in New England and the introduction of manufactures. He berated Lowell for stating that profits at one time were fifty percent. Carey claimed the average profits of successful commerce were less than twelve percent. He noted that two-thirds of once successful merchants in New York and Philadelphia were bankrupt.
Carey’s goal throughout the Olive Branch was to convince Federalist farmers the Federalist judges, newspapers and clergy were mistaken, and were leading the nation into civil war.[3] After critiquing Lowell, Carey attacked New England’s Congregationalist clergy for “pulpit politics.” In Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Congregational Church was established. As the official church of those states, the Congregationalist clergymen preached secession from the pulpit.
Mathew Carey was horrified. He wrote that clergymen are “pre-eminently” charged with promoting peace and good will. Instead in New England the clergy used their pulpits “enkindling among [their] hearers the most baleful, the most furious passion—to prepare them for insurrection and revolution—for all the horrors of civil war.”[4]
Carey wrote that New England had inhibited the war’s success. As a final salvo, as the Olive Branch went to press, Carey commented on the continuing flow of specie to Boston, and its effects on banks in New York, Philadelphia and the South. Philadelphia banks had difficulty putting up bank notes for sale at a discount. There were no bidders. “If this does not open the eyes of those who have been hitherto duped by these people, they deserve to be sealed forever.”[5]
Who were these New England Federalists and what led them to want to secede?
Look for it Monday, July 15
[1] Mathew Carey, The Olive Branch or Faults on Both Sides, (Philadelphia: M. Carey, November 8, 1814) 246.
[2] James M. Banner, Jr. To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970)28, 179. Note: Judge John Lowell Senior’s son, John Lowell Junior, is not to be confused with John Lowell, the son of Francis Cabot Lowell, the co-founder of a famous cotton manufacturing facility in Lowell, Massachusetts.
[3] Edward C. Carter, II, “Mathew Carey and ‘The Olive Branch,’ 1814-1818, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, V 89, N 4 (Oct. 1965) 406.
[4] Carey, Olive Branch, 250.
[5] Carey, Olive Branch, 252.
