Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

confirmed the triumph of democracy for white men in the North. Meanwhile, slaveholder power in the Republican coalition, in conjunction with southwestern expansion, cotton production, and the domestic slave trade, ensured the dominance of slavery in the antebellum South.¹⁸

      This book integrates the two main developments of Jeffersonian America by trying to understand how white northerners, in the midst of their democratic transformation, came to terms with the growing power of slavery. The northern Republican response to slavery varied from individual to individual and, in many cases, an individual’s response to slavery varied across time, shifting from opposition to accommodation—and then, in more cases than one, back to opposition. The strength of Jeffersonian political culture lay less in its ability to impose any one uniform response to the problem of slavery than in its ability to contain contradictory sentiments about the institution in a wider culture of democratic nationalism.

      Jeffersonian democracy thus followed a crooked path, but not a haphazard one. The political intensity of the 1790s created powerful pressures and incentives for northerners to join southern masters in the fight against Federalism, and that entailed some accommodation of slaveholder power. The first two chapters explore this process in two different locations, Federalist New England and Jeffersonian Philadelphia, where negotiating the problem of slavery was an inevitable condition of democratic politics.

      In New England, Federalists contested Republican claims to be persecuted democrats by arguing that Jeffersonian political power depended directly on the institution of slavery. This forced Republicans to publicly come to terms with their ties to the South. They did so by insisting on their own political oppression, aggrandized throughout the Jeffersonian press. The experience of northern freedom served as collateral in an ideological alliance that brought democracy to New England while entrenching slavery in the South.

      Similar transactions defined the nature of Jeffersonian democracy in Philadelphia, but the terrain was very different. Philadelphia, was in many ways the most heterogeneous and egalitarian place in the early United States, home to a large free black community, an influential antislavery organization, and articulate immigrant radicals who imported European struggles against aristocracy into the United States. Philadelphia was a crossroads where democracy collided with slavery and cosmopolitanism collided with race. Chapter 2 examines these intersections from the perspective of three Irish American immigrants, John Binns, Thomas Branagan, and William Duane. All three believed that America should serve, as Tom Paine had argued, as an “asylum of freedom” and an exemplar of democratic rule. They reframed personal and transatlantic struggles for liberation in terms of American nationalism, lending the illusion of universality to the recently invented United States. At the same time, all three men came to some sort of accommodation with slavery, a coercive institution bent on denying asylum to enslaved people.

      In New England and Pennsylvania, the rise of the Republican coalition demanded some accommodation of slavery. Jeffersonian success, however, also produced new sources of sectional discord. Chapters 3 and 4 examine sectional conflicts over slavery in the Republican coalition, which often turned on the relationship between slaveholder power and democratic governance. The relative ideological accord between slavery and democracy developed by white men in the North repeatedly broke down when it came to the institutional politics of slavery at the national level.

      As Chapter 3 demonstrates, from the 1790s onward, conflict over slavery was no longer resolved by brokering between regional elites. Instead, slavery was entangled in partisan struggles between Federalists and Republicans, and thus in the national politics of democracy. When northern Jeffersonians came to Washington after 1800, they encountered some of the most powerful slaveholders in the nation, who were often far more adamant in the defense of slavery than Thomas Jefferson. On issue after issue, from fugitive slave rendition, to the end of the international slave trade, to the expansion of slavery to the West, southerners confronted northern Republicans and fought to control slavery on their own terms. Effectively, they demanded that democracy check its advance where slavery was concerned. On that question, slaveholders alone should rule. As northern Republicans repeatedly encountered the antidemocratic posture of slaveholders, they turned to dissidence, disillusion, and in some cases revocation of the Jeffersonian alliance.

      Slavery was hardly the only issue that fueled northern discontent with the Democratic-Republican coalition. Republican attempts to respond to the diplomatic crises of the Napoleonic wars by restricting American commerce alienated many men in the North, catalyzing sectionalism and regional envy of southern power. Once northerners began to think in sectional terms, it was difficult to prevent them from attacking the political power of slavery in the federal government. Chapter 4 outlines the emergence of northern sectionalist thought in the Democratic-Republican coalition, from the early Jeffersonian years to the onset of the War of 1812. Tracing debates over Jeffersonian foreign policy and northern resentment of Virginia rule, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the Clintonian campaigns of 1808 and 1812, when George and then DeWitt Clinton challenged James Madison for the presidency. In 1812, DeWitt Clinton came close to defeating Madison and undoing Virginia’s hold on the presidency, while some of Clinton’s supporters broke with the ideological structure of Jeffersonian democracy created in the 1790s.

      Yet in the midst of internal dissent and renewed Federalist attacks, Jeffersonian democracy demonstrated a remarkable resilience. The Democratic-Republican coalition’s true strength became apparent in the critical year of 1812. Faced with domestic and diplomatic challenges, Jeffersonians managed to maintain their preponderance in national politics and redefine American nationalism on Republican terms. Northerners played a critical role in this process, as Chapter 5 argues. Pennsylvania Republicans resolutely supported declaration of war against Great Britain on June 18, 1812 and they likewise backed the reelection of James Madison later that fall. Despite military and political setbacks during the war, martial nationalism became a new and potent ideological bond between Republicans North and South. Chapter 5 follows the ideological war of 1812, in which immigrant radicals once again played a pivotal role. Republicans redefined the United States as an aggrieved democracy, struggling against internal and external enemies. Nationalism suppressed the problem of slavery, as Federalists and enslaved people who challenged bondage during the war were cast as allies of Britain and opponents of the United States.

      Once again, however, national ideological unity broke down over the practical politics of slavery. The final chapter of this book traces the congressional conflict of 1819–1821 over the expansion of slavery to the new state of Missouri. In contrast to Republican nationalism during the War of 1812, the Missouri Crisis appears much as Jefferson described it, as an alarming interruption in national political life. But the Missouri Crisis was also the culmination of a long Jeffersonian argument about the power of slavery in the United States. A debate that began over the expansion of slavery to the West became a referendum on Jeffersonian democracy, American nationalism, and slaveholder power.

      The Missouri Crisis presented northern Republicans with a dilemma at once ideological and historical. Northern Republicans tried to use Jeffersonian nationalism to restrict slavery expansion by arguing that the founding ideals of the United States were opposed to slaveholder power. But they faced a contending nationalist argument that stressed the protection of slavery as the price of Union and celebrated the expansion of American sovereignty under Republican rule. That counterargument was persuasive in good part because northern Jeffersonians had often accommodated slaveholder power in the past. Republican advocates of restriction were defeated, in other words, by their own ideological commitments, which had tolerated a major expansion of American slavery during two decades of Jeffersonian rule. During the Missouri Crisis, northerners took a stronger stance against slavery than they ever had before. But they did so in a political context where nationalism, the American nation-state, and the economic power of slaveholders were far stronger than they had been previously.