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T Lee Horne III

Male. Lives in Pensacola, Florida, United States. Is single.

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I retired when I turned 50 years old. I am working again at 72 years old.

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CSA II: The New Confederate States of America

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T Lee Horne III

May 17, 2026 9:47 pm

Chet McAteer ·March 8, 2018 BLUE LIGHTS AND YANKEE TREASON: New England’s 1812 Betrayal of the Union Exposes the Hypocrisy of the “Perpetual Union” Myth Invented to Crush Southern Secession During th... View MoreChet McAteer ·March 8, 2018 BLUE LIGHTS AND YANKEE TREASON: New England’s 1812 Betrayal of the Union Exposes the Hypocrisy of the “Perpetual Union” Myth Invented to Crush Southern Secession During the War of 1812, the New England States heartland of Federalist opposition to “Mr. Madison’s War” engaged in a sustained campaign of resistance, obstruction, and covert collaboration that contemporaries across the republic rightly branded as treasonous, exposing the same sectional arrogance and commercial self-interest that had defined Yankee behavior since colonial days. Governors Caleb Strong of Massachusetts and Roger Griswold and later Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut flatly refused President Madison’s requisitions to federalize or deploy State militias for national defense, insisting the Constitution permitted such calls only in cases of actual invasion or insurrection and that the governor alone judged when those exigencies existed. Massachusetts’ highest court upheld this view, declaring the State Sovereignty in its militia power; Connecticut’s legislature condemned the War itself as Unconstitutional aggression. While Southern and Western troops bled on the frontier and along the Canadian border, New England’s militias stayed home, guarding only their own commerce and leaving the federal government to beg for volunteers it could not compel. This was not mere political dissent; it was deliberate nullification of federal War powers in wartime, the very doctrine New England would later denounce when Southern States invoked the Compact's Reserved Rights. Even more damning were the direct aids to the enemy. “Blue Light Federalists” in New London, Connecticut, flashed blue lanterns from shore to warn British blockaders of American ships attempting to break out, Commodore Stephen Decatur himself reported the signals foiling his squadron. Smuggling flourished openly along the Maine and Vermont borders, with New England merchants funneling goods, provisions, and intelligence about U.S. Troop movements to British forces in Canada, evading Jefferson’s earlier embargo and Madison’s wartime restrictions alike. British warships were exempted from the coastal blockade in practice because New England ports remained profitable ground; some Federalist leaders even floated secret overtures for a separate peace, with Massachusetts reportedly offering Britain portions of Maine to end hostilities on terms favorable to Yankee trade. These were not abstract grievances; they were active subversion of the War effort while American sailors were impressed and American soil invaded. The climax came in the secret Hartford Convention of December 1814, January 1815, where twenty-six delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont gathered behind closed doors to air sectional fury. While moderates prevailed and the official report avoided explicit calls for Secession, the radicals, men like Timothy Pickering and John Lowell had long advocated a Northern Confederacy or outright separation; the convention’s proposed Constitutional Amendments were nakedly designed to cripple Southern and Western influence: requiring two-thirds majorities for War, embargoes, or new State admissions; abolishing the three-fifths compromise; limiting Presidential terms; and restricting federal commerce power. The report warned that continued Southern dominance would justify “measures” to preserve New England’s interests, language contemporaries interpreted as a veiled threat of Disunion or separate negotiation with the enemy. Massachusetts dispatched commissioners to Washington to press these demands just as news of the Treaty of Ghent and Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans arrived, rendering the mission ludicrous and subversive in the eyes of the nation. Cartoons depicted the delegates leaping into King George III’s arms for “plenty of molasses and codfish… honours, titles and nobility,” and Democratic-Republicans nationwide branded the proceedings treasonous, a charge that stuck and destroyed the Federalist Party as a national force. From a strictly Constitutional and Southern perspective, these acts reveal New England’s hypocrisy in stark relief. The same States that had first and most persistently practiced Secessionist rhetoric, militia nullification, and commercial disloyalty during a declared War later invented the “perpetual Union” myth to condemn the South’s peaceful, ordinance-based withdrawal in 1860–61. Where the South cited the 10th Amendment, Ratification reservations, and the Voluntary Compact to leave a Union that had become destructive of its ends, New England in 1814–15 flirted with actual aid and comfort to the British enemy for the sake of trade profits and sectional dominance. The Hartford Convention was not mere protest; it was the logical outgrowth of the Yankee spirit Washington, Greene, and Braxton had already condemned decades earlier avarice, intolerance, and the willingness to fracture the Union whenever numerical or economic supremacy was challenged. That the victors of 1865 airbrushed this history while criminalizing Southern Secession only underscores the Constitutional Truth: the Compact was always Voluntary, and New England’s wartime Treason proves it was they, not the South, who first tested its limits with bayonets in mind. In Liberty and Eternal Vigilance, C.M.McAteer March 8, 2018 References Proceedings and Report of the Hartford Convention (December 1814–January 1815), including the official amendments proposed and the warning of “measures” to preserve New England interests. Contemporary accounts: Commodore Stephen Decatur’s reports on Blue Light signals (Niles’ Weekly Register, 1813–1814); Governor Caleb Strong’s messages and Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court opinions on militia sovereignty. Theodore Dwight, History of the Hartford Convention (1833); Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (1869). Henry Adams, History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison (1889–1891); primary records of Federalist correspondence (Timothy Pickering, John Lowell, and Governors Strong, Griswold, and Trumbull). Democratic-Republican newspapers and political cartoons of the era branding the Convention treasonous; ratifying convention debates and 10th Amendment records for the constitutional compact analysis.

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