Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

for one, thought it might have been beneficial had the king been “trampled to death,” as his demise might have led to the establishment of a republic in England. The attack on the king was linked to the meeting near Copenhagen House and the LCS, leading to the passage of the Two Acts on November 13, 1795, which gave the British government broad powers to outlaw “seditious practices” that threatened the king, as well as “seditious assemblies.” Duane, still in London at this point, chaired an even larger meeting to protest the Two Acts on November 12, 1795, where he defended the right of petition and free assembly. Despite widespread public protest, the acts were approved the following day. Had Duane remained in England, he no doubt would have soon found himself at odds with William Pitt, the prime minister who led the suppression on the LCS. But in May 1796, Duane fled for the United States.⁵¹

      Binns, in contrast, remained in England and repeatedly came into conflict with the British state. In March 1796, he was arrested for delivering “seditious and inflammatory lectures” in Birmingham. He was acquitted, only to be arrested again in February 1798, along with four other Irishmen, on the charge of treason. Binns had attempted to find passage to France for United Irish leader Arthur O’Connor so that he could join the French army to plan for an invasion of Ireland. Once again, Binns was ultimately found innocent, but James Coigley, a Catholic priest who had been caught along with him, and who had on his person a letter discussing potential French support for revolution in Ireland, England, and Scotland, was not so fortunate. He was found guilty of treason and executed June 7, 1798. In the summer and fall of 1798, the British ruthlessly suppressed multiple uprisings in Ireland and defeated two French invasion forces, which effectively put an end to the United Irishmen’s vision of an independent Irish Republic.⁵²

      Binns, meanwhile, was arrested again in March 1799 and detained in prison until 1801, under a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. When he was finally freed, he emigrated to the United States. Thus Binns arrived in Pennsylvania, even more so than Duane, with a visceral sense of the oppressive power of the British state. After landing in Baltimore in the late summer of 1801, he found his way to Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he became close friends with Joseph Priestley, the more famous Birmingham radical who had come to the United States in 1794, as well as Thomas Cooper, who had arrived from Manchester in 1794 as well, after joining Paine’s attack on Edmund Burke. This triumvirate had counterparts all throughout the northern states, from Duane in Philadelphia to the Irishman Thomas Addis Emmet in New York (whose brother, Robert Emmet, was executed for treason after a final United Irish uprising in Dublin in 1803). Such men, who had fled British tyranny to find political asylum in the United States, often found new political influence in the Democratic-Republican party as well. Their politics were inherently transatlantic, both because they understood the American nation from the perspective of past British abuse, and because Federalists in the United States saw these foreign radicals as an inherent danger to American sovereignty.

      Irish Americans thus became vocal supporters of what historian James Kettner eloquently termed “volitional allegiance,” the fairly radical notion that one’s political affiliation should result from conscious choice, rather than nativity or longstanding residence. After Jefferson’s election, the new Republican Congress repealed the Federalist Naturalization Act of 1798, shortening the waiting period for citizenship from fourteen to five years. Republicans in the northern states pushed for even more lenient provisions, while portraying the United States as a haven for the oppressed democrats of the world. Binns, who called himself an “Irishman by birth, American by choice, and a United Irishman from principle,” is a powerful example of this emergent democratic political culture. He became an American, he relates in his autobiography, not upon taking a formal oath of citizenship, but when, days after landing in the country, he saw a Pennsylvania militia company at drill, under a banner bearing the state’s motto, “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence.” “It was then,” Binns recalled, “under the broad expanse of heaven, without the adoption of any form of words, I took my first oath of allegiance and fidelity to the United States; an oath which, according to my best judgment, I have faithfully kept, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances, in peace and war.”⁵³

      The United States provided refuge for Binns, who, like Duane and Paine before him, envisioned the American nation as fulfilling a secular providence, offering an “asylum of freedom” to the world’s oppressed. Shortly after his inauguration, Jefferson endorsed this cosmopolitan image in a flattering letter to Joseph Priestley in which he expressed his “heartfelt satisfaction that, in the first moment of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender you the homage of it’s respect & esteem, cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise & good like you.” He also promised to “disclaim the legitimacy of that libel on legislation,” the Alien Friends Act.⁵⁴ Jefferson offered Priestley a home, a place where he would be protected by the law as an equal. Such protection would reverse Federalist policy; it was also in essence the complete reversal of the position of the slave, who was in theory permanently alienated from equal standing in the political community and could not make the volitional choice, like Binns, to be a free American.

      Historian Gordon Wood cites the Priestley letter as evidence that Jefferson was “the fount of American democracy,” the source of “American ideas and ideals that have persisted to this day.” But in many ways, it was the immigrant radicals who were the fount of democracy, as they fought with Federalists to obtain political standing in the United States. Conflicts between Federalists and Republicans over citizenship and democracy were far more than domestic squabbles, as they ultimately allowed immigrants to gain political standing in the United States, where they fought to establish democratic ideals that were transatlantic in origin. Federalists were not entirely mistaken, then, when they warned that such foreigners would revolutionize the American republic. Yet at the same time, the rise of the Democratic-Republican coalition led to a retrenchment of some of the more radical cosmopolitan arguments of the 1790s. As Duane and Binns claimed their place as Americans, they redefined an internationalist agenda for democratic reform in nationalist terms. Much like Paine before them, they helped build the case for American exceptionalism. Binns, for example, in the first issue of his Democratic Press, identified his lifelong struggle against political tyranny with the United States, whose “extensive, federative, democratic republic is, indeed, and in truth, the only hope of the world.” The American nation now enclosed the universal principles of democratic radicalism, and Binns promised that he would “regard every attempt to dismember its territory, or violate the principles of its government, not only as a Treason against the Government and People of the United States, but as a Treason, of the deepest dye, against the whole human race.”⁵⁵

      Judged on these terms, the fight between immigrant radicals and the Federalist party appears a straightforward conflict between democratic idealism and conservative reaction. But in the context of the Republican movement as a whole, the struggles of men like Duane and Binns were far more complicated, insofar as they worked to bind northern democrats to the slaveholding South. Although they did not join them in jail cells, many southern Republicans embraced the democratic martyrs of the North. Stevens Thomson Mason, a Republican senator from Virginia, traveled to Vermont with funds collected from prominent Virginians to pay Matthew Lyon’s Sedition Act fine, and he was duly outraged at Thomas Cooper’s conviction. Irishman John Daly Burk fled from New York to Virginia to avoid having to leave the United States and remained there for much of the rest of his life. Mason provided refuge for James Thompson Callender, who had fled from Philadelphia to Virginia in fear of the Adams administration in 1798. When Callender was tried by Judge Samuel Chase in Richmond, making him the only “southern” victim of the Sedition Act, Virginia Republicans again came to his defense, raising funds on his behalf and contributing legal talent to his defense. Callender proved a turncoat, and by 1802 he had disowned Jefferson and exposed the president’s relationship to Sally Hemings. But many Republican victims of Federalist repression were grateful for the patronage of southern Republicans, and some later took up residence in the South. Lyon toured Virginia in support of Jefferson in 1800 and Burk subsequently wrote a celebratory history of the state, which he dedicated to Jefferson. Like Burk, Lyon later moved to the South, eventually settling in Kentucky. In Vermont, Lyon and his son published a paper known as The Scourge of Aristocracy; after moving to Kentucky, he soon became a slaveholder. Defending the