Boston, the metropolis of Massachusetts, has been for a long period, and more particularly since the close of the reign of federalism, the seat of discontent, complaint, and turbulence. She has been herself restless and uneasy — and has spread restlessness and uneasiness throughout the union. She has thwarted, harassed, and embarrassed the general government, incomparably more than all the other states together.
         Whatever difficulty or distress arose from the extraordinary circumstances of the times — and great difficulty and distress were inevitable — was aggravated and magnified to the highest degree, for the purpose of inflaming the public passions. The leaders in this business were clamorous when we were at peace in 1793, and in 1806, for war against England, on account of her depredations on their commerce, and in 1807, on account of the attack on the Chesapeake. They were equally clamorous, as we have seen, in 1803, for war against Spain, on account of the interruption of the right of deposit at New Orleans, and denounced, in the most virulent style, the imbecility and cowardice of the government. Yet from the moment when war was declared, they clamoured for peace, and reprobated the war as wicked, unjust, and unnecessary, although the causes of the war were incomparably greater in 1812, than in 1793, or 1806, or 1807. They made every possible effort to raise obstructions and difficulties in the prosecution of the war; and yet reprobated the administration for their imbecility in carrying it on. They reduced the government to bankruptcy, as I trust I shall prove; and reproached it for its necessities and embarrassments. In a word, all their movements have had but one object, to enfeeble and distract the government for the purpose of regaining their lost authority.
         This object has been too successfully attained.
         With a population of only 33,000 inhabitants, and a commerce quite insignificant compared with that of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Charleston, Boston has, by management and address, acquired a degree of influence beyond all proportion greater than her due share — greater in fact than the above four cities combined — a degree of influence which has been exercised in such a manner as to become dangerous to public and private property and happiness, and to the peace and permanence of the union. It brought us to the very verge of its dissolution, and nearly to the awful consequence — a civil war.
         The movers of this mighty piece of machinery — this lever that puts into convulsive motion the whole of our political fabric, are few in number. But several of them are possessed of inordinate wealth — considerable talents — great energy — and overgrown influence. They afford a signal proof how much a few men may effect by energy and concert, more especially when they are not very scrupulous about the means of accomplishing their ends. A northern confederacy has been the object for a number of years. They have repeatedly advocated in the public prints a separation of the states, on account of a pretended discordance of views and interests of the different sections.
         This project of separation was formed shortly after the adoption of the federal Constitution. Whether it was ventured before the public earlier than 1796, I know not. But of its promulgation in that year, there is the most indubitable evidence. A most elaborate set of papers, under the signature of Pelham, was then published in the city of Hartford, in Connecticut, the joint production of an association of men of the first talents and influence in the state. They appeared in the Connecticut Courant, published by Hudson and Goodwin, two eminent printers of, I believe, considerable revolutionary standing. There were then none of the long catalogue of grievances, which, since that period, have been fabricated to justify the recent attempts to dissolve the union. General Washington was president; John Adams, an eastern citizen, vice-president. There was no French influence — no Virginia dynasty — no embargo — no non-intercourse — no terrapin policy — no democratic madness — no war. In fine, every feature in the affairs of the country was precisely according to their fondest wishes.
         To sow discord, jealousy, and hostility between the different sections of the union, was the first and grand step in their career, in order to accomplish the favourite object of a separation of the states.
         In fact, without this efficient instrument, all their efforts would have been utterly unavailing. It would have been impossible, had the honest yeomanry of the eastern states continued to regard their southern fellow citizens as friends and brethren, having one common interest in the promotion of the general welfare, to make them instruments in the hands of those who intended to employ them to operate the unholy work of destroying the noble, the August, the splendid fabric of our union and unparalleled form of government.
