Not only did New England advance secession from the Union at 1814’s Hartford Convention, but the sharp Yankees found that trading with the enemy was a highly profitable venture.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com
The Yankee Rebels of 1815
Diary Entry: January 9, 1864
“A remarkable parallel is found between the law proposed in our [Confederate] Congress to prevent trade with the enemy and one enacted by the United States Congress in 1815 to stop the Yankees from trading with the British — a business in which New England was largely and constantly engaged. Judge [John A.] Campbell tells me he knew intimately an old gentleman, who lived at that time in the same house with Amos Lawrence and who narrated to him particularly how that . . . Yankee and his brother brought vast quantities of goods from Canada to Lake Champlain in enormous trains of sleighs.
The country was a wilderness and there was small risk of detection, except by those [Yankees] who sympathized with the trade. At the same time, Yankee rebels were carrying supplies to Wellington in Spain under licenses from the British Admiral on the North Atlantic station.
(Inside the Confederate Government, The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean, LSU Press, 1993, pp. 131-132)