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to “deem it no disgrace with slaves to mend thy breed / nor let the wench’s smutty face deter thee from thy deed.”³⁶

      The Federalist treatment of “Black Sal” appealed to racial prejudice and demonstrated a lack of humanitarian concern for the enslaved. Many historians consider Federalist antislavery argument a utilitarian political tactic at best. Federalists were happy to editorialize in support of slavery if it suited their cause, warning southerners of the dangers of republicanism and “French” influence on their slaves during the election of 1800. Not all Federalists fit this pattern, however. Many leading Federalists supported manumission societies in the North, and Federalists took strong anti-southern positions in national level debates over slavery. Overall, Federalists were less inclined toward racism than Republicans, as they believed in an organically ordered society in which “respectable” African Americans could find a legitimate place, and in which deference, rather than race, governed social difference. Furthermore, after 1800, they had less and less reason to reach out to the South at all, because Republican success in the region was so far-reaching. In the last Federalist Congress (1799–1801), Federalists held 23 southern seats in the House; in the first Jeffersonian Congress, the 7th, which sat in 1801–1803, they held 12; in the 8th of 1803–1805 they held 9; and by the 9th of 1805–1807, there were only 4 southern Federalists remaining in the House. Their rapidly diminishing southern wing left the Federalists more or less free to denounce the “slaveholding Lords” as they saw fit.³⁷

      Republicans responded to Federalist criticism through self-aggrandizement and nationalism. In pamphlets, orations, and toasts, they emphasized their own oppression at the hands of New England elites, while building a Jeffersonian patriotism that cast Federalism as the bitter voice of regional resentment. In a June 1802 letter to Jefferson, Levi Lincoln described New England as “that difficult part of the country, of which I am an inhabitant.” As Lincoln and Jefferson tried to bring the region into a national Republican consensus, they traded malicious descriptions of Federalism back and forth: Jefferson was sure that extreme Federalists “wish to sap the republic by fraud, if they cannot destroy it by force, & to erect an English monarchy in its place”; Lincoln, who at first believed that moderate Federalists might join with Republicans in a spirit of patriotic accord, became convinced that Jefferson’s government would “never be countenanced” by Federalists and that Republicans “had to depend solely on themselves.” Jefferson promised Lincoln in October 1802 that he would “sink federalism into an abyss from which there will be no resurrection.” Their strategy was both institutional and ideological: Lincoln helped Jefferson make patronage decisions about New England federal offices, to ensure they went to sympathetic Republicans, and he helped found a newspaper in his hometown of Worcester to counteract the local Federalist press. The National Aegis debuted in December 1801, preceded by a prospectus that promised “to expose the fallacy of pretended federalism; to increase the energy of republican principle.” In conjunction with a series of letters from “A Farmer” that Lincoln began to publish in the fall of 1801, the Aegis worked to instill Republican nationalism throughout New England, by celebrating Jefferson and Republican values and marginalizing Federalist dissent as borderline treason.³⁸

      Republished as a pamphlet in 1802, Lincoln’s “Farmer’s letters” indicted Federalists for slandering the president and insulting “the majesty of the people.” He was particularly upset at their fusion of religion and politics, claiming that Federalists had “prostituted” their “altars” in order to foment dissent; their political attacks, he decided, were “virtually, treason.” The New-England Palladium, source of many of the charges against Jefferson and the three-fifths clause, was his principal target. He considered the “tenor of the obnoxious paper” a fair indication “of propensity to insurrection” and argued that even subscribers to the paper should be held accountable for the seditious material they consumed. Obsessed with the political abuses of New England Congregationalists, Lincoln did not answer in detail Federalist attacks on Virginia slavery, but he did turn to the subject once, with predictable tones of nationalist affront. Federalist ideologues who attempted to place “prejudices” between “the Farmer, and his readers, the northern and the southern States, Republicans and Republicans, the people and their administration,” said Lincoln, betrayed the legacy of the American Revolution, when the “inhabitants of the South, these Virginian slave holders, with a swell of magnanimity, run to the North, and hurried about our Capital, to rescue the endangered, or to perish in the attempt.”³⁹ Intended as a sarcastic rebuff of Federalist attacks on the three-fifths clause and Republican sincerity, Lincoln’s phrase also suggests the difficulty of celebrating national unity when it came to slavery: in order to defend those “Virginian slaveholders,” he had to name them as such, and exhort New Englanders to celebrate their salvation at the hands of southern masters.

      Jeffersonian nationalism was not always so awkward, but it was persistently defiant. The National Aegis likewise responded to charges that Jefferson was a sectional president, elected by the “votes” of black slaves, by invoking the virtues of national union. “The Monitor,” writing in March of 1802, argued that the underlying objective of Federalist sectionalism was “to divide the northern from the southern States, and on the ruins of such division, to erect a Monarchical Government.” And yet, he exclaimed, those monarchists “are the men who are reviling the present administration; comparing the President to a Nero, and calling him a Negro President! Was he not chosen under the same Constitution that Washington and Adams were, and does not the same base reflection rest on them as it does on Mr. Jefferson? Shameful disgrace to our national character !!!” The disgrace, to be clear, was not the three-fifths clause, but the fact that anyone would use the clause to criticize Jefferson. A month earlier, “A Traveler” made the same point. He acknowledged the popularity of Federalist charges that Jefferson was elected by the three-fifths clause, but, like Lincoln, decried such criticism as the suggestion of treason, as a betrayal of the Constitution and the nation. The unstated counterpart to that message was critical to Jeffersonian success in the North: being an American meant not talking about the political power of slavery.⁴⁰

      Federalists were hardly deterred. Though some members in Congress worried that they might be overwhelmed by a Republican tide and “go home without their heads,” Federalist dissidents only escalated their attacks on slavery and southern power.⁴¹ In 1804, they proposed a constitutional amendment abolishing the three-fifths clause, attempting to strike a blow at both the political power of the South and the political conscience of the North. Known as the Ely amendment, for its sponsor in the Massachusetts Senate, William Ely, the proposal gained little traction, but it once again placed Jeffersonians on the defensive, as Federalists exposed the institutional contradictions of Jeffersonian democracy. John Quincy Adams, one of two Federalist senators from Massachusetts, joined the attack as “Publius Valerius” in the fall of 1804, hoping to influence the presidential contest in Massachusetts. Relatively silent on slavery in the Senate, Adams was vociferous in print, denouncing the three-fifths clause for creating “a privileged order of slave-holding Lords, and a race of men degraded to a lower station, merely because they are not slave-holders.”⁴²

      Massachusetts Republicans responded with a familiar mixture of nationalism and accusation: In their minds, Ely’s proposal was yet another byproduct of disaffected, antidemocratic resentment by sectional elites. Barnabas Bidwell, soon to begin a short-lived national political career as a Jeffersonian, reminded the Massachusetts Senate of the once powerful bonds between his own state and Virginia. Those bonds were a staple trope for New England Republicans, who constantly retold the story of the Revolution, when Virginia came to the aid of Massachusetts. Rather than sons of the Revolution, Federalists were portrayed as its traitors. Virginians, in contrast, from the Revolution to the ascendancy of Jefferson, were the guarantors of New England freedom. As Elbridge Gerry explained to Thomas Jefferson in 1803, the three “antirepublican” states of New England “had great merit in establishing their independence but owe the preservation of it to the southern states.” Until the rise of “Federalism,” said the Independent Chronicle, “Massachusetts and Virginia were happily united and harmonious in their politics.” Throughout early 1805, the Chronicle reprinted criticisms of the Ely amendment from multiple state legislatures, as part of a campaign to paint Federalists as

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