The Federal grip upon Connecticut, one of the last strongholds of that party, was weakening. Preceding the deflection of the Episcopalians in Connecticut, there had been throughout New England a strong Federal opposition to the national government and its commands during the War of 1812. Such conduct had shattered party prestige, and when its opposition culminated in the Hartford Convention of 1814, it wrote its own death-warrant. The Republicans, on the contrary, had dropped local questions of constitutional reform and religious liberty, preferring to bend all their energies to the support of the general government. When as a national party they humbled England and brought the war to a victorious close, the contrast of their loyalty to state and national interests steadily drew the popular favor. In the era of good feeling and prosperity that followed, the great national political parties dissolved somewhat and crystallized anew. In Connecticut a similar change took place in local politics. In the years immediately following the war, the Democratic-Republicans, the majority of the dissenters, and the dissatisfied among the Federalists, formed different coalitions that, under the general name of Toleration, [a] opposed the Standing Order. In 1816 the agitation for constitutional reform was revived, and after three years resulted in the overthrow of the Federalists and the triumph of a peaceful revolution whereby religious liberty was assured. The conduct of the Federal party, both within and without Connecticut from 1808 to 1815, was quite as much the real cause of their downfall in the state as that coalition between clergy and lawyers described by Dr. Beecher as causing the breakdown of party machinery and its ultimate ruin. Glancing somewhat hastily at some of the most far-reaching acts of the Federalists, we find first the Federal opposition to the embargo that from December 22, 1807, for over a year paralyzed New England commerce. In February, 1809, John Quincy Adams, who had recently resigned the Massachusetts senatorship because of his unpopular support of the embargo, informed President Jefferson that the measure could no longer be enforced. He assured the President that the New England Federalist leaders, privily encouraged by England, were preparing to break that section off from the union of the states if the embargo were not speedily repealed. This information, whether accurate or not, so influenced the President and his advisers that the Non-intercourse Act, applying only to France and England, replaced the embargo, whose repeal took effect from March 4, 1809. In the following December, Madison's administration (in the belief that France had withdrawn her hostile decrees) limited non-intercourse to England alone, after having vainly urged upon her a repeal of her Orders in Council. With the embargo lifted, New England commerce revived, and Connecticut seamen, Connecticut farmers, [b] Connecticut merchants,