Just three New England states appointed delegates to the proposed convention.
Massachusetts led the way with twelve delegates: George Cabot, William Prescott, Harrison Gray Otis, Timothy Bigelow, Nathan Dane, George Bliss, Joshua Thomas, Hodijah Baylies, Daniel Waldo, Joseph Lyman, Samuel S. Wilde and Stephen Longfellow.[1]
Connecticut’s legislature sent seven delegates: Chauncey Goodrich, James Hillhouse, John Treadwell, Zepheniah Swift, Nathaniel Smith, Calvin Goddard, and Roger M. Sherman.[2]
The legislature of Rhode Island sent three delegates: Daniel Lyman, Benjamin Hazard and Edward Manton.[3]
Vermont was under siege from the British. The Federalist legislative caucus, with the advice of Governor Gilman, did not send delegates[4]
In New Hampshire, the legislature was not in session. Democratic-Republicans controlled the governor’s council, and even Federalists, such as Daniel Webster, did not support the convention. At first, New Hampshire did not send delegates. Later, two counties in New Hampshire with Federalist majorities held county conventions to send delegates to Hartford, Benjamin West and Miles Olcutt.[5]
On November 9, 1814 the Boston Centinel reported the legislatures of Rhode Island and Connecticut had accepted the invitation to send delegates to the convention. Referring to the original federal edifice, paraded in Philadelphia after the ratification of the Constitution, the Centinel published an illustration of a new federal edifice with three columns. On December 9, 1814 a wit, writing for Yankee, a Democratic-Republican newspaper, said the three pillars resembled a snuff bottle. Democratic-Republicans then disparaged the meeting in Hartford as the “Snuff Bottle Convention.”[6]
Who Was Absent From the Convention
[1] [Theodore Lyman] Short Account of the Hartford Convention Taken from Official Documents and Addressed to the Fair Minded and Well Disposed to which is Added An Attested Copy of the Secret Journal of that Body (Boston: O. Everett, 1813) 22.
[2] [Lyman] Short Account, 22.
[3] [Lyman] Short Account, 22.
[4] 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) 328.
[5] [Lyman] Short Account, 22; Banner, To the Hartford Convention,328-9.
[6] Samuel Eliot Morison, “Our Most Unpopular War” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, V. 80 (1968) 51.
