Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

slaveholder power, northern Jeffersonians faced the more complicated task of confronting their contradictory history as democrats in a slaveholding republic.

      The Missouri Crisis had no decisive conclusion in northern political thought, and it left a divided legacy for the antebellum era. Antislavery northerners left the Missouri Crisis bitter at southern defenses of slaveholder power, but also confident in their commitments to the American nation and the core democratic principles of Jeffersonian politics. Other northerners, in contrast, responded to the Missouri Crisis and especially its final phase, which focused on the rights of free African Americans, by endorsing a racist consensus in which the political union of the United States and the political rights of white men required the subordination of black Americans, free and enslaved. As the Missouri Crisis concluded, moreover, New York’s Martin Van Buren began early attempts to revive the Jeffersonian coalition, thus setting in motion a renewed North-South partnership that would flourish by the late 1820s, with the rise of Jacksonian democracy.¹⁹

      While this book ends as antebellum politics begins, it also looks beyond the Jacksonian era to a longer, deeper, and ongoing story about the relationship between democratic freedom, oppression, and power in the United States. Ultimately, it explores a problem raised in a starker form by antebellum abolitionists and especially by escaped slaves who joined the antislavery struggle: why did nonslaveholders tolerate the existence of slavery? And how could they be persuaded to oppose to it? As Frederick Douglass told a British audience in March of 1847, “the northern states claim to be exempt from all responsibility in the matter of the slaveholding of America … but this is a mere subterfuge.” In fact, northerners buttