and vigorous Legislature
in the fall of 1814. Washington had been captured and burned;
Armstrong, threatened with removal, had resigned in disgrace; the
national treasury was empty; and every bank between New Orleans and
Albany had suspended specie payment, with their notes from twenty to
thirty per cent. below par. Although, in ten weeks, from July 3 to
September 11, the British had met a bloody and unparalleled check from
an inferior force, under the brilliant leadership of Brown and Scott,
and a most disgraceful repulse by Macdonough and Macomb at Plattsburg,
victorious English veterans, fresh from the battlefields of Spain,
continued to arrive, until Canada contained twenty-seven thousand
regular troops. On the other hand, Macomb had only fifteen hundred men
at Plattsburg, Brown less than two thousand at Fort Erie, and Izard
about four thousand at Buffalo.

To make bad matters worse, the New England Federalists were renewing
their talk of a dissolution of the Union. "We have been led by the
terms of the Constitution," said Governor Strong of Massachusetts,
addressing the Legislature on October 5, 1814, "to rely on the
government of the Union to provide for our defence. We have resigned
to that government the revenues of the State with the expectation that
this object would not be neglected. Let us, then, unite in such
measures for our safety as the times demand and the principles of
justice and the law of self-preservation will justify."[178] Answering
for the Legislature, which understood the Governor's words to be an
invitation to resume powers the State had given up when adopting the
Constitution, Harrison Gray Otis reported that "this people, being
ready and determined to defend themselves, have the greatest need of
those resources derivable from themselves which the national
government has hitherto thought proper to employ elsewhere. When this
deficiency becomes apparent, no reason can preclude the right of the
whole people who were parties to it, to adopt another."[179] The
report closed by recommending the appointment of delegates "to meet
and confer with delegates from the States of New England or any of
them," out of which grew the celebrated Hartford Convention that met
on the 15th of December. The report of this convention, made on the
24th of the same month, declared that a severance of the Union can be
justified only by absolute necessity; but, following the Virginia
resolution of 1798, it confirmed th