Crisis Years

Henry Gilpin.

The Crisis Years was a period in the history of the Confederation of North America between the Era of Harmonious Relations and the Rocky Mountain War. The period was characterized by various forms of social strife in the four major confederations of the C.N.A.: labor strife in the Northern Confederation, the collapse of Negro slavery in the Southern Confederation, an Indian uprising in Indiana, and a seperatist uprising in Quebec. The social strife led to the drafting of the Second Britannic Design at the 1842 Burgoyne Conference, transforming the C.N.A. into a unified state, and precipitating the outbreak of the Rocky Mountain War in 1845.

Panic of 1836

The Crisis Years were brought on by the economic dislocations following the Panic of 1836, when the collapse of Barings Bank in London caused a series of bank failures in New York City, beginning with the Peoples' Bank in March 1836. Other bank failures followed, notably the Manhattan Bank, which declared insolvency on 15 April. On 1 May 1836 Jacob Little closed down his office and fled to the United States of Mexico.

Franz Freund.

The banking crisis caused hundreds of firms in the N.C. to close in 1836, bringing a sharp increase in unemployement. This led to a sharp rise in the membership of the Grand Consolidated Union. Franz Freund of the Grand Consolidated created a labor-based political party, the Laborers' Alliance, which allied with the Conservative Party to contest the 1839 Northern Confederation Council elections. When the Liberal Party retained its majority in the N.C., the result was a massive general strike in the summer of 1840 that threatened to bring down the government of Governor Daniel Webster. Following Webster's assassination in September, Henry Gilpin of Pennsylvania became Governor. Gilpin suspended civil rights in the N.C., and used the N.C. army in coordination with private armies hired by manufacturers to attack the Grand Consolidated, crushing the N.C. labor movement and leading to the deaths of over 40,000 people, and serious injuries to 78,000 more. The 1842 elections led to a landslide victory by the Conservatives, and Gilpin was replaced by John Dix, who promised an administration of "healing and humanitarianism, in which the rights of all will be protected."

Winfield Scott.

In Indiana, Chief John Miller, a Christianized Osage leader who claimed to be both the Messiah and the ghost of Tecumseh, led an uprising in which he promised to create a new heaven on earth after the destruction of the white settlers. Thousands of Indians joined Miller's army, allowing him to take Michigan City on 21 July 1839 after a two-week siege, after which he killed some 5,000 of its population of half a million. News of the fall of Michigan City led Viceroy Sir Alexander Haven to call an emergency meeting of the Grand Council, which met in Burgoyne on 15 August. The Grand Council authorized the formation of a united North American army under the command of General Winfield Scott.

Scott led his army west from Burgoyne the following month, arriving at Michigan City on 18 October and entering the city the following day. Winfield's army was able to overrun Miller's army, then proceeded to slaughter them to the last man. Scott was seen as having avenged the deaths inflicted by Miller's men in Michigan City, and was hailed throughout the C.N.A. as a hero.

News of the fall of Michigan City to Chief Joseph Miller also reached Quebec in August, where the leader of the Patriotes, Louis Papineau, decided that the time had come to rise up against the C.N.A. Papineau assembled an army of 3,000 men in Mont Michel, which was joined by an additional 800 men from Nova Scotia. Papineau attacked Quebec City on 21 September, but Governor Henry Scott had been warned of his coming, and was able to ambush the Patriote force, crushing the uprising. Although Papineau was killed, the Patriotes remained a powerful force, and the authorities in Quebec remained fearful of future uprisings.

Willie Lloyd.

In the Southern Confederation, the Panic of 1836 brought about a fall in cotton sales, which led to a collapse in the price of slaves, from N.A. £150 for a prime field hand in the spring of 1835 to less than N.A. £19 after April 1838. Willie Lloyd of South Carolina responded to the collapse of the slave market by offering the Lloyd Bill in 1840, a plan for the compensated manumission of all the S.C.'s slaves. The Southern Confederation Council passed the Lloyd Bill in April 1840, and Sir Alexander Haven ratified it on 16 May. By the end of 1841, most of the slaves in the S.C. had been freed (or presumably emigrated with their owners to the Mexican state of Jefferson, though Sobel doesn't actually say so), and the rest were freed by law on 1 January 1842.

