The same committee formally approved the governor’s course in declining to co-operate with the national government in expelling the enemy from Maine. The public excuse for the refusal was founded on the condition of the Treasury. In Federalist society the weightier motive was supposed to be the wish to leave on the national government the odium of failure to defend the State.[426] While Massachusetts sustained the Hartford Convention, and pressed to an issue the quarrel with the national government, Connecticut acted with equal zeal in the same sense. The governor, John Cotton Smith, was an old man, and neither his opinions nor his passions were extreme; but as far as concerned the Hartford Convention, his views differed little from those of Pickering and Lowell. He called a special session of the legislature for January 25, to act on the delegates’ report; and his speech at the opening of the session would have been taken for irony, had his moderation of character not been known.[427] “The temperate and magnanimous course proposed for our adoption cannot fail to allay the apprehensions which many have professed to entertain, and to enliven the hopes of all who cherish our national Union, and are disposed to place it on a solid and durable basis.” The legislature without delay approved the measures recommended by the convention, and appointed delegates to accompany those sent from Massachusetts to effect the proposed arrangement with the government at Washington. In later times the Hartford Convention was often and vigorously defended by writers whose works were friendly to the national government, and whose influence was popular.[428] The wisdom, loyalty, and patriotism of George Cabot and his associates became the theme of authors whose authority was above dispute. Nearly always the defence rested on the argument that popular opinion went beyond the convention’s report, and that the convention risked its credit by refusing to advise instant withdrawal from the Union.[429] This view was apparently correct. The efforts of the moderate Federalists to praise the moderation of the report, and the labored protests of the extremists against the possible suspicion that they objected to its moderation,[430] showed that the convention was then believed to have offered resistance to what Governor Smith stigmatized as “rash councils or precipitate measures.” The tone of the press and the elections bore out the belief that a popular majority would have supported an abrupt and violent course.