LITMIR.BIZ

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ties to the New Haven elite in order to pursue the democratization of Connecticut—and power and fame as a Republican along the way. Chosen by the Phi Beta Kappa society at Yale to give its annual lecture in September 1800, Bishop wrote a blistering political indictment of Connecticut Federalism that closed with an exhortation to elect Thomas Jefferson president. When he gave the advance copy of the speech to the Phi Beta Kappa society, it decided at the last minute to revoke the invitation, immediately publicizing the decision in handbills that claimed the society was apolitical. Undeterred, Bishop gave the speech at the White Haven meetinghouse in New Haven, to a crowd estimated at 1,500 people. He opened by rejecting “literary” speeches, classical languages, and intellectual theorizing. Instead, Bishop, a Yale alumnus, allied himself with the anti-elitist intellectual culture of Republicans like John Leland. He would serve a “plain dish” full of his chosen topic, “THE EXTENT AND POWER OF POLITICAL DELUSION.”²⁹

      Thus began a relentless assault on Federalism in state and nation. Bishop attacked Alexander Hamilton’s funding system, Federalist naval expenditures, banks, excessive commercial wealth, the New England clergy, and the lack of democracy in Connecticut. The indictment was meant to inspire, not simply harangue. Bishop wanted ordinary people to think freely and seize political power for themselves. He wished them to be free of delusion—to be free of the various arts that the “wise, rich, and mighty men of the world” (dating back to Satan, the primeval deluder) used to manipulate and control “the laboring and subordinate people of the world.” Here he chose a theme that resonated with Republicans throughout New England. John Leland sought to defend freedom of conscience, while the Republican printer Samuel Morse told Ephraim Kirby in July of 1800 that he had been subject to “illiberal abuse … because I dare to think for myself.” As another Republican sympathizer Philo Murray put it in September 1801, describing the rise of Connecticut Republicanism, “People have begun to dare to think.” Autonomous thought was both the highest aim of individual subjects and the means—the very medium, as Jeffrey Pasley has shown in the case of Morse and other Republican printers—of political contestation. Jeffersonians like Bishop sought not simply to inform the state but to take it over. Mobilizing public opinion, they aimed to bring ordinary men to their senses, and then to the polls.³⁰

      Thus by the end of his address, Bishop turned to open electioneering, calling on Republicans to “be awake” on the upcoming Election Day, which was “more important than any day of your revolution. Now republicanism dies or lives forever.” A vote for Jefferson was a vote for “redemption” from the “great and little tyrants” who dominated men’s lives. As was true of Varnum, Bishop’s anti-aristocratic message, although focused on a male electorate in Connecticut, expanded to indict hierarchical forms of political power throughout the world. “Nearly the whole of Africa and a considerable part of Asia, are subject to the delusions of Europe,” Bishop told his audience. “Slaves in immense troops must sweat under a scorching sun to bear or follow the palanquin of a lordly master: slaves by ship loads must be dragged from their homes to serve imperious tyrants.” This passage remained general enough not to point a direct finger at the Republican slaveholders who were likewise stumping for Jefferson in the South, but it demonstrated that Bishop’s hatred of oppression, which had informed his defense of the slave rebels of Saint-Domingue in the early 1790s, retained a degree of universalism. The evils of Federalism were the evils of the deluders the world over, including the “imperious tyrants” who enslaved captive Africans.³¹

