Carey asserted that New England’s newspapers, especially those in Boston, wrote essays against Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations. They repeatedly inflamed their readers with the following falsehoods:
- New England was not agricultural; it was commercial.
- States in the South were only agricultural.
- Agricultural and commercial states were inevitably hostile.
- The South was “uniformly” opposed to the North.
- Motivated by this hostility, Congress passed measures unfavorable to New England.[1]
Carey claimed that because of this newspaper campaign, the people of New England, “proverbially orderly, quiet, sober, and rational, have been actually so highly excited as to be ripe for revolution.”[2]
Referring to the Hartford Convention in December, 1814, Carey wrote: “A confederacy has thus been formed which, promises fair to produce a convulsion—a dissolution of the union—and a civil war, unless some very extraordinary and at present unexpected circumstance prevents it.[3]
How New England Considered Itself Morally Superior to the Rest of the Country
Look for it Monday, June 10
