LITMIR.BIZ

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children of the same primeval parents, but dispersed over the face of the earth by the accumulation of intermediate generations.” African slaves were not alienated from the American body politic, but rather equal members of the human family. Their slavery was as morally revolting as the slavery of one’s own kin.³⁵

      Many northern Jeffersonians, like Duane, understood slavery as an institution that embodied unjust power. They perceived the authority and wealth of a man like George Washington from an ideological distance and deemed slavery wrong because slaveholders behaved like aristocrats. Although Branagan made similar arguments, he constantly asked his readers to think of slavery from the perspective of the slave and thus to understand slaveholder power in terms of the suffering it caused. This shift in perspective enabled Branagan to interrogate how non-slaveholders participated in such suffering. Whereas Duane’s attack on Washington emphasized his and like-minded democrats’ distance from slavery, Branagan emphasized his and his readers’ proximity to the institution and their complicity in sustaining it. For example, like other early antislavery radicals, he opposed the use of sugar, because it was tainted by slavery. He implored his readers (especially those “desirous of vindicating the propriety of using the produce of slavery”) to put themselves,

      for one moment, in the same condition in which the poor unhappy slaves now are; and view, from the West-Indies, the votaries of liberty and religion, in America, drinking out of their jovial bowls, or China tea cups, the produce of thy labour, thy sweat, and thy blood—and then, and not till then, let thy conscience answer, is it right or wrong? is it just or unjust? is it pleasing or not to that impartial holy Being who is no respecter of persons?³⁶

      The passage illuminates the importance of empathy in Branagan’s work, and the critical role of conscience as the seat of ethical judgment—the intersection in the mind between one’s own life, the lives of the oppressed, and abstract principles of equality and justice.

      Branagan put his vision of human solidarity into practice during his time in Philadelphia, as he formed relationships with elite African Americans in the city, who helped support his literary efforts. Readers of the Preliminary Essay were asked to contribute funds for Avenia by way of Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and James Forten, three of the most prominent black men in Philadelphia; Allen had paid for the printing of Branagan’s first work, perhaps believing Branagan an ally in the antislavery cause. Yet when Branagan spoke directly to white northerners, he spurned Allen’s generosity by endorsing racial exclusion in Pennsylvania. In his Serious Remonstrances … to the Citizens of the Northern States, also published in 1805, Branagan set out to explain the dangers of slavery to the North. He indicted the abusive power of the masters over their slaves, and their institutional power under the three-fifths clause of the Constitution. But he also contended that the northern states had to end slavery because the institution foisted free and runaway blacks onto them—or rather, into them, as their very “bowels” were filled with “three hundred thousand well informed and aspiring Negroes.” The metaphor indicated Branagan’s convoluted thought: “bowels” in this case referred to either the stomach or simply the interior of the body; the incorporation of “Negroes” promised internal explosion. But in the early nineteenth century, “bowels” also referred to the seat of sympathy, or sympathy itself. As Branagan would ask in one of his later essays, “Can we be so unreasonable as to suppose, that God will hear the prayers of the person who shutteth up his bowels of compassion against his brother?”³⁷ Yet Branagan had trouble maintaining the two main senses of “bowels” alongside each other. Pennsylvania was beset by an internal enemy, and Branagan, who had befriended slaves in Antigua and glorified Africans in Avenia, now argued “that the Northern States would have flourished far more, if there was not a negro in the Union.”³⁸ He turned to a series of racist phobias to explain why these free and “aspiring Negroes” were a danger to northern whites: black men might be elected to Congress (or even the presidency); they would marry white women; they would sexually violate young white girls; they would compete with whites for jobs. The result would be the creation of a mongrel nation, filled with degraded interracial children. The solution was removal of all African Americans, free as well as slave, to a colony somewhere in the new Louisiana Territory, where blacks could rule themselves—as well as, Branagan added, in a faint nod to his earlier arguments for human solidarity, any whites who chose to remove with them.³⁹

      How to reconcile the two Branagans? One was an idiosyncratic antislavery radical; the other, in many ways, was in the vanguard of northern racism. One Branagan argued for human equality and formed ties to men like James Forten; the other claimed that free black men were merely “up-start gentlemen” on the lookout for white wives. Such men contributed nothing to the United States; their race and their history of enslavement, not their standing or character, determined whether they could belong to the American polity.⁴⁰

      In the work of historian Gary Nash, Branagan reflects the rise of racism in Pennsylvania. Throughout the early national period, many whites who had once opposed slavery embraced racial exclusion. In Philadelphia, this played out in the most practical of ways, as whites forcibly excluded blacks from July Fourth celebrations in the city, enacting the racial limits of their vision of democracy. In 1813, a Jeffersonian Republican named Jacob Mitchell proposed legislation in the Pennsylvania state legislature that would both bar all black in-migration and compel all current black residents to carry a certificate proving their free status. Philadelphia petitioners also demanded that in case of certain crimes, black men and women should be indentured for a term of years to compensate their victims. James Forten fought to keep Mitchell’s proposal from becoming law, appealing to white Pennsylvanians to honor the universalism of the founding principles of the United States and their own state, and protect equality before the law for all citizens, black and white. Mitchell’s bill did not pass, but in many ways the tide was turning against Forten. In the early 1820s, Philadelphia Federalist Samuel Breck was liberal enough to meet Forten in the street and shake his hand (“knowing his respectability,” said Breck, though he mistook his name); Forten informed Breck that he had brought fifteen of his white journeymen to the polls to vote for Breck in a recent congressional election. Yet Forten himself did not vote, as Breck noted that black citizens “never presume to approach the hustings” at election time, since they were kept from the polls—as well as juries and militia musters—by “custom, prejudice or design.” These informal practices foreshadowed later attempts to formally exclude African Americans from the franchise and define full political citizenship as the exclusive prerogative of white men.⁴¹

      Thomas Branagan experienced this democratic culture in formation, and did not appear to question it: in his mind, embracing democracy in Philadelphia entailed embracing racism. He intended Serious Remonstrances to be a popular work, written for the “the honest farmer and industrious mechanic”; the essay was filled with denunciations of the idle rich in the North and the slaveholding elite in the South. He adopted a Paineite vision of the United States, but one now deeply modified by race: “America,” he believed, “was appropriated by the Lord of the universe to be an asylum for the oppressed, the injured sons of Europe.” Maintaining that vision required colonization of free blacks, lest the “injured sons of Europe,” on arrival in the United States, be compelled “to associate with negroes, take them for companions, and what is much worse, be thrown out of work and precluded from getting employ to keep vacancies for blacks.”⁴² In other words, American citizenship was meant for white men.

      Historians of whiteness have argued that white supremacy enabled immigrants in the antebellum period, especially the Irish, to separate themselves from slaves and free blacks and claim belonging as Americans in the face of nativist xenophobia. White supremacy also helped secure the consent of nonslaveholders to the coercive power that masters wielded over enslaved people.⁴³ Focusing primarily on Jacksonian democracy, accounts of whiteness have underscored the prevalence of race and racial exclusion in American political culture. But such accounts do not fully capture the political and ideological transactions that led democratic radicals like William Duane and Thomas Branagan to embrace slaveholders as political allies in the early national period. Transnational republicans arriving in the United States found that they had to “associate,” not only with black men and women, but with slaveholders, who were a dominant presence in the early Republican coalition.

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