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      North of Jefferson

       The Problem

      Historians and the wider public continue to be fascinated by Thomas Jefferson, who seems to embody a fundamental American contradiction. An advocate of republican government, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and given at times to ideological musings that bordered on the anarchic, Jefferson also owned hundreds of slaves, had a long-term affair with his bondwoman Sally Hemings, and, like most slaveholders, considered the birth of slave children “an addition to capital.”¹ Driven by hagiography, criticism, and, more often than not, the passion engendered by his many contradictions, scholars continue to study Jefferson’s life and voluminous correspondence, hoping to discover some fundamental truth about the American political order, about the vexed relationship between liberty, power, and race that runs throughout the history of the United States.

      But for all the attention devoted to Thomas Jefferson, there has been surprisingly less analysis of the problem of slavery within the Democratic-Republican party, the political coalition that elected Jefferson president of the United States in 1800. Jeffersonian democracy, far more so than Jefferson’s personality, shaped the long-term relationship between freedom and slavery in American history. As a political movement, it brought together northerners and southerners, gentry elites and men on the rise, evangelicals and freethinkers, cosmopolitans and nationalists, and, most crucially of all, democrats and slaveholders. The Democratic-Republican coalition united the vanguard of democratization in the northern states and the most adamant representatives of southern mastery. Men who believed the United States should be a beacon of democracy for a world enslaved by aristocratic power became the political allies of men who believed the United States was obliged to protect a master’s right to enslave. This diverse composition was torn at times by sectional and ideological conflict, but it consistently found unity in American nationalism and the political aspirations of white men. And that unity proved essential to the preservation of slavery in a democratizing polity.

      This book studies a diverse set of white men who helped build Jeffersonian democracy in the North from the late 1790s to the early 1820s. As a group, these northerners present a very different intellectual problem from that posed by a slaveholder who believed in universal human freedom yet could not free his slaves. They force us to think about how slavery was tolerated not by the minority of masters in the early American electorate, but by the majority of non-slaveholders, whose relationships to slavery were often far less direct. To trace these relationships is to examine the pervasiveness of slavery, a complex institution that affected masters, non-slaveholders, and slaves alike. Masters and slaves understood slavery as governed first and foremost by individual control and domination; such power was necessary to maintain property rights in slaves. But the masters themselves were governed by a national polity in which non-slaveholders predominated. Slavery thus required some degree of toleration, if not consent, by non-slaveholders. Beyond the individualized dominion of masters, slavery required individual

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