Slavery and the Democratic Conscience - Padraig Riley Early American Studies

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of liberty, holds at this moment hundreds of fellow-beings in a state of abject bondage.”13 Indictments of American hypocrisy on the slavery question were not confined to conservative critics of the American and French Revolutions. Transatlantic republicans likewise attacked slavery and pointed to the gap between American political rhetoric, which celebrated freedom, and the American political economy, which depended on bondage. But in the context of the 1790s, egalitarian attacks on slavery became entangled in partisan conflict and the emergence of Jeffersonian democracy. Thus Duane sought to turn his antislavery condemnation of Washington to partisan ends. Any advocate of democracy opposed to aristocratic rule, he implied, should oppose slavery and George Washington, and support the emerging Democratic-Republican coalition.

       Antislavery Republicans

      Duane was hardly alone in combining opposition to Federalism with opposition to slavery. The more genteel Republican Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant, had become a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1793, and supported a resolution in the Pennsylvania legislature to abolish slavery in the state, as the institution was “inconsistent with every principle of humanity, justice, and right.” Gallatin briefly served as a U.S. senator in the winter of 1793–1794, until Federalists ejected him on the grounds that he had not been a citizen of the United States the required nine years. In 1795, he returned to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives, where he argued on behalf of antislavery causes. He presented a Quaker antislavery petition to the House in November 1797, and fought southern Federalists to have it read and sent to committee; he likewise defended, albeit in a more circumspect way, the right of free blacks from Philadelphia to petition the House in 1800.14

      In defense of the Quaker petitioners, Gallatin told southern members of Congress that “all men are free when they set their foot within the State” (of Pennsylvania), the only exception being slaves of southern congressmen. That was a considerable overstatement, since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed masters to recapture enslaved people who escaped into Pennsylvania, while state law permitted slaveholders to reside for up to six months in Pennsylvania, slaves in tow. Congressmen, as Gallatin noted, were immune even from the six-month limit, a clear sign of Pennsylvania’s willingness to accommodate the slaveholders of the American federal government. On the other hand, Gallatin, one of the more important Republicans in the House, had no qualms about uttering such openly antislavery sentiments in Congress. His southern Federalist colleagues took him seriously and were fairly incensed by his idealization of an antislavery Pennsylvania. In their eyes, at least, northern Republican hostility to slavery was far from superficial.15

      Gallatin’s colleague John Swanwick, a Republican merchant from Philadelphia, also supported the November 1797 Quaker petition. Back in December 1796, Swanwick had argued for federal intervention to prevent kidnapping of free African Americans. He provoked a debate with South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith, in the course of which Swanwick claimed that free African Americans “ought to be protected in their freedom, not only by the State Legislatures but by the General Government.” In January 1797, Swanwick presented a petition from North Carolina freemen (at the time, residents of Philadelphia), protesting the abrogation of their manumissions in North Carolina and the racist operation of the fugitive slave law. Like Republican Joseph Bradley Varnum of Massachusetts, Swanwick believed free African Americans had the right to petition the government, for “if men were aggrieved, and conceive they have the claim to attention, petitioning was their sacred right, and that right should never suffer innovation.” For most southerners, granting legitimacy to black petitioners was dangerous in and of itself, since it implied some recognition of African American political standing. In the case of the North Carolina freemen, accepting the petition also implied that Congress might investigate southern slavery. The status of slaves from North Carolina, southerners argued, was the proper concern of North Carolina, not the federal government. Northern petitioners and their congressional advocates threatened to instigate a struggle over the control of slavery, one which southern slaveholders wanted by all means to suppress.16

      They consistently failed to do so. Slaveholders successfully blocked northern antislavery proposals, but they could not control the legislative discussion of slavery. When they attempted to suppress discussion, they often demonstrated an antidemocratic authority that further agitated antislavery northerners. In response to Gallatin’s Quaker petition in November 1797, John Rutledge, Jr., complained that Philadelphia Quakers “attempt to seduce the servants of gentlemen travelling to the seat of Government” and that their petition attempted to incite a slave rebellion. Instead of referring the petition to a committee, he was “for its laying on the table, or under the table, that they might not only have done with the business for to-day, but finally.” Rutledge, in other words, agreed with fellow South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith, who told Congress in January 1797 that slavery was “a kind of property on which the House has no power to legislate.” Some historians interpret such claims to exclusive authority over slavery, the indispensable axiom of slaveholder political thought, as arguments for the state-level regulation of the peculiar institution. But many northern Republicans in Congress saw them differently, as attempts to resist democratic governance of an institution dependent on coercive power. Such transparent claims to power in national politics only supported Duane’s portrayal of slaveholders as irredeemable enemies of liberty.17

      Congressional conflict would eventually tear at the sectional bonds of the Jeffersonian coalition, but in the early years of Republican enthusiasm many northerners managed to maintain antislavery principles alongside support for Thomas Jefferson, who was no less a master than George Washington. In Congress, this was made possible in part by the fact that southern Federalists were the most voluble defenders of slavery. They were likewise exceedingly hostile to immigrant Republicans like Gallatin. In March 1798, Gallatin, along with Joseph Bradley Varnum, supported Massachusetts Federalist George Thatcher’s plan to restrict expansion of slavery in the new Mississippi Territory. It was very much a minority position, as only twelve members of the House ended up backing Thatcher’s visionary plan. Gallatin, in other words, much like Duane, was not afraid to speak out against slavery, and he likely felt an extra motivation when attacking arch-Federalists like the South Carolinians John Rutledge, Jr., and Robert Goodloe Harper. An opponent of Thatcher’s motion in March 1798, Harper would soon be denouncing immigrants like Gallatin in debates over the Federalist Naturalization Act of 1798. In May 1798, Harper told Congress that citizenship should be confined to those born in the United States, and “that none but persons born in this country should be permitted to take a part in the Government.”18

      In contrast to men like Rutledge and Harper, it was hard for Thomas Jefferson not to appear liberal-minded. Nor was it difficult for northern Republicans, into the early 1800s, to maintain antislavery arguments alongside devotion to Jefferson. James Sloan, a Quaker who lived across the Delaware River from Philadelphia in Gloucester County, New Jersey, was a defiant Republican and Jefferson adulator: “Instead of a haughty Monarchist,” he told fellow Republicans in 1801, after Jefferson’s election, “we are now blest with a meek and amiable Democrat in the presidential chair.” He was likewise a confirmed opponent of slavery: he was a member of a local abolition society, and after arriving in Congress in 1803, he fought consistently against slavery at the federal level, at one point proposing the emancipation of all the slaves in Washington, D.C.19 Sloan was often joined in his antislavery attacks by two long-serving Pennsylvania representatives, William Findley and John Smilie. All three men embodied the democratizing impulse of Jeffersonian politics. Findley, in many ways the unspoken hero of the work of historian Gordon Wood, immigrated from Ireland in 1763 and began his American life as a weaver. Smilie had immigrated from Ireland in 1741, almost starving to death en route. He survived to become a prosperous farmer, and then spent a long career representing western Pennsylvania in Congress. These men owed their prominence, and their sense of political belonging, to the success of Jeffersonian democracy at the state and national levels.20

      That success was subject to constant Federalist rebuke, as the case of James Sloan indicates. He often marketed his goods (including, presumably, hogs and cattle) in Philadelphia, leading Federalists to lampoon him as a common tradesman unfit for political power. In 1806, a Federalist paper mocked “Jemmy Sloan, who has been so often seen with his apron, his steel, and his cleaver,

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