heresy," he is wrong in fixing upon its first progenitor, and in saying that the date of its birth was as late as 1811; for in 1803, one Colonel Timothy Pickering, a senator from Massachusetts, and Secretary of State in the Cabinet of John Adams, complaining of what he called "the oppression of the aristocratic Democrats of the South," said, "I will not despair; I will rather anticipate a new confederacy." ..."That this can be accomplished without spilling one drop of blood I have little doubt." . . . "It must begin with Massachusetts. The proposition would be welcomed by Connecticut; and could we doubt of New Hampshire? But New York must be associated; and how is her concurrence to be obtained? She must be made the center of the confederacy. Vermont and New Jersey would follow, of course; and Rhode Island of necessity."
In 1814, the Hartford Convention was called and met in consequence of the opposition of New England to the war then pending with Great Britain. Delegates were sent to this Convention by the Legislatures of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, and several counties and towns from other Northern States also sent representatives. This Convention, after deliberating with closed doors on the propriety of withdrawing the States represented in it from the Union, published an address, in which it said, among other things:
" If the Union be destined to dissolution ... it should, if possible, be the work of peaceable times and deliberate consent. . . . Whenever it shall appear that the causes are radical and permanent, a separation by equitable arrangement will be preferable to an alliance by constraint among nominal friends, but real enemies."
In 1839, Ex-President John Quincy Adams, in an address delivered by him in New York, said:
"The indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right, but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert
