Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

equal standing. Moreover, in the years after 1780, many African Americans who by rights should have become free were illegally sent to the southern states or kidnapped into slavery. Similar developments shaped the post-abolition world of New York and New Jersey as well, but not until 1799 and 1804 respectively, when those states passed gradual emancipation laws. In 1800, there were still more than 20,000 slaves in New York and 12,000 in New Jersey (compared to roughly 1,700 in Pennsylvania), and New Jersey masters frequently published runaway ads in Philadelphia papers. The unfinished state of mid-Atlantic abolition meant that antislavery efforts in Pennsylvania were constantly embattled in the local politics of race and emancipation.⁵

      Philadelphia was a crossroads where multiple strands of early national politics intersected, overlapped, and collided: antislavery agitation, immigrant radicalism, slaveholder power, and democracy. Looking beyond the local struggles over race and abolition in the city that have been well documented by historians, this chapter examines the Jeffersonian encounter with slavery in terms of national and transnational ideological struggles over democracy. The major focus throughout is on three Irish American insurgents—William Duane, Thomas Branagan, and John Binns—whose lives exemplify the crucial connections between slavery, nationalism, transatlantic democracy, and race in early national Philadelphia. Taking this wider perspective suggests a more complicated genealogy for the emergence of white male democracy in the North. As Jeffersonians sought a language to explain themselves and their bonds to southern power, they increasingly turned to race, which allowed them to redefine democracy in ways that made solidarity with slaveholders seem more legitimate. Whiteness, in other words, was as much about making cognitive and ideological allowances for the extreme authority of slaveholding, as it was a method for excluding free African Americans from equal political standing.⁶

      But race was always an unstable category, reflecting the complicated origins of the Jeffersonian alliance. The relationship between slaveholders and democrats was not built on open claims of white supremacy, but rather in a long political fight to democratize the American polity. Throughout the 1790s, cosmopolitan democrats sought to redefine American nationality and citizenship along egalitarian lines. Embracing the United States from the outside, such men had little respect for the claims of tradition or nativity. Yet they also confronted American slavery from an external perspective. It was not an institution that immigrants could take for granted, since they did not have historic ties to the American nation-state. Instead, they had to choose citizenship in the slaveholding republic of the United States. In doing so, immigrant radicals presented the conflict between cosmopolitan democracy and chattel slavery, a defining contradiction of the age of revolution, in one of its starkest forms. Ultimately, nation, race, and democracy fused in a complex and volatile arrangement in Pennsylvania, as immigrants claimed the slaveholding republic as their own, and as the world’s best hope for democratic government.

       George Washington, Slaveholding Tyrant

      The relationship between transatlantic radicalism and Pennsylvania democracy began during the American Revolution, as exemplified by Thomas Paine, who defined a cosmopolitan argument for American independence in Common Sense and supported the radically republican Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776.⁷ The career of William Duane, who became the most important Jeffersonian editor in the United States during the election of 1800, reflected the ongoing ties between anglophone radicalism and American democracy in the early national period. Born in the North American colonies to Irish emigrant parents in 1760, Duane spent his early years on the New York frontier, near Lake Champlain.⁸ He returned to Ireland with his mother in 1771, then moved to England in the early 1780s, and then, in 1787, to Calcutta, where he edited two newspapers, the Bengal Journal and the World. By 1794, his support for the French Revolution and disgruntled officers in the army of the East India Company put Duane at odds with colonial elites, who forcibly banished him from Bengal. In a parting editorial, Duane proudly claimed American citizenship and told his fellow “Englishmen” that he planned to return to America, where he hoped to find his countrymen enjoying true liberty: “I trust in God I shall find them free, that I may forget that slavery exists anywhere.” That proved to be an impossible ambition, in the short term because he was confined to a ship (aptly named the William Pitt) bound for England.⁹

      Duane arrived in England in 1795, where he worked briefly with the London Corresponding Society (LCS), a group of political radicals and reformers who sought to democratize British politics and society. In the context of war between Britain and revolutionary France, LCS members were targets for government repression, as Duane’s counterpart John Binns learned firsthand. Duane emigrated to the United States in 1796, evading Prime Minister William Pitt’s crackdown on the LCS. In America, he continued to pay close attention to British and European politics. He especially supported the United Irishmen, a group of radicals, including John Binns, who fought for an independent Irish republic. His transatlantic politics were shared by Philadelphia Jeffersonians, as the toasts at a December 1799 political celebration suggest: Republicans drank to the cause of democracy in Pennsylvania and the character of Thomas Jefferson as well as to the “rights of man,” the downfall of the “despots of Europe,” and “The United Irishmen, rebellion against tyrants is the law of God.”¹⁰

      In the United States, Duane soon found himself at the center of national political conflict. He began to work for Benjamin Franklin Bache at Philadelphia’s Aurora General Advertiser, the most prominent Republican paper in the 1790s. Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, imported European political radicalism into the United States. He published Paine’s work throughout the 1790s, and repeatedly instigated conflict with the Federalist party. After Bache died of yellow fever in 1798, Duane continued to publish the Aurora on behalf of his widow, Margaret Bache. He later took over the paper on his account and married Margaret. With financial assistance from prominent Republicans, the Aurora became the most important Jeffersonian paper in the election of 1800, and Duane retained fairly close ties to Jefferson for the rest of his career. Duane’s life in the United States mirrored those of other British and Irish immigrants like Binns, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Cooper, and Thomas Addis Emmet, who achieved political standing in the United States and infused democratic politics with cosmopolitan radicalism.¹¹

      As in New England, early democratic politics in Pennsylvania frequently embraced open opposition to slavery. Soon after arriving in the United States, Duane penned a blistering attack on George Washington and his 1796 farewell address to the American people. Addressing the president directly, through a public letter, Duane indicted Washington for numerous faults, from his partiality to Britain to his endorsement of Hamilton to the warnings against partisanship in the farewell address, which Duane described as “the loathings of a sick mind.” Duane saw himself as a patriot in defense of the new American nation, unafraid to criticize the hero of the Revolution. He warned his readers that republics had often faltered because of excessive “confidence placed in the virtues and talents of individuals”; he therefore sought “to expose the PERSONAL IDOLATRY into which we have been heedlessly running.” At the end of his letter, Duane ruthlessly assessed Washington’s character. He claimed that Washington’s repressive political behavior reflected his moral failures, and entertained doubts about the sincerity of his patriotism during the Revolution. Most damning of all, Washington was a slaveholder. Duane argued that future generations would look back on Washington as a hypocrite and tyrant. They would “discover,” said Duane,

      that the great champion of American Freedom the rival of Timoleon and Cincinnatus, twenty years after the establishment of the Republic, was possessed of FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY, enjoying the FRUITS OF THEIR LABOUR WITHOUT REMUNERATION, OR EVEN THE CONSOLATIONS OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION—that he retained the barbarous usages of the feudal system, and kept men in LIVERY—and that he still affected to be the friend of the Christian Religion, of civil Liberty, and moral equality—and to be withal a disinterested, virtuous, liberal and unassuming man.¹²

      To Duane, slaveholding was fundamentally antidemocratic.

      His denunciations of Washington were echoed across the Atlantic by the Liverpool radical Edward Rushton, who published in 1797 a letter he had written Washington the previous year. A supporter of the French Revolution, Rushton marveled at the contradiction of Washington, “a man who,