Burgoyne Conference

Sir Alexander Haven.

The dislocations suffered throughout the C.N.A. during the Panic led the leaders of the various Liberal parties to meet in a national convention at Concordia, North Carolina in July 1841 to seek a joint strategy for dealing with the situation. The delegates agreed to call for a national conference to revise the Britannic Design of 1781 to transform the C.N.A. into a unified state. The various Conservative parties met at their own convention in Brant, Indiana, and also endorsed a sweeping revision of the Design.

Sir Alexander Haven transmitted the appeals by the two conventions to the government of Sir Duncan Amory in London, who was able to gain approval in Parliament for the requested conference in January 1842. The result was a special meeting of the Grand Council in Burgoyne in June 1842, which drafted a series of amendments to the Design, known as the Second Britannic Design. Under the Second Design, the Grand Council was remade into a 150-member legislature chosen by popular vote. The Grand Council in turn would choose a chief executive known as the Governor-General, who in turn would appoint a Cabinet to formulate and carry out government policy.

In the 1843 Grand Council elections, the first held under the Second Design, the Unified Liberals won a 91-59 victory over the National Conservatives, and General Scott was elevated to the governor-generalship, with Gilpin as his Minister of War. Gilpin was eager for a war with the "anarchists and half-breeds of Mexico," and he began to pressure Scott for a surprise attack against the Mexican cities of Tampico and Jefferson City. As settlers and miners from the two nations began to come into conflict with each other in the disputed Broken Arrow region, Gilpin became more insistent, and by the summer of 1845 he had persuaded a majority of the Cabinet to ask for war against the U.S.M.

Sources

Sobel's sources for the Crisis Years are Fanny Lever's The Second Britannic Design (New York, 1850); Francois Papineau's My Father: His Cause Was Just (Mexico City, 1854); Gilpin's No Apologies Are In Order: My Term as Governor (New York, 1860); Freund's The Work of Three Decades (2 vols., New York, 1869); William Gibbs' The Gilpin Legacy (New York, 1889); Frank Stroud's "Calhoun in Defeat: The Lost Cause of '39" from Annals of the Southern Confederation vol. XXXVI, No. 5 (April, 1889); Lady Jane Hargrove's The Flaw in the Design: Suffering During the Crisis Years (London, 1899); Roscoe Symes' The End of the Slave Trade (Norfolk, 1904); William Cocke's John Dix: The Great Healer (New York, 1905) and Caesar in Broadcloth (New York, 1910); Colonel Harry Warner's The Michigan City Inquiry: Scott and the Nation (New York, 1906); Arthur Ruppert's Georgian Feudalism (New York, 1910); Arthur Watkins' The Baring Crisis of 1835 (London, 1910); Dickinson Letts' Origins of the Two Party System (New York, 1923); John Harnett's A History of Slavery in the Southern Confederation (London, 1935); William Reuss's The Origins of Unionism in the N.C. (New York, 1950); George Loring's The Right Man: Gilpin in Command (London, 1956); John Pritchard's William Lloyd: The Southern Emancipator (New York, 1956) and He Was First! The Governorship General of Winfield Scott (New York, 1960); John Reynolds' Background for Rebellion: Quebec, 1800-1838 (New York, 1956); Valentine Edwardson's The Burgoyne Conference of 1842 from the University of Canberra Studies in Political Science, vol. XXVI (Canberra, 1960); Esther Kronovet's New York in the Crisis Years: 1836-1837 (New York, 1960); Adolph Anderson's The Rise of the C.N.A. (London, 1967); Paul Brooks' Jacob Little and the Panic of 1836 (New York, 1967); H.C. Hartwick's Black Skin and Red Ink: Profits in the Slave Trade, 1820-1840 (New York, 1967); Francis James' Decision at Brant (Mexico City, 1967); Alex Prentiss' A More Perfect Union: The Concordia Accords (New York, 1967); Frank Cockrill's What Happened at Michigan City? (London, 1968); and editor Henry Murray's Gilpin and the Historians (New York, 1970).

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