Slavery and the Democratic Conscience - Padraig Riley Early American Studies

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and Burr to the presidency,” he told his Wallingford audience in 1801. In terms of the wider Republican coalition, this meant that the very men who, as a class, forestalled emancipation in the South, freed the northern slaves from the shackles of aristocratic tyranny. Bishop claimed forthrightly, “if the white slaves should rise in mass, they would be too much for their masters.” The image was meant to provoke, but Bishop was not joking: in his mind, Jeffersonian democracy was a slave rebellion.64

      These comparisons and substitutions seem irrational and exaggerated in retrospect, and to most Federalists, they appeared so at the time. But most New England Republicans were true believers, despite constant Federalist harping that the Republican emancipators were in fact slaveholding lords. Northern Republicans were perhaps misguided but they were not insincere. Men like Bishop and Leland believed ardently in the Republican cause, and they also believed that slavery was wrong. In contrast to most Republican commentary on the three-fifths clause, they did not try to suppress discussion of slavery or minimize southern bondage; nor did they condone the institution by appeals to race. But in substituting northern political inequality for southern slavery, they helped create a complex political alliance that in turn made it difficult to achieve antislavery objectives in national politics. For some Republicans, mere political calculation made this knot difficult to unravel, since there was no political organization more devoted to ridding New England of Federalism than Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. But for others, ideological and emotional bonds were decisive: if one really had felt liberated by the rise of Jeffersonian democracy—hardly an implausible emotion in early nineteenth century Massachusetts or Connecticut—then the temptation to magnify one’s own oppression in order to come to terms with slavery in the South must have been all the more powerful.

      New England Jeffersonians, like Republicans throughout the North, helped provide American slaveholders, a distinct minority in a democratizing polity, what they needed most: tacit majority consent. They did so not by linking arms in racial fellowship, but rather by transforming themselves into slaves, and slaveholders into their emancipators. They won their freedom from Federalism, as Jefferson had promised Elbridge Gerry, but freedom on those terms proved hard to escape.

      CHAPTER 2

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      Philadelphia, Crossroads of Democracy

      Writing in Philadelphia’s Aurora General Advertiser in 1804, Thomas Paine defined the political novelty of Jeffersonian America. According to Paine, popular sovereignty and political equality made the United States home to a new type of man. Once they left Europe and its “hereditary potentates” behind, men began to consider “government and public affairs as part of their own concern,” and thereby “found themselves in possession of a new character, the character of sovereignty.”1 Alongside the freedom to govern one’s self, however, there was a very different type of sovereignty in America, as Paine knew well—the sovereignty of the master over the slave. Slaveholding power did not inspire all men to see government as “part of their own concern,” as it was inherently antidemocratic. But in Jeffersonian political culture, these two forms of sovereignty were closely bound to each other, as the autonomy of new men helped sustain a nation-state that perpetuated bondage.

      More than any other location in the early republic, Philadelphia expressed the conflicting strands of early national democracy. Tensions between North and South, Europe and the United States, black and white, cosmopolitanism and nationalism were woven throughout the city in a complex and combustible mix. Following the path of Tom Paine, English and Irish radicals flocked to the United States in the 1790s in response to British political repression, only to encounter the nativist and anti-Jacobin sentiments of the Federalist party. In Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, such men acquired national significance in the partisan struggles that created and sustained Jeffersonian democracy. These migrants gave an international cast to the rise of American democracy, since they connected their fight against Federalism to the French Revolution, the struggle for Irish autonomy, and a global ideological war against aristocracy. They also fought, by their very presence, to achieve Paine’s vision of America as an “asylum for liberty.” Northern Jeffersonians, immigrant and native alike, were the strongest supporters of liberalizing citizenship laws in the early nation. They embodied, in their lives and experiences, some of the most egalitarian ambitions of the Jeffersonian coalition.

      In the midst of such cosmopolitan ardor, the state of Pennsylvania also had an important practical role in the Jeffersonian coalition. It was by far the most crucial ally to the South and the Republican cause. Jefferson wrote multiple letters about Pennsylvania in the lead-up to the election of 1800, explaining to confidantes that Pennsylvania “nearly holds the balance between the North & South”; that through “harmonizing by it’s public authorities with those to the South,” Pennsylvania “would command respect to the Federal constitution.”2 The 1799 election of Republican Thomas McKean as governor of Pennsylvania was seen as a bellwether for Republican success in the presidential contest the following year. As it turned out, Pennsylvania almost did not cast an electoral ballot in the election of 1800, since Federalists maintained enough power in the state senate to block a popular vote of the state’s electors. But Jefferson was right about Pennsylvania’s role in the Republican coalition. A relatively united South allied to one of the larger northern states, New York or Pennsylvania, could control national politics (or, in Jefferson’s more subtle rendering, “command respect to the Federal constitution”). New York joined southern Republicans in 1800 to bring Jefferson to the presidency, but it quickly proved unreliable, in part because of factional competition among the state’s Republicans, and in part because New Yorkers quickly moved to challenge Virginia for predominance in the federal government. After the election of 1800, by contrast, Pennsylvania proved to be the most reliable northern state in the Democratic-Republican column: it supported every Democratic-Republican presidential candidate and then every Democratic presidential candidate until the election of 1840. Other than Martin Van Buren in 1836, all these candidates were southern slaveholders. This record of capable support earned the state its moniker, “the keystone in the democratic arch,” a label that, for some southerners, reflected the state’s tractability as much as its position in the Union. Thus Henry Clay, in the midst of the Missouri Crisis, asked that the state remember itself as “the unambitious Pennsylvania, the keystone in the federal arch,” and cease stoking sectional discord.3 From Clay’s perspective, among Pennsylvania’s chief virtues was its ability to keep quiet on the problem of slavery.

      Yet when it came to political conflict over slavery, Pennsylvania had not exactly been unambitious. In 1780, the state instituted gradual emancipation, and Jeffersonian Philadelphia was home to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the most powerful antislavery group in the early republic, as well as a significant and politically active free black community. Southerners were well aware of Pennsylvania’s antislavery tendencies, since the first major congressional crisis over slavery was sparked by antislavery petitions Pennsylvanians sent to the House. Southerners who came to Philadelphia in the 1790s, when the city served as the national capital, were wary of antislavery and free black residents; George Washington made sure to keep his slaves shuttling back and forth to Mount Vernon when he served as president, anxious that they would seek their freedom under Pennsylvania law. This reflected a common problem for slaveholders who traveled to or lived in proximity to Pennsylvania. Despite obtaining a fugitive slave law in 1793 that aided masters in recapturing their human property, slaveholders from Maryland and Virginia complained that their slaves frequently escaped to Pennsylvania, and they soon petitioned the federal government for stricter fugitive laws. Even though Pennsylvania accommodated sojourning slaveholders in state law, masters worried that Pennsylvanians, white as well as black, might refuse to tolerate the force and authority necessary to maintain power over their slaves.4

      From the perspective of African Americans like Philadelphia’s James Forten, however, freedom in the white-dominated society of early national Pennsylvania was deeply compromised. Most Pennsylvania whites were not willing to accept African Americans as social and political equals, barring them informally from the polls, juries, militia companies, and political celebrations. Gradual emancipation itself kept blacks born before 1780 enslaved

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