Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

not a latinest, and notify him that his author is one.”²⁸ This populist and peculiar writer did not achieve much in the way of literary merit, but more than any other white Pennsylvanian, he gave voice to the powerful connections and contradictions between democratic subjectivity, slaveholder power, and race in the early national North.

      From 1804 to 1805, Branagan published four long works indicting the international slave trade and the power of slavery in the United States. The first, A Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa, introduced his cause and attempted to raise subscription funds for two poetic works, Avenia and The Penitential Tyrant, both published in 1805, that dramatized the evil of the slave trade and slavery. Branagan apparently caught the attention of New York Quaker and antislavery publisher Samuel Wood, who helped release Avenia in 1805 and printed an extended edition of The Penitential Tyrant in 1807.²⁹ Finally, Branagan also published his Serious Remonstrances Addressed to the Citizens of the Northern States in 1805, a pamphlet that sought to incite northerners to confront the problem of American slavery. Serious Remonstrances also marked a departure from his other work, characterized by a deep empathy for the enslaved, as Branagan now embraced a racist paranoia and proposed to colonize all persons of African descent outside the United States. Thus in a compressed period, Branagan expressed a wide range of responses to slavery and African Americans: egalitarian disgust for slaveholders; empathy for the enslaved; and racist fear of black equality. The tensions between these positions were never reconciled in Branagan’s work. Serious Remonstrances, contrary to some interpretations of Branagan, was not a conclusive sign of his departure from the empathic politics of his earlier work, as Branagan republished Tyrant in 1807 and Avenia in 1810 and continued to publish antislavery writings in the antebellum period.³⁰ The two Branagans, empathic and racist, were very much contemporaneous, just as egalitarian thought in the early national North was torn between indictment and accommodation of American slavery.

      In many ways, Branagan defined a vanguard antislavery position for his time, combining Christian ethics, democratic sentiment, and empathy for the oppressed. He believed that all humans were fundamentally equal, and that slavery was unjust according to Christian principle; that slaveholders were despots who threatened the rights of all individuals, not only their own slaves; and, finally, that every individual had a compassionate interest in ending slavery, whether or not they owned slaves themselves. In a complex restatement of the Golden Rule, Branagan understood society as an interdependent web of humans, all spiritually equal, which made the oppression of any one human an ethical problem for all others. One should feel not only pity for the enslaved, he argued, but also guilt for tolerating the violent authority of slaveholders. Political belonging, insofar as it formalized these social ties, escalated the gravity of one’s responsibility for actions committed by the state and fellow citizens. Every free American, in other words, was culpable for the crime of slavery.

      The frontispiece to the 1807 edition of The Penitential Tyrant dramatized this argument. Branagan used an engraving by David Edwin which had served as the frontispiece for a previous edition of Tyrant as well as the 1805 edition of Avenia. It depicted a man gesturing to the Goddess of Liberty, who sat beneath a pillar adorned with the motto of the state of Pennsylvania, “Liberty, Virtue, and Independence.” In the background were “African slaves, landed on the shores of America.” An accompanying description emphasized the contrast between “Practical Slavery and Professional Liberty” in the United States. As they attacked American hypocrisy, Branagan and his publisher Samuel Wood emphasized the guilt of the average citizen as much as that of the slaveholder. “Sons of Columbia, hear this truth in time,” said the description, “he who allows oppression shares the crime.” An introduction written by Wood offered a maxim that indicted the American political order and those who supported it: as “slavery and tyranny are completely inseparable … no man who holds a slave ought to be intrusted with a post, either great or small, among a free people.”³¹ In a democracy like the United States, one’s own life, however remote from the scene of a plantation, bore some responsibility for the tyranny of slaveholding.

      Branagan’s sense of racial equality was fairly straightforward—all humans were racially the same, he argued in his Preliminary Essay, and contending otherwise “subverts the whole fabric of revealed religion.” He mocked scientific speculations that diversity of physical appearance indicated diversity of species.³² Avenia, arguably his most ambitious production, rendered this sense of human equality in poetic form, by presenting a gory epic of the African slave trade, told from the perspective of the title character, an African princess, and her friends and relations. Much of the poem recounts a brutal battle on the African coast between slave trading “Christians,” as Branagan sarcastically called Europeans, and virtuous Africans. Modeled on the Iliad, the poem indulges in depictions of violence—characters are burned alive, have spears thrown through their heads, and are struck by lightning in an act of divine retribution. The narrative has a simple moral lesson: the so-called Christians are violent men and hypocrites, while the Africans are heroic individuals who represent the true spirit of Christianity. Branagan remained within the model of the “virtuous slave,” as identified by François Furstenberg, in which white representations of slave resistance typically end not with liberty for the enslaved but rather with tragic death.³³ Having proved their capacity for freedom by resisting enslavement, all the Africans in Avenia eventually die. The Christians win the battle on the African coast and bring captive slaves to the Caribbean, where Avenia, after being raped by her master, decides to kill herself in a noble and predictably ghastly plunge from a cliff, looking back toward her African homeland. Because violent claims of black autonomy were safely contained by literary demise, Branagan and his readers did not have to imagine how slaves who demonstrated the capacity for freedom would achieve it in fact.

      Figure 1. Frontispiece from Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant, or Slave Trader Reformed (New York: Samuel Wood, 1807). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

      Figure 2. Description of frontispiece from Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant.

      Yet Branagan’s work had a disruptive potential, and it often broke down the boundaries of the “virtuous slave” narrative. He relished describing the deaths of Christians at the hands of Africans, clearly endorsing African resistance and, by extension, slave resistance in the Americas. He named one of his African heroes Louverture, after Toussaint Louverture of the Haitian Revolution; his counterpart among the Christian enslavers was Leclerc, the name of the French general who tried to reconquer Saint-Domingue for Napoleon in 1802. Both men die in the course of the poem, but meet different fates. Leclerc is electrocuted by God’s retributive lightning bolt, while Louverture, killed by Christian treachery, ascends into heaven, to take a seat alongside other virtuous men, including George Washington, John Wesley, George Whitfield, Branagan’s infant son (who died in 1802), and Jesus Christ. That mental picture of the after-life encapsulates Branagan’s idiosyncratic political imagination. Like most moments in Avenia, the scene is elaborately overworked, and it salvages Christianity even as it indicts “Christian” slave traders. Christian faith remains the fundamental determinant of goodness and truth, judging Europeans and Africans alike. Yet the scene also exemplifies Branagan’s more complex political motivation, which runs throughout much of his early work: to advocate empathetic identification with the victims of slavery.³⁴

      In The Penitential Tyrant, his second poetic endeavor, Branagan argued for a human universalism based on empathetic recognition. Inspired by God, humans should “feel our brother’s grief, our brother’s wo; / Feel sympathetic love for all our race, / And circle man in one kind embrace.” For Branagan, sympathy was rooted not in pity for the weak, but rather in empathetic acknowledgment of another’s suffering. In an essay appended to the 1807 edition of the poem, Branagan asked white Americans to put themselves in the position of the slave. Imagine, Branagan asked his readers, that a French army had invaded New York, captured 10,000 white Americans (including one’s family members) and enslaved them in the West Indies.