Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

“physical” and “moral” kind—required “a reciprocal spirit of conciliation and compromise, in the formation of a general government.” To trifle with that spirit, they claimed, might send the whole national edifice crashing to the ground. Similar comments followed from the legislatures of South Carolina, Kentucky, and Maryland. The national chorus defined the three-fifths clause as the necessary price of Union. According to the Chronicle, it was a price worth paying.⁴³

      Such arguments aggravated John Quincy Adams to no end. In his mind, the three-fifths clause was unjust, and anyone who advocated against the Ely amendment on grounds of “patriotism” or “union” prostrated themselves with the “fear of giving offense by the exercise of an indisputable right.” To feel such fears was to act the slave; to instill them was to employ the “language of a negro driver on a plantation, to the wretches who tremble under his lash.” Adams doubted that such cowardly motives could truly exist “in the heart of a New England farmer.”⁴⁴ In the midst of this bombast, he had a point: New England Jeffersonians consistently attacked Federalist elitism and hierarchy, while claiming the right and power of ordinary citizens to make political decisions in their own interest and on their own terms. But when it came to the three-fifths clause they advocated either outright suppression of political debate or, at best, leaving the issue to their southern colleagues to resolve. Such arguments effectively mirrored the southern response to antislavery argument at the national level. When Joseph Bradley Varnum and other Republicans spoke on behalf of African American petitioners and against the Fugitive Slave Act in 1797, southern slaveholders responded by demanding that the subject be rejected altogether. “This is a kind of property on which the House has no power to legislate,” explained South Carolina’s William Loughton Smith; “it was not a proper subject for Legislative attention.”⁴⁵ Acceding to such autocratic claims should have galled any true democrat, implied John Quincy Adams, who was distressed as much by self-censorship among New England Republicans as by southern Republican dependence on the three-fifths clause.

      But the political landscape was even more convoluted than he made it out to be. While New England Jeffersonians celebrated democracy and suppressed the problem of slavery, Federalists, who were quick to indict the political inequality created by the three-fifths clause, were also eager to scorn the degradations of democracy. In addition to denouncing the “Negro President,” the New England Palladium instructed its readers about the dangers of “universal suffrage.” In March of 1801, “Farmer Johnson” proposed that the vote be restricted to men “who hold a good character and a reasonable share of property,” lest “the bad men” (who were generally men without property) elect “bad candidates” to office. “Democracy,” the paper explained that October, “says to the destitute mob, protect the rights of man, which are two, the one vengeance and the other pillage.” In the fall of 1802, the Palladium insisted that a political system based on the “uncontrouled power of the multitude,” would lead to “the slavery of all, even of that of the blind multitude.” Such openly antidemocratic professions only justified the Republican image of Federalists as unrepentant aristocrats.⁴⁶

      To Jefferson and his supporters, Federalist disdain for democracy simply reflected the perversity of New England elites, and a number of historians have remained squarely in the Jeffersonian tradition. Yet many Federalists developed a complex interpretation of American politics, one rooted in a transatlantic, conservative critique of the violent potential of unchecked popular sovereignty. This conservatism had its repressive side, as was obvious from the Alien and Sedition laws or the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries’s Rebellion in 1790s Pennsylvania; on the whole, however, Federalist “tyranny” was mild compared to either the Jacobin Terror or British political repression, on brutal display in Ireland in 1798. It was likewise far less violent than Virginia’s response to Gabriel’s failed slave rebellion in Richmond in the summer of 1800. In the end, Federalist conservatism was not driven, as Jeffersonians argued, by the simple desire to control. Many Federalists were skeptical of the human character and the human capacity for good, and they consequently favored an organic social hierarchy, tied to traditional sources of authority and order. Connecticut’s Noah Webster, for example, believed that only old men should vote and hold office because the majority of men were “ignorant, or what is worse, governed by prejudices & authority.” In contrast, Connecticut Republican Samuel Morse believed that “the human mind is capable of improvement, the human heart susceptible of much amendment, and human happiness of great extension.” To Federalists, such optimism for human progress was foolhardy at best. Republican claims that democracy and reason would liberate mankind were contradicted by the violence of the French Revolution and the slaveholding South. Yet Federalists rarely made these points in isolation from far more simplistic antidemocratic arguments, in which they derided the capacity of ordinary people to govern. This did not aid their electoral prospects and it limited the impact of their criticism of Republican hypocrisy on the slavery question. Confronted with Federalist outrage, Jeffersonians consistently refocused political debate on the purportedly true source of inequality in America: New England elitism.⁴⁷

      Doing so, as in the debate over the Ely Amendment, sidelined Federalist challenges to slavery. This had obvious practical benefits for Republicans. The ideological virtues of “union” and the Republican cause were frequently supplemented by the virtues of patronage and political favors. Levi Lincoln, for example, along with prominent Republicans like Gideon Granger, Henry Dearborn, William Eustis, and Elbridge Gerry, joined the Jefferson and Madison administrations in Washington; Republicans like Abraham Bishop and Ephraim Kirby were rewarded with federal patronage. As Jeffrey Pasley has argued, less genteel Republicans, like the Connecticut printers Charles Holt and Samuel Morse, did not fare as well when it came to political rewards.⁴⁸ Democratization had obvious institutional limits tied to class and status, even among white male Republicans. Yet on the whole, national success helped sustain the Republican movement locally. New England Jeffersonians gained power at home after 1800 by employing the political capital of the nationally dominant Republican party. Jeffersonian nationalism helped Republicans remain competitive in Massachusetts from Jefferson’s election until the War of 1812: They held the governorship outright in four of thirteen elections, and garnered a majority of the Massachusetts delegation to the House of Representatives in two elections before the war. Republicans fared well in Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire as well. They had a harder road in Connecticut, but after the War of 1812 they eventually defeated the reigning Federalists.⁴⁹ The alliance between men like Lincoln, John Leland, and Abraham Bishop and men like Jefferson and Madison was thus in many ways pragmatic. And as long as the power of Federalist aristocrats over their own lives seemed more ominous to northern Jeffersonians than the power of southern slaveholders over their slaves, joining the Virginians at the national level made eminent sense. Raising the issue of slavery would only destabilize an effective political coalition, so the subject was best left in silence.

       The Big Cheese

      Yet Jeffersonian political behavior constantly exceeded instrumental explanation, as the now often told story of John Leland and the “Mammoth Cheese” indicates. For many ordinary people, Jeffersonian politics offered a new understanding of one’s self and national political culture, rather than direct institutional benefits in the form of patronage. John Leland’s hometown of Cheshire, Massachusetts, settled by Rhode Island Baptists, was apparently overwhelmed with Republican enthusiasm. The town voted 181-0 for Jeffersonian electors in the presidential election of 1804.⁵⁰ In the election 1800, the Massachusetts legislature, controlled by Federalists, cast all of the state’s electoral votes for John Adams rather than allow the presidential contest to be fought out in separate electoral districts. Cheshire Republicans managed to find a way to demonstrate their loyalty to Jefferson nonetheless. Likely spurred by Leland, the town decided to commemorate Jefferson’s rise to the presidency by producing a giant cheese. Requiring a cheese vat six feet in diameter and the milk of 900 cows, the cheese had preposterous proportions: the finished product weighed in at 1,235 pounds. Even before it was completed, the so-called “mammoth cheese” became a topic of national discussion. Federalists mocked the proposed endeavor, while Republican papers from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania reported on its production and anticipated its arrival at Washington in early 1802.⁵¹

      Leland did not