LITMIR.BIZ

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of Federalist rule. Returning to the themes of Connecticut Republicanism, Bishop identified Federalists as the latest incarnation of the “friends of order”—the few who attempted to rule the many and suppress the message of human equality, from the days of Jesus Christ to the time of Jefferson. The “friends of order” maintained political and economic inequality by force but especially by ideology: by “enslaving the minds of men.” Connecticut Federalists pursued this object by controlling the press, through localist paternal power, and especially through the union of church and state. But their time had finally come, for “the American and French revolutions were doubtless intended to improve the moral and political condition of man by redeeming the people from the tyranny of the friends of order. All our victories, all our defeats have been so many pledges for the eventual triumph of the rights of man.” In Bishop’s eyes, Jeffersonian Republicanism was an anti-elitist political movement that would liberate New Englanders from Federalist authority.⁵⁸

      “Slavery” as a political metaphor appeared throughout Bishop’s speech, in attacks on the power wielded by the “friends of order.” A preface to the published version of the speech, however, indicated that Bishop was specifically thinking of southern slavery when considering the predicament of New England Republicans. These men were “white slaves,” he claimed, who had it far worse than their southern counterparts:

      When a Southern slave breaks his fetters of bondage and declares for liberty, a hue and cry is raised, the daring culprit is apprehended and death is his portion. When a Northern slave declares for the emancipation of himself and his white brethren, all the masters are in an uproar, the pursuit is close, all means are fair and the daring wretch is doomed to all the vengeance of his oppressors.

      But a Southern slave has only one master; a northern one has many, yea, he has a master to every power and faculty, to every thought and opinion on every subject. It is not necessary to the character of a slave that he have a chain about his leg, or a rope about his neck. Invisible slavery is more dreadful, extensive and intolerable than visible slavery, because in the first case the masters will often deny its existence.

      Like Leland, Bishop did not attempt to ignore slavery in the South. Instead he incorporated slavery into a political vision that emphasized the oppression of northern white men. In doing so, he reconciled his liberation with slaveholder power, through a self-aggrandizing celebration of New England freedom. “THE REIGN OF TERROR is no more,” Bishop told his Wallingford audience, “and we are allowed, on this festive day, to render thanks for our emancipation…. Slaves in every part of the world are bursting their chains and proving that ‘man in his soul abhors tyranny.’”⁵⁹ Toasts offered at the Wallingford celebration and elsewhere echoed Bishop’s salute to emancipation from tyranny. “Republican Printers,” said the Wallingford Republicans: “of all men the most hated and persecuted, because of all men the most dangerous to Tyrants.” In Torringford, Connecticut, Jeffersonians toasted “The people of the United States: May the despotic chains from which they are emancipated, teach them to form into a phalanx impenetrable to the shafts of monarchical or aristocratical delusion.”⁶⁰ Republicans would defend their liberated minds.

      But in many respects, these episodes of emancipation best revealed the compromises that Jeffersonians made with slavery and slaveholder power. While they continued to represent their cause in terms of egalitarian universalism, the Republican political alliance caused such principles to founder, as black slaves and white democrats met different fates in the Jeffersonian United States. In Virginia, when slaves attempted to burst their chains during Gabriel’s Rebellion in August of 1800, they were met by state violence, as the masters maintained their power by killing slaves who abhorred their condition. In Connecticut a few months later, such conflicting details disappeared in the grandiosity of Bishop’s rhetoric and its narrow focus on northern white men. Whereas cosmopolitan radicalism in the 1790s caused Bishop to turn outward, including slavery under a broad critique of unjust power, Jeffersonian politics invited a turning inward, as distant oppression became a metaphor for the self. Emphasizing their bondage in Federalist Connecticut, Bishop and his Republican comrades came to uneasy terms with slavery in Jeffersonian America.

      New England Republicans accommodated the institutional power of slavery in a similar way, by insisting on their own relative oppression. Discussing the three-fifths clause in 1803, Bishop again returned to the language of white slavery: “The Southern States modestly claimed a representation only on 3 fifths of their black slaves, but the northern states insisted on estimating the whole number of their white slaves.” A year prior, he had lamented “the condition of tens of thousands of our brethren, who have no more voice in our councils than the black slaves in the Indies; men of full age and capacity, industrious, intelligent, useful members of society, who happened not to have property enough to entitle them to a vote.” In response to Federalist attacks on the institutional power of slavery in the Jeffersonian coalition, Bishop pointed to the political slavery of northern whites, suffering under property qualifications for the franchise. Such comparisons may have been intended to prove Federalists hypocrites, but the metaphorical substitution of white bondsman for black also obscured the political power of Jeffersonian slaveholders. The coercive minority of southern masters became lost in the midst of Republican clamoring for emancipation and democracy.⁶¹

      Leland and Bishop were not alone in thinking themselves enslaved by Federalism. The Independent Chronicle, the leading Republican paper in New England, likewise substituted northern Jeffersonian for southern slave, albeit in a much more mundane way. Like the National Aegis, the Chronicle parried Federalist criticism of the three-fifths clause, Virginia slaveholders, and Jefferson’s personal relationship to mastery and despotism. It pointed to Jefferson’s antislavery principles, on record in the Notes on the State of Virginia, and observed that the Virginia House of Burgesses had opposed slave importation (while conveniently overlooking the racist passages in the Notes and Virginia’s self-interest in curtailing the international trade). As to the three-fifths clause, the Chronicle insisted, like the National Aegis, that it was an essential part of the Constitution, a compromise Massachusetts had always supported. Moreover, the Chronicle argued, Virginians did not in fact derive additional political power from their slave population. Because of the large state-small state bargain, Virginia actually sacrificed federal representation in the interest of Union. Returning to charges that Jefferson was elected by the three-fifths clause, the Chronicle claimed the truly “subject” votes in the election of 1800 were those of Massachusetts, since the Federalist legislature had refused to allow the people to determine the electoral vote.⁶²

      In other words, the Massachusetts Republicans were the real slaves, to Federalists who controlled their votes, just as Virginian slaveholders, presumably, controlled the votes of their bondsmen. The logic here was far more convoluted than in Bishop and Leland’s comparisons, since the three-fifths clause did not deny anyone the right to vote—it simply gave additional power to slaveholders. But the Chronicle was undeterred, exclaiming in a later piece, “Let the Centinel then say that Mr. Jefferson has been chosen by slaves! If the true republicans of the United States are slaves, what is the other party?” Regardless of Federalist efforts, the paper continued, “the friends of Mr. Jefferson are not yet slaves; and under a merciful and protecting Deity, are not likely to become so.” The article likely referred to complaints in the Columbian Centinel, similar to those in the New-England Palladium, that Jefferson’s election depended on the three-fifths clause. As the Centinel put it in December 1800, “the wise and good of other countries … will regret that any policy shall impose on the United States a Chief Magistrate elected by the influence of Negro slaves.” In response, the Chronicle simply substituted northern Republicans as the referent for “slaves,” and turned Federalist criticism of the South into slander of Jeffersonian New England. Then the paper righteously protested this Federalist abuse. As sophistry, this may not inspire, but unconsciously, such a substitution expressed the essence of the Jeffersonian coalition. Jefferson’s friends in the North became the true slaves, a people fighting for freedom from oppression by aristocrats, religious zealots, nativist prejudice, and Anglophiles, while southern slaveholders became iconic leaders of northerners fighting for political and social equality.⁶³

      Abraham Bishop

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