John Lowell urged immediate action. He wrote “Throwing off all connection with this wasteful war making peace with our enemy and opening once more our commerce with the worlds would be a wise and manly course.”[1]
The war was “wasteful” because New England did not have the funds to support a militia capable of expelling the British, who already occupied territories in Maine and Nantucket.
While militias in New England were crack troops, calling out thousands of soldiers from the citizenry required funds that New England states did not have. Historian Donald Hickey argues that defending New England was too costly. It was, he wrote, another reason that drove the Federalists to the Hartford Convention.[2]
[1] Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of James Madison (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1986) 1109-10.
[2] Donald R. Hickey, “New Englands Defense Problem and the Genesis of the Hartford Convention,” The New England Quarterly, V. 50 N. 4 (December, 1977) 588.