      Yet Republican thought moved in a parallel direction at the same time. Instead of extending outward, in a universalizing condemnation of illicit power, it began with slavery and moved inward, employing bondage as a metaphor to define the Republican condition in New England. As Bishop warned in 1800, Federalist measures threatened to “launch this country from liberty to slavery, from a republican to a monarchical government.” Writing a year later in response to Federalist criticism, Bishop declared self-righteously that he would no longer truckle to the Connecticut elite. “I am no slave to clergy or merchants,” he declared, before symbolically renouncing his Phi Beta Kappa membership. Henceforth, he would be a member of “the great community of unprivileged men, to whose emancipation from the tyranny of the ‘friends of order’ and from the arts of political delusion I shall always chearfully devote those talents, which were never made for literary societies.” Bishop’s renunciation came in an appendix to a pamphlet in which slavery served as the central metaphor for the experience of white male Jeffersonians in Connecticut. While Bishop meant to indict Federalist economic as well as political power, the “slavery” he felt most deeply was ideological. “If you wish to reduce any man or number of men to complete slavery, the surest mode is first to enslave the mind,” he wrote in an 1802 pamphlet protesting religious establishment in Connecticut. Republicans sought what Bishop promised his New Haven audience that September evening in 1800: freedom of the self; freedom to think and choose based on one’s own conscience, unencumbered by delusion or deference. Free minds would make free men.³²

      Liberation on those terms was a delicate act, however, and the slavery metaphor, an inevitable hyperbole, pointed to the liabilities of Republican ideology when it came to confronting actual chattel slavery in the American South and in the emerging Jeffersonian coalition. In seeking freedom from Federalist oppression, Bishop and his fellow partisans elevated slaveholders as their champions, transforming Jefferson in particular into a secular messiah of liberty. Their quest for autonomy became the very currency of political alliance with the slaveholding South. Federalists would not let them forget that fact, as they spent the early 1800s denouncing the slaveholding foundations of the Jeffersonian coalition. This forced Republicans to come to some sort of terms with the fact that their freedom had become intertwined with the distant oppression of others. In this respect, as in others, Abraham Bishop was in the vanguard of American political modernity.³³

       Federalist Antislavery and Republican Nationalism

      While some New England Federalists had openly opposed slavery in the 1790s, the Jeffersonian “revolution” of 1800 encouraged them to take a much stronger sectional stance. After 1800, southern Federalism quickly declined. Meanwhile, Republicans made inroads in the Federalist heartland of New England, gaining congressional seats in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the election of 1800. In the Federalist citadel of Connecticut, Republicans could not win a congressional seat until after the War of 1812, but they made limited gains at the state level before then, winning 40 percent of the seats in the state House of Representatives in 1804. In the face of this rising Republican tide, Federalists grew tired of hearing themselves denounced as tyrants and compared to slaveholders. Many shared the sentiments of Delaware Federalist James Bayard, who found it hard to understand how he and his colleagues could be indicted as aristocrats. That charge, he told Congress in 1798, was far more applicable to southern Republicans, who had “been born in a land of slavery, whose cradles had been rocked by slaves, and who had been habituated from infancy to trample on the rights of man.” New England Federalists felt similarly, and spent the months after the election of 1800 decrying the slaveholding roots of Republican electoral success, thus ensuring that local Republicans could not simply ignore slavery. Federalist criticism forced them to reckon with two obvious facts that contradicted their emerging democratic vision: the oppression of slaves and the excessive power wielded by slaveholders.³⁴

      Federalist antislavery escalated in earnest after Jefferson’s election in 1800, particularly in New England. Multiple papers complained that Jefferson never won the votes of a majority of free men in America, but instead owed his election to the three-fifths clause of the Constitution. As the New-England Palladium explained, the clause “operates exclusively in favour of the southern division of the Union,” to the disadvantage of the North; worse yet, it was institutionalized hypocrisy, since the purported “men of the people” in the Republican party would “ride into the TEMPLE OF LIBERTY, upon the shoulders of slaves.”³⁵ New England Federalists labeled Jefferson a “Negro President,” because he obtained political support from the subject population of the South, in a transparent attempt to mobilize northern support by appealing to antislavery sentiment. In 1802, some papers went farther, and published claims by James Thompson Callender and others that Jefferson slept with his female slave, Sally Hemings. This led to choice remarks throughout the Federalist press, such as Thomas Green Fessenden’s

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