To James Madison from Mathew Carey, 30 October 1814
From Mathew Carey
Philada. Oct 30. 1814
Sir
With a heavy heart, I take up my pen to close a correspondence of nearly six years, which has cost me great uneasiness, & utterly disappointed all my expectations.
Invested with the executive magistracy of the nation, it was your imperious & incumbent duty to watch over its safety, to guard it from danger, and to counteract any plots formed for its destruction.
A conspiracy of the most treasonable kind has been maturing for years, whose object is the destruction of our form of government. This in its consequences will involve us in all the horrors of civil war, anarchy, & probably terminate in despotism, after the ruin of as fair a form of government as ever the mind of man conceived, & the fairest man ever enjoyed.
The conspirators openly and fearlessly avowed their projects. They were proclaimed in the papers with ostentatious parade, as if to defy your impotence.1
No notice was taken of them. No attempt was made to ward off the stroke. You regarded the whole with calm & philosophical tranquility, although every day brought the catastrophe nearer, & with more unerring certainty. It was impossible to arouse you to a sense of the gaping vortex to which the nation was hastening with rapid strides.
The enemies of the government, seduced & impelled forward by the agents & emissaries of England, were organizing themselves in every quarter for the work of destruction. The friends of the government were three or four-fold more numerous. But they had no bond of union. They were & are a mere desultory mob. They wanted nothing but organization to secure an easy & bloodless triumph.
Having been early, and deeply, & unalterably impressed from personal observation with a thorough sense of the extent of the perdition that menaced us, I submitted to you a plain, simple, efficacious, unexpensive, & perfectly practicable plan of salvation. To insure its success, it only required a strong recommendation from you to three or four influential men in New England.
For years I begged, prayed, intreated, urged, supplicated & implored you, to give it a trial. I exhausted all the powers of my mind, & all the force of the language, to impress you with a conviction of its necessity & its advantages. But you remained inflexible. As well might I have attempted to arrest the torrent of the Niagara as to prevail upon you.
If I could persuade myself to believe in the truth of the maxim Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat,2 I should suppose this as strong a case as ever existed. For nothing short of miracle could have prevented you from using such obvious & infalable means—more especially as in no possible event could they have produced disadvantage.
Had these means been employed we should have escaped war & all its horrors; for England’s reliance on our divisions induced her to persevere in her iniquitous system. Or if we had war, we should have a portion, if not the whole of New England, with the government, instead of a solid phalanx hanging on the skirts of the government, and aiding the enemy.
The die is now cast. The union will not last a year. Rapine, and desolation, and slaughter will lay every thing waste. Murder will prowl through our streets, & the gutters will run with blood. And our blessed Country will for ages be the sport & victim of the profligate powers of Europe.
All this you might have readily prevented—almost without an effort—without stirring out of your palace—& without expending a single dollar.
I wd. not for worlds have such a burden on the shoulders of Your obt. hble servt.
Mathew Carey
P.S. It is barely possible that such societies might even at this late day, avert our perdition. I enclose a constitution.3 It is worth a trial.
RC and enclosure (DLC). RC enclosed in Carey to JM, 16 Nov. 1814. For enclosure, see n. 3.
1. For examples of the newspaper articles to which Carey referred, see 5:161 n. 2, 6:192 n. 1, 331 n. 2. He may also have had in mind publications such as Northern Grievances, Set Forth in a Letter to James Madison. By a North American (New York, 1814; 32370), a sixteen-page pamphlet distinguished not only by its open declaration of New England’s intent to secede from the union rather than submit to the measures of JM’s administration but also the intensity of its vitriolic attack on the president. Among other charges and epithets, the anonymous author accused JM of corruption in office, declared him a paragon of “southern effeminacy,” and asserted that his diplomatic dealings consisted of “frivolous chicane and disgraceful subterfuge.”
2. Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat: Whom God would destroy, he first makes mad. This widely quoted adage was traced to a fragment of Euripides but not without dispute. Twentieth-century scholarship gives it no classical, medieval, or early modern attribution (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D. … [3 vols.; Boston, 1807; 12184], 3:291; R. C. Jebb, ed. and trans., Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments; With Critical Notes, Commentary, and Translation in English Prose [7 vols.; Cambridge, England, 1883–1896], 3:119–20, 255–56; American Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. 1 [1888]: 54, 58–59; Author 8 [1898]: 321; Paul Gerhard Schmidt and Hans Walther, eds., Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis medii ac recentioris aevi, nova series: Lateinische Sprichwörter und Sentenzen des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit in alphabetischer Anordnung, Neue Reihe [3 vols.; Göttingen, 1982–86], 3:428).
3. The enclosed constitution of a Washington Union Society (4 pp.; in Carey’s hand), opened with a quotation from George Washington’s Farewell Address urging U.S. citizens to preserve national unity. Following a description of the disastrous consequences of disunion, the three initial articles of the agreement pledged members of the society to sustain the union of the states, work to defeat its internal enemies, and cooperate with others of like intent. Two additional articles stated that the officers of the society would include a committee of correspondence, which was to encourage the formation of additional union societies, to “investigate & expose to public abhorrence the various plans” for disunion, and to promote the “inestimable advantages” of republican government. At the bottom of the last page JM wrote: “Transmitted by one who wishes to be nameless.”