In one respect only did New England enter the war. She sup plied men and ships to the navy and was especially active in fitting out privateers. A threatened secession movement in was headed off by the wiser.Federalist leaders like George Cabot and Hamilton, but by 1814 the sentiment had got beyond the control of the moderates and resulted in the convention at Hart ford, which demanded an amendment of the Constitution to pro tect New England interests. The termination of the war left this movement high and dry; it brought its sponsors—the Federalist Party and New England generally—into disrepute among the na tionalistically-minded rising generation of statesmen from the South and West. The interference with her commerce wrought by the embargo together with the interruption of the usual flow of manufactured merchandise from England and the Continent caused some New England capitalists to transfer their money from shipping to the new textile plants which had been introduced dur ing the last decade of the 18th century. At Beverly and Waltham in Massachusetts, at Pawtucket and Woonsocket in Rhode Island, the new spinning and weaving machines had been set up. Saved by the war from immediate competition of English textiles these factories gained a start. The termination of the war saw a great importation of English goods. Faced with ruin, the mill owners of New England joined with the infant woollen manufacturers of Pennsylvania to secure a protective tariff in 1816. As part of a general burst of nationalism the policy of protection and crea tion of a home market as advocated in Hamilton's famous report on manufactures was adopted. Increased rates were sought after the depression of 1819 and by 1824 New England politicians of all parties were faced by the presence of a new sectional issue. Manu facturing as a New England occupation grew steadily through the next generation bringing with it the social, economic and political problems of concentration of population and constant de mand for cheap labour and widening markets. In the same period, 1816-50, the rapid expansion of the agricultural regions of the South and West brought into the eastern markets the cheaper cotton as well as the cheaper food-stuffs. The former stimulated more textile activity—the latter drove the less well-situated farmers to abandon their farms.
Several of the shibboleths, such as "Manifest Destiny" which swept the national Government in the first half of the 19th cen tury left New England cold. Her own frontier, the northern and eastern regions of New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine were losing that character. The northern boundary, long subject to dispute even to the extent of an armed clash known as the Aroos took war of 1838, was finally determined by the Webster-Ash burton treaty in 1842. While hostile to Western expansion, and to the policy of cheap public lands which went with it, New Eng land had contributed mightily to people the new areas. Miss Lois K. Mathews's Expansion of New England admirably relates the direction, quantity and peculiar quality of the migration from the New England States. Through this transplantation of her popu lation to the new States of the old North-west and later to Iowa, Kansas and Oregon, New England continued to exert the peculiar influence of her Puritan traditions. In the great problem which
confronted the inhabitants of the great areas of the Mississippi valley and the Western plains—transportation—New England took little interest until railroad building came into the class of capitalistic enterprises. Her location excluded her from the corn petition in canal, highway and railroad building which engrossed the attention of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York. Yet New England had locally been a pioneer in railroad experi mentation. One of the first railroads in America was built in 1826 to carry granite blocks from the Quincy quarries to tide water. In the '4os short lines were built connecting Boston with Providence, Lowell, Portsmouth, Worcester, Springfield, New Haven and New York. In 185o Massachusetts ranked third to New York and Pennsylvania in railroad mileage.
The humanitarian movements of the '3os produced lively re sponse in New England. Not only were the social problems in cident to concentration of population in her mill-towns provoca tive of controversy over questions such as the length of a work ing day and conditions of labour, the right to strike and the asso ciation of workers, but the assembling of people within easy reach of such potent agencies for education and enlightenment as schools, colleges and lyceum lectures, had a stimulating effect on the popular interest in all sorts of questions. In this soil flour ished many new ideas—advocates of liberal movements in religion, like William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker and Horace Bush nell, crusaders for temperance like Neil Dow, who in Maine se cured the first prohibition law in the United States, or for abolition of slavery like William Lloyd Garrison, for public high schools like Horace Mann; the Concord group—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller gave New England an international reputation for "trah scendental philosophy"—and with Longfellow, Holmes and Lowell made this section the literary centre of America. The colleges and the academies that had survived the Revolution largely as sec tarian institutions or theological schools now took on more liberal aims and methods and sent their graduates all over the country. At Litchfield, Conn., the first real law school in America flourished, under the guidance of Chancellor Kent, and produced such men as John C. Calhoun. Harvard college, where the triumph of liberal ism over the more orthodox Puritan Party in Boston in the early 18th century had led to the founding of Yale by conservatives, carried its liberalism still further and in the 19th century, under the guidance of Unitarians, borrowed largely from the German universities, gradually widened its curriculum on an elective basis, developed graduate schools of law, medicine, arts and science. In Providence the Baptists had founded Brown; at Middletown, Conn., the Methodists established Wesleyan ; in the Connecticut valley arose Amherst ; in the Berkshires Williams college, and in Maine appeared Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby. In Vermont a State university was established through the benevolence of Ira Allen.