Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

than those that are free.” Thomas Cooper, who had published an early attack on the slave trade in the 1780s, maintained strong connections to the South after his prosecution for sedition: he eventually moved to South Carolina, where he became an instructor of the planter elite at South Carolina College and an early exponent of states’ rights.⁵⁶

      These episodes point to a more widespread ideological accommodation with slavery in the early Democratic-Republican party. In claiming their place in America through an alliance with Virginia Republicans, Duane and other radicals tempered their criticism of slaveholders. Immigrant radicals infused American nationalism with transatlantic republican idealism, but at the same time, the political context of the American nation-state worked to constrain their cosmopolitan principles. For Republicans like John Binns, defending the United States as the representative of the entire “human race” marked a crooked path toward accommodation with American slaveholders and toleration of human bondage.

       Republican Masters Versus Rebellious Slaves

      Jeffersonian politics was formed by multiple bonds between the subjective experience of freedom and the reality of the American political system, where slavery was powerful and protected. Democrats in Pennsylvania in the early 1800s had a clear sense of what it meant to be politically free: it meant participating in a government based on popular sovereignty, in which individual citizens had the power to influence political decisions. William Duane believed that all humans had equal rights to political freedom, and that freedom was best protected by democracy. “Democracy upholds, as Christianity upholds,” said the Aurora in 1806, “that all men are equal.” Democracy was likewise the only practical defense against political oppression: “the only foundation of free and virtuous Government.” Theoretically then, the Aurora supported the simple idealism of a Republican toast from 1799: to defend the rights of man “until all oppressed nations are emancipated from tyranny.” Such principles seemed, logically, to pose a serious danger to any institution based on coercive authority, including slavery. Duane had made the connection himself on more than one occasion, and he insisted in 1805 that the Aurora had always been an advocate “for the freedom of the Africans.”⁵⁷

      Practically, however, democracy in the United States was a much more complicated affair, as the institutional power of slaveholders in the federal government and the Republican coalition proved a powerful check on northern antislavery sentiment. As Duane’s son William John remembered, his father taught him “to entertain an hereditary dislike of all privileged classes.”⁵⁸ But William Duane’s anti-elitism wavered when it came to slavery. As Duane was well aware, the political strength of the Republican party lay in the southern states, and Jefferson was the most important political icon for the Republican movement. Given these political ties, Duane attempted to accommodate slavery and slaveholders in his larger political worldview. In doing so, he at times turned to the language and ideology of race, instigating white paranoia of black Americans. However, while white solidarity served as a key method of accommodation for Duane, it was never his primary motivation. Instead, he wanted to ensure that the Democratic-Republican party won and maintained institutional power, in order to advance his ideological agenda of achieving democracy in America and abroad. Instead of consciously embracing whiteness and white supremacy as political values, Duane embraced slaveholders as allies in a project of democratization. Choosing to tolerate the antidemocratic, coercive authority of slavery, Duane and other Jeffersonians helped lay the foundations for a more openly white supremacist politics in the future.