In the winter of 1814 and 1815, New England Federalists met in secret at Hartford, Connecticut, angered by trade embargoes, an unpopular war, and the threat of a federal draft. This episode explains how their timing turned a list of demands into the end of America’s first political party.

We trace the economic damage of the Embargo Act, the crisis of the War of 1812, and how moderates like Harrison Gray Otis kept radical secessionists out of the convention. Then we break down the proposed amendments targeting the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Virginia dynasty, the commissioners who arrived in Washington amid news of New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent, and how the convention was later mythologized.

• Why New England’s maritime economy suffered under the Embargo Act
• How the burning of Washington and the draft proposal fueled talk of secession
• Why the delegates met in secret and left behind such sparse records
• The constitutional amendments the convention proposed and what they targeted
• How Southern secessionists later invoked a distorted version of Hartford