Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

Samuel Taggart, called him “emphatically the small end of small things,” and could not understand how men like Sloan were elected to office. Taggart took solace in a frequently used metaphor for the rise of Jeffersonian democracy: “the faster the pot boils the sooner it will throw off the scum.”²¹ The pot was democracy, and Sloan was the scum. Such vitriol reflected the democratizing effect of Jeffersonian politics, which brought men like Sloan into political power.

      In Taggart’s New England, antagonism between Federalists and Republican often served to deflect attention from the national politics of slavery. But in Congress, Republican commitments to democracy and equality often led to conflicts over slavery with southern Federalist masters. In January 1800, Smilie, like Gallatin, defended the right of Absalom Jones and other free blacks from Philadelphia to petition the federal government, in the face of pronounced southern hostility. The Philadelphia petitioners requested reconsideration of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, an end to the international slave trade and, most alarming of all to slaveholders, “measures as shall in due course emancipate the whole of their brethren.” Southerners immediately moved to reject the petition and suppress any discussion of slavery. John Rutledge, Jr., scorned the petition as an expression of “this new-fangled French philosophy of liberty and equality,” and deemed its contents “unconstitutional to discuss.” The young Virginia Republican John Randolph, serving his first term in Congress, “wish[ed] that the conduct of the House would have been so indignant as to have passed it over without discussion.” But John Smilie wanted to discuss the petition, for he believed parts of it fell under the purview of the House; more important, he contended that free blacks in the North were “a part of the human species, equally capable of suffering and enjoying with others, and equally objects of attention, and therefore they had a claim to be heard.” Smilie admitted that the House could not grant all the petitioners’ requests—by which he meant their plea for a plan of national gradual emancipation—and he later voted with the overwhelming majority of the House (85-1) to affirm this point and appease slaveholders like Rutledge. Yet his defense of the right of petition, like Gallatin’s and John Swanwick’s, should not be taken lightly, since it suggested that in resistance to southern arguments for absolute control over slavery, northerners might acknowledge the political standing of free African Americans and their “claim to be heard.”²²

      Smilie’s appeal to the rights of the “human species” indicated the importance of cosmopolitan and universalist conceptions of political freedom among northern Republicans. These beliefs, Rutledge acknowledged, could challenge slavery by inciting sympathy for the enslaved or by granting free African Americans in the North a limited degree of political standing. In a related way, egalitarian sentiments could challenge slavery by inciting antipathy for slaveholders. Although by no means economic levelers, many northern Jeffersonians opposed elite privilege, in part because so many Federalists treated upstart Republicans as men who did not deserve to govern. Pennsylvania’s Republican governor from 1808 to 1817, Simon Snyder, had once been a tanner. Pennsylvania representative and then senator Jonathan Roberts’s father was engaged in politics, but Roberts began his own career as an apprentice wheelwright. Duane scrambled for money throughout his career, constantly imploring subscribers to the Aurora to pay their bills, and requesting patronage from gentlemen Republicans in positions of power. Such men were not accustomed to luxury; they made a virtue of their middling backgrounds, and, like the more genteel Abraham Bishop in Connecticut, they were often indignant at the wealth and power of “the great, the wise, the rich and mighty men of the world.” Such attitudes, often generated by disputes with northern Federalists, could also engender hostility to slaveholders, as in Duane’s attack on George Washington. As Pennsylvania Republican John B. C. Lucas (originally Jean-Baptiste, a republican immigrant from France) argued in Congress in 1804, slavery was an institution run by and for “the rich part of the community.”²³

      Thus, as in New England, Pennsylvania Jeffersonians demonstrated a wide range of antislavery sentiment. Of course, as Democratic-Republicans, all these men were allied to powerful slaveholders in the southern states. And as in New England, instead of rejecting that alliance, they found ways to embrace it. Immigrant Jeffersonians elevated the Jeffersonian alliance beyond partisanship, as they fought for political inclusion in the United States. In response to Federalist nativism, immigrants leagued with Republican slaveholders to protect their political future in America. Through this relationship, cosmopolitan conceptions of American citizenship and a democratic public sphere became closely tied to what William Duane had defined, in 1796, as their antithesis: American slavery.

       Slaves in the Bowels: Thomas Branagan

      The Irish immigrant Thomas Branagan enacted the most poignant rendering of this ideological encounter, in a series of eccentric works that defined the intersection of egalitarianism, slavery, race, and conscience. A Jefferson acolyte, but not formally a Republican, Branagan began his American career relatively penniless. He appears to have come from means in Dublin, but he was disinherited for abandoning Catholicism, and arrived in Philadelphia without capital and with few connections. Before coming to the United States, Branagan, according to his autobiography, had participated in both the transatlantic slave trade and Caribbean slavery. As a young man in 1790, he joined a slave ship operating out of Liverpool and traveled to Africa and then the Caribbean to help buy and sell African slaves. He remained in the Caribbean for the next eight years, working as a seaman, a privateer, and finally as an overseer in Antigua. At some point he had a conversion experience and embraced a form of evangelical Christianity, likely Methodism; while an overseer, he experienced a more profound conversion to antislavery principle. “Impressed with a sense of the villainy and barbarity of keeping human beings in such deplorable conditions as I often saw the slaves reduced to,” Branagan abandoned his position, returned to Dublin long enough to be disinherited, and then made for the United States. He would eventually come to call himself a “Penitential Tyrant,” a man driven by remorse for his past participation in the evil of slavery.²⁴

      Branagan expressed a different side of northern democratic culture than William Duane: he was far less interested in secular politics, and on some issues, he was closer to New England Federalists than Jeffersonian Republicans. While he shared Duane’s anti-elitism and his ardor for Thomas Jefferson, Branagan ultimately believed in divine justice far more than secular redemption. God, not natural law or reason, judged the good and evil in men and provided the foundation for human solidarity and individual morality. Like many evangelicals, Branagan stressed an individual connection to God, rooted in “conscience,” but antislavery arguments radicalized his sense of religious individualism. He echoed antislavery figures from Pennsylvania’s past, like the Quaker Benjamin Lay, and pointed to future abolitionist appeals to a “higher law”: “it is better for me to hearken to, and obey the voice of conscience, (when under the influence of scripture and reason,),” said Branagan in 1807, “than the requisitions or prohibitions of men.”²⁵ As was true of Jeffersonians throughout the North, Branagan understood democracy in terms of the freedom of the individual subject to think and act autonomously. But liberation from religious or political authority was less important to Branagan than coming to terms with human interdependence, and especially the relationship between one’s self and suffering others. As Branagan put it in verse, humans, inspired by Jesus Christ (the “guest of celestial race”),

      Feel sympathetic love for all our race,

      And circle mankind in one kind embrace;

      Our greatest grief is to see human wo,

      Yet can’t relieve, or stop the tears that flow.²⁶

      Branagan’s individual was caught in an empathic web of connections to others, oppressed and oppressors alike. One’s conscience was the arbiter of these relationships, the place where the pain of the suffering and the power of despotism were felt most keenly, and where the work of opposition began.²⁷

      Like many middling Jeffersonians, Branagan challenged the power of traditional elites to control access to knowledge. He had little faith in classical learning, and had no desire to comprehend Greek or Latin—although he did base much of his literary work on imitations of Homer and Virgil. “What in the name of common sense,” Branagan wondered, “is the use of using language that one reader in one thousand