LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

on display, then by ship to Baltimore, and finally by wagon to Washington, where he delivered the cheese to the president on January 1, 1802. Jefferson called the cheese “an ebullition of the passion of republicanism in a state where it has been under heavy persecution.” On the day of its delivery, he cemented his ties to New England Baptists by writing a letter to the Danbury Association in Connecticut, where he employed his now famous metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state,” lending his charisma to the dissenters’ fight for religious disestablishment.⁵² Federalists in Washington were far less fond of Leland’s cheese. Manasseh Cutler, with a flourish of disdain, referred to it as “this monument of human weakness and folly.” He was even less impressed by Leland’s preaching abilities when the “Mammoth Priest” gave a sermon in the House of Representatives a few days later. William Plumer, the New Hampshire senator, had the chance to sample the cheese two years later while dining with Jefferson, and remarked simply that it “is very far from being good.” Samuel Taggart of Massachusetts was served some of the cheese a week before Plumer and described it as “wretched enough.” Similarly arch comments echoed in Washington throughout the cheese’s career.⁵³

      The people of Cheshire had inscribed on the cheese the motto that Benjamin Franklin had proposed for the seal of the United States, a succinct expression of their evangelical political radicalism: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” In an address from his townsmen read by Leland at the presentation of the cheese, religion and politics were similarly combined. “We believe the supreme Ruler of the Universe,” said Leland, “has raised up a Jefferson at this critical day, to defend Republicanism and to baffle the arts of Aristocracy.” Leland then went on to note that “The Cheese was produced by the personal labor of Freeborn Farmers, with the voluntary and cheerful aid of their wives and daughters, without the assistance of a single slave.” As the historian Jeffrey Pasley has suggested, we may today be surprised by such language, “given the modern view of Jefferson as an avatar of slavery.”⁵⁴ But one might have expected contemporaries to be somewhat surprised at the language too, since, avatar or not, Jefferson surely partook of the fruits of slave labor. In Washington, Jefferson preferred to employ “white servants” rather than his own slaves, and his chef was a Frenchman, Honoré Julien. Yet he did have both slaves and free blacks in his presidential household, including Edith Fossett, whom he brought to Washington to be trained under Julien. She became Jefferson’s cook at Monticello after his retirement, and she remained enslaved until his death, at which point she was sold along with her children to settle Jefferson’s many debts. Fortunately, her husband, freed by Jefferson’s will, later managed to purchase Edith and the rest of their family.⁵⁵ While Jefferson did not have much compunction about the political status of those who produced his food, one might have expected Leland to be aware of the irony in offering a glorified free-labor cheese to a slaveholder, since his own writings demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the everyday despotism inherent in slaveholding. What is surprising when one reads his address is not that we moderns view Jefferson and the southern Republicans as so closely bound to slavery, but that Leland did not.

      Leland did not overlook Jefferson’s attachment to slavery simply because it served his interest to do so. Instead of discarding his criticism of slavery as he embraced Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican cause, Leland harnessed it to a critique of New England Federalism and religious oppression. He truly believed that Jefferson had a providential role in American history, and that an aristocracy, in the form of the Federalist party, controlled the government of Massachusetts and oppressed Republicans and evangelicals alike. To Leland, the subjection of conscience in New England was not only analogous but somehow equivalent to the subjection of African American slaves. In a Fourth of July oration at Cheshire in 1802, Leland lamented that “a great number of thousands of people, within the United States, are still held in lasting slavery,” forced to “drag the galling chain of vassalage under their despotic masters.” He then made a remarkable transition from the South to New England: “As personal slavery exists chiefly in the southern states,” he explained, “so religious slavery abounds exclusively in three or four of the New England states. Here the rights of conscience are made articles of merchandise, and men, who differ in opinion from the majority of a town, have to buy them.” These were patently different forms of oppression, but in essence, Leland argued, “tyranny is always the same.” He closed with a prayer that both tyrannies would be abolished together, in some far off “halcyon day … when the chains of personal slavery, and the manacles of religious despotism may be broken asunder, and freedom and religion pervade the whole earth.”⁵⁶ In theory, Leland’s vision of universal freedom was both compelling and coherent. But in terms of the Jeffersonian alliance, it had some major problems: Leland relied on the Democratic-Republicans to bring religious liberty to New England, while southern Republicans relied on the same coalition to represent their interests, including the protection of slavery, at the national level. The institutional context of Jeffersonian democracy, in other words, made Leland’s “halcyon day” incredibly unlikely.

      In contrast, the ideological context of Jeffersonian democracy made such contradictory relationships between northern liberation and southern slavery not only possible but necessary. Slavery as metaphor allowed Leland to substitute his evangelical brethren for southern bondspersons, which in turn displaced slavery as fact. Thus a slaveholder like Jefferson could become the folk hero of a band of anti-aristocratic Baptists who objected to despotism in all of its forms and took pride in their free labor cheese. Jefferson encouraged these identifications and substitutions through his patronage of men like Leland. Although he never imagined Leland as a social and intellectual equal, receiving a giant cheese required more than condescension. Jefferson gave Leland $200 for the cheese and, more importantly, welcomed him in Washington as a man with political standing. Leland, in turn, gave crucial substance to Jeffersonian ideology, in a way that Jefferson himself, a quintessential Virginia slaveholder, could never have done. Leland fought for the basic objectives of political liberty and reform at the heart of the Jeffersonian message. He lived the democratic life that Jefferson, at his best, envisioned himself defending. That Leland saw Jefferson as a providential hero leading a party of the oppressed, and not as a master leading a party of slaveholders, only solidified their ideological bonds. Leland’s celebration of Jefferson did far more than parry Federalist recriminations of the “Negro President.” It helped Leland and other northern Republicans reconcile hostility toward slavery with political ties to southern masters. Imagining Jefferson as an emancipator served obvious partisan ends, but it also helped Leland believe that his aspirations for freedom were untainted by slavery. The Cheshire Republicans could celebrate their free-labor cheese and dream of liberty without acknowledging their institutional dependence on southern bondage through the Jeffersonian coalition. The giant cheese eventually moldered away, but the alliance between northern freedom and southern slavery that Leland helped form lasted well into the antebellum period.

       The Rebellion of the White Slaves

      Abraham Bishop had defined a vanguard position in 1791, when he defended the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and attacked the racial cast of American politics. In many ways, he defined a similarly innovative position in 1801 when he called for a new antislavery movement in New England, led by “societies for the emancipation of white slaves.” In 1791, Bishop had denied that the American British revolutionaries had ever been enslaved, disputing the comparison between imperial rule and bondage. But in Jeffersonian Connecticut white Americans had become slaves, to an insidious group of masters among the Federalist party.

      This argument crystallized at a daylong celebration of Jefferson’s inauguration in Wallingford, Connecticut, on March 11, 1801. Advertised as a “day of Thanksgiving” to celebrate Jefferson’s election, the Wallingford event brought together the many strands of Connecticut Republicanism and “an immense concourse of people” that included at least 1,000 Republicans (according to the Republican paper The American Mercury). In the morning, Gideon Granger read the Declaration of Independence and the Unitarian minister Stanley Griswold gave a sermon, after which the celebrants drank several toasts. In the evening, Abraham Bishop gave an oration at Wallingford’s North Meeting House, festooned for the occasion with “the names of Jefferson and Burr in large capitals over the door.” The night ended “with a brilliant exhibition of Fireworks.”⁵⁷

Скачать книгу