         For eighteen years, therefore, the most unceasing endeavours have been used to poison the minds of the people of the eastern states towards, and to alienate them from, their fellow citizens of the southern. The people of the latter section have been portrayed as demons incarnate, destitute of all the good qualities that dignify or adorn human nature — that acquire esteem or regard — that entitle to respect and veneration. Nothing can exceed the virulence of these caricatures, some of which would have suited the ferocious inhabitants of New-Zealand, rather than a civilized or polished nation.
         To illustrate, and remove all doubt on this subject, I subjoin an extract from Pelham's essays, No. 1:

Negroes are, in all respects, except in regard to life and death, the cattle of the citizens of the southern states. If they were good for food, the probability is, that even the power of destroying their lives would be enjoyed by their owners, as full as it is over the lives of their cattle. It cannot be, but their laws prohibit the owners from killing their slaves, because those slaves are human beings, or because it is a moral evil to destroy them. If that were the case, how can they justify their being treated, in all other respects, like brutes? For it is in this point of view alone, that negroes in the southern states are considered in fact as different from cattle. They are bought and sold; they are fed or kept hungry; they are clothed, or reduced to nakedness; they are beaten, turned out to the fury of the elements, and torn from their dearest connections, with as little remorse as if they were beasts of the field.

Never was there a more infamous or unfounded caricature than this — never one more disgraceful to its author. It may not be amiss to state, and it enhances ten-fold the turpitude of the writer, that at the period when it was written, there were many slaves in Connecticut, who were subject to every one of the disadvantages that attended the southern slaves.
         Its vile character is further greatly aggravated by the consideration that a large portion of these very negroes, and their ancestors, had been purchased, and rent from their homes and families, by citizens of the eastern states, who were actually at that moment, and long afterwards, engaged in the Slave Trade.
         I add a few more extracts from Pelham:

We have reached a critical period in our political existence. The question must soon be decided, whether we shall continue a nation, at the expense even of our union, or sink with the present mass of difficulty into confusion and slavery.
         Many advantages were supposed to be secured, and many evils avoided, by a union of the states. I shall not deny that the supposition was well founded. But at that time those advantages and those evils were magnified to a far greater size, than either would be if the question were at this moment to be settled.
         The northern states can subsist as a nation, a republic, without any connection with the southern. It cannot be contested, that if the southern states were possessed of the same political ideas, a union would be still more desirable than a separation. But when it becomes a serious question, whether we shall give up our government, or part with the states south of the Potomac, no man north of that river, whose heart is not thoroughly democratic, can hesitate what decision to make.
         I shall in the future papers consider some of the great events which will lead to a separation of the United States; show the importance of retaining their present constitution, even at the expense of a separation; endeavour to prove the impossibility of a union for any long period in future, both from the moral and political habits of the citizens of the southern states; and finally examine carefully to see whether we have not already approached to the era when they must be divided.

It is impossible for a man of intelligence and candour to read these extracts without feeling a decided conviction that the writer and his friends were determined to use all their endeavours to dissolve the union, and endanger civil war and all its horrors, in order to promote their personal views. This affords a complete clue to all the seditious proceedings that have occurred since that period — the unceasing efforts to excite the public mind to that feverish state of discord, jealousy, and exasperation, which was necessary to prepare it for convulsion. The parties interested would, on the stage of a separate confederacy, perform the brilliant parts of kings and princes, generals, and generalissimos — whereas on the grand stage of a general union, embracing all the states, they are obliged to sustain characters of perhaps a second or third rate. "Better to rule in hell, than obey in heaven."
         The unholy spirit that inspired the writer of the above extracts has been, from that hour to the present, incessantly employed to excite hostility between the different sections of the union. To such horrible lengths has this spirit been carried, that many paragraphs have occasionally appeared in the Boston papers, intended, and well calculated to excite the negroes of the southern states to rise and massacre their masters. This will undoubtedly appear incredible to the reader. It is nevertheless sacredly true. It is a species of turpitude and baseness, of which the world has produced few examples.
         Boston having acted upon and inflamed Massachusetts, that state acted upon and put in movement the rest of the eastern states, more particularly Connecticut and Rhode Island. New Hampshire and Vermont are but partially infected with the turbulent and jacobinical spirit that predominates in Massachusetts.
         It thus happens, that a people proverbially orderly, quiet, sober, and rational, were actually so highly excited as to be ripe for revolution, and ready to overturn the whole system of social order. A conspiracy was formed, which, as I have stated, and as cannot be too often repeated, promised fair to produce a convulsion — a dissolution of the union — and a civil war, unless the seduced people of that section of the union could be recovered from the fatal delusion they laboured under, and restored to their reason.
         I shall very briefly, and without much attention to order or regularity, consider these positions. They are not entitled to a serious refutation, but merely as they have been made the instruments of producing so much mischief.
         Before I touch upon the commercial points, I shall offer a few observations on the high and exalted pretensions of the people of the eastern states, to superior morality and religion over the rest of the union. There has not been, it is true, quite so much parade with these exclusive claims as on the subject of commerce. Perhaps the reason is that there was no political purpose to be answered by them. But that the people of that section of the union are in general thoroughly persuaded that they very far excel the rest of the nation in both religion and morals, no man who has been conversant with them can deny. This folly of self-righteousness, of exalting ourselves above others, is to general all over the world; but nowhere more prevalent, or to greater extent, than in the eastern states. To pretend to institute a comparison between the religion and morals of the people of Boston and those of Philadelphia, New York, or Baltimore, would be considered as extravagant and absurd as a comparison of the most licentious votary of Venus with a spotless vestal.
         The character of the eastern states for morality has been various at various times. Not long since, it was at a very low ebb indeed. It is within the memory of those over whose chin no razor has ever mowed a harvest, that Yankee and sharper were regarded as nearly synonymous. And this was not among the low and liberal, the base and vulgar. It pervaded all ranks of society. In the middle and southern states, traders were universally very much on their guard against "Yankee tricks," when dealing with those of the eastern.
         They now arrogate to themselves (and, for party purposes, their claims are sometimes admitted by their political friends here) to be, as I have stated, a superior order to their fellow-citizens. They look down upon the people of the southern states with as much contempt, and with the same foundation, as did the Pharisee of old on the despised Publican.
         Both of those views are grossly erroneous. They never, as a people, merited the opprobrium under which they formerly laboured. There were, it is true, many worthless miscreants among them, who, on their migration to the other states, were guilty of base tricks, which, by an illiberality disgraceful to our species, but nevertheless very common, were charged to the account of the entire people of the eastern states, and brought them under a most undeserved odium.
         I feel a pride and pleasure in doing justice to the yeomanry of the eastern states. They will not suffer on a comparison with the same class of men in any part of the world. They are upright, sober, orderly and regular — shrewd, intelligent, and well informed — and I believe there is not a greater degree of genuine native urbanity among the yeomanry of any country under the canopy of Heaven. And it is lamentable and unaccountable how they have allowed themselves to be so egregiously duped as they have been. I have known them long; and my respect for them has gradually increased in proportion as my knowledge of them has extended. But I shall never admit any exclusive or supereminent claim to the virtues which I know they possess. And I have no hesitation in averring, that although Boston, or Hartford, or Newhaven, may exhibit rather more appearance of religion and piety than New York, or Philadelphia, or Baltimore, yet the latter cities possess as much of the reality. It would astonish and frighten many of the pious people in New York or Philadelphia to be informed — but they may nevertheless rely upon the information as indubitably true — that a large portion of the clergy in the town of Boston are absolute Unitarians; and scout the idea of the divinity of Jesus Christ as completely and explicitly as ever Dr. Priestly did. This is a digression. I did not intend to introduce it. But since it is here, let it remain. And let me add, that the present principal of Harvard College was known to be a Unitarian when he was elected. This fact establishes the very great extent and prevalence of the doctrine.