Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

Instead, they recast universal democratic principles in terms of American nationalism and partisan politics. Doing so entailed some toleration of slaveholder power, especially for immigrants who became significant members of the Jeffersonian coalition. That political encounter with slavery ultimately rendered democratic radicalism more amenable to white supremacy, as repeated accommodation of coercive power impaired egalitarian commitments.

       Immigrant Radicals and American Nationalism

      In the 1790s, Federalists attempted to undermine and constrain Republican agitators like Duane through the Naturalization Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts, a series of laws that directly targeted immigrants. If Branagan did not want European immigrants to “associate with negroes,” Federalists did not want immigrants to associate with the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1798 imposed a fourteen-year waiting period for citizenship, and compelled all immigrants to register themselves forty-eight hours after entering the country; the Alien Enemies Act gave the president the power to deport citizens of any country with whom the United States was at war; the more far-reaching Alien Friends Act gave the president the power to deport any alien deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States”; and the Sedition Act criminalized “false, scandalous, or malicious” statements made against the president, Congress, or the federal government.⁴⁴

      The Aurora General Advertiser was a principal target of the Sedition Act, as Federalists had long opposed Benjamin Franklin Bache; when Duane assumed the editorship after Bache’s death, he quickly became a target for repression as well. Pennsylvania Federalists first attempted to corral him through the charge of seditious riot, issued against Duane and three other men, including United Irishman Dr. James Reynolds, for a fracas that occurred outside a Philadelphia Catholic church, when the four attempted to obtain signatures for a memorial in protest of the Alien Friends Act. In defense of Duane, Republican Alexander Dallas argued that the charges were politically motivated, and a Philadelphia jury acquitted him. But Federalists continued to pursue Duane, and attempted to charge him twice with seditious libel, and once on a manufactured charge of contempt of the Senate of the United States. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams considered deeming Duane an alien and deporting him from the United States. More crude methods were employed by McPherson’s Blues, a Federalist militia company. Taking objection to Duane’s portrayal of their role in the suppression of Fries rebellion, a tax rebellion in eastern Pennsylvania, members of the militia company invaded Duane’s office on May 15, 1799, dragged him into the street, and beat him mercilessly. As Duane’s biographer Kim Phillips relates, Federalist editor John Ward Fenno commended the attack, noting that Duane had once insulted George Washington and that he “was not an American, but a foreigner, and not merely a foreigner, but an United Irishman.” Meanwhile, other northern Republicans, like Vermont’s Matthew Lyon and Duane’s Pennsylvania comrade Thomas Cooper, were sent to jail for violations of the Sedition Act. To militant Federalists, immigrant radicals threatened the security of the United States and therefore had to be repressed.⁴⁵

      Federalist repression backfired, however, as Republican printers continued to publish their papers and elevated Sedition Act victims as martyrs for democratic freedom. Cooper published essays in the Aurora dated from the Philadelphia prison where he was held, while Lyon ran for and won reelection to Congress from jail. Equally important, the Alien and Sedition Acts were critical in forming ideological and political bonds beyond northern and southern Republicans. When Republicans like Duane supported Jefferson in the election of 1800, they were seeking freedom from political repression in the form of the Sedition Act, and they were fighting to reverse the nativist limits to American citizenship imposed by the Naturalization Act. They argued for an open society, in which a free press protected and expanded democratic freedom and European immigrants could claim citizenship and belonging in the United States. “The press is the engine which every tyrant fears,” said Duane’s Aurora in 1806; “put out the press, and there is an end to democracy.” John Binns, an Irish republican who arrived in the United States in 1801, and eventually became a rival of Duane’s, put this principle on the masthead of his paper, underneath an image of a printing press: The Democratic Press was “the tyrant’s foe, the people’s friend.” The fight against the Sedition Act was, in many ways, a struggle over language, as Duane and later Binns used their newspapers to celebrate “democracy,” a word and idea Federalists disparaged as unchecked, illegitimate popular rule. As Duane would write to Jefferson many years later, the rise of Jeffersonian democracy was as much a “revolution in speech” as a revolution in government. The Republicans won on both counts, driving the Federalists from power and building democracy in the United States, as practice and idea.⁴⁶

      Immigrant radicals like Duane and Binns likewise responded to Federalist nativism by championing cosmopolitanism and ethnic diversity. Duane claimed that he was born in colonial New York and that he was therefore an American citizen, but Federalists disputed that claim, and eventually won a court ruling that deemed Duane an alien and a British subject. He became a naturalized citizen in 1802.⁴⁷ As much as he liked to imagine himself a freeborn American, Duane also delighted in celebrating his checkered ethnic and national past. Nativism did not automatically create incentives to claim a blanket white identity, as immigrant radicals instead argued for the political and cultural value of ethnic diversity. “It continues to distress the tories,” wrote Duane, “that a half Irish, half Indian, making for a while a whole American British subject—should be found so fond of the Declaration of Independence—it is downright rebellion against the Lord’s anointed!”⁴⁸

      The conflict between nativism and ethnic heterogeneity persisted well after the triumph of the Democratic-Republicans in 1800. In Jeffersonian Pennsylvania, elite Republicans were skeptical of Duane’s attachment to European immigrants and opposed Philadelphia’s Tammany Society because it accepted aliens as members. When Duane ran for a seat in the Pennsylvania state Senate in 1807, he was attacked by Federalist editors, in particular George Helmbold, who edited the satirical paper The Tickler under the moniker “Toby Scratch’em.” Helmbold, son of a German immigrant, had once published a German-language paper and even written for the Aurora, but had come to embrace a nativist worldview. He promised that The Tickler “shall invariably be purely American—excluding all foreign partialities or prejudices.” He deemed Duane “a literary adventurer” whose “abilities are comprised in the single faculty of abusing” and mocked immigrants as “Imported Patriots.” Such men were “the scum of Europe,” said Helmbold, modifying Shakespeare’s Richard III, “rascals, runaways / whom their o’er cloyed country vomits forth.” Particular scorn was reserved for the Irish, whose speech, appearance, and intellect were subject to constant ridicule. The Tickler’s intemperance reflected an ongoing battle for control of the American political system and American political culture. Although Federalists managed to keep Duane from the state Senate, they were losing the larger struggle to keep the Aurora editor and 1his supporters out of the United States.⁴⁹

      Figure 3. Masthead of John Binns’s Democratic Press, March 27, 1807. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

      Duane and other radical Jeffersonians saw their fight for democracy in international terms. Duane consistently identified himself as Irish, and openly declared his ideological sympathy for the United Irishmen, as part of a wider program of resistance to the British government. He organized Irish immigrants in Philadelphia to help support the Democratic-Republican party, inaugurating a long relationship between urban democratic political organizations and the immigrant vote.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, Federalists like Connecticut’s Uriah Tracy warned that Duane and the United Irishmen were bringing revolution to American soil. In many respects Tracy was correct, as the case of John Binns makes clear. Duane had only briefly spent time in England during the heyday of Paineite radicalism in the 1790s; he had returned from India to England in July 1795, but remained for only ten months before leaving for the United States. Binns, in contrast, lived through the height of William Pitt’s repression of British political dissent. Both he and Duane took part in a London Corresponding Society (LCS) meeting of over 100,000 men near Copenhagen House on October 26, 1795; a few days