In response to the question
> Does your New England separatist movement include the Essex Junto?
> I am intrigued by the suggestion that this group was funded
> by England to get New England back into the royal fold.

Yes.
  I’m not aware of any British money lining Essex pockets, and I doubt that it did. If you read the correspondence of Timothy Pickering and others associated with Essex County and Salem, Mass. in Henry Adams, Documents Relating to New-England Federalism, 1800-1815 (Boston, 1905) you will probably conclude, as I did (and as I suspect the British recognized), that the High Federalists' enthusiasm for all things British and horror over the French Revolution didn’t need any help from bribes -- indeed would have been harmed by the suggestion.  Pickering and his circle were capable of self-righteousness to the point of deceit – as in his conduct as John Adams’s Sec of State – but probably not susceptible to something as low and offensive as a bribe.
  The British were, of course, capable of using bribery as an instrument of foreign policy – and attempted to do so with people around Napoleon Bonaparte (which is why he negotiated with Livingston and Monroe through the squeaky-clean Barbe-Marbois rather than Talleyrand).
  Like the Richmond Junto of the antebellum period, the Essex Junto was just a network of like-minded men who saw themselves as representing “the good and the just and the wise” (who we recognize as High Federalists).  At their center until his death in 1807 was Fisher Ames.
  On this subject, one simply MUST read David Hackett Fischer, “The Myth of the Essex Junto,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 21 (1964): 191-235 before saying anything more. Its available on line if you have access to JSTOR - otherwise WMQ is in all serious libraries.
  Fischer’s article is so influential, in fact, that some scholars avoid the term Essex Junto entirely – which is why one of my footnotes reads: “Fisher Ames described himself ‘as a one of the Essex Junto’ in a letter to Jeremiah Smith, February 16, 1801; William B. Allen, ed., Works of Fisher Ames (rev. ed., Indianapolis, 1983), 1408.”

In addition to Ames’s works (just cited), four useful things are:

Elisha P. Douglass, “Fisher Ames, Spokesman for New England Federalism,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959): 693-715

Winfred E. A. Bernhard, Fisher Ames: Federalist and Statesman, 1758-1808 (Chapel Hill, 1965)

Stephen E. Patterson, “The Roots of Massachusetts Federalism: Conservative Politics and Political Culture before 1787,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty (Charlottesville, 1981), 38-39.

Charles Warren, ed., Jacobin and Junto, or Early American Politics as Viewed in the Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 1758-1822 (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), 162.

Jon Kukla


--
Jon Kukla ....................... Executive Vice-President
1250 Red Hill Road ........ Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation
Brookneal, VA 24528 .... www.redhill.org .... 434 376-2044
Home 434 376-4172 ...... Office email: [log in to unmask]
--

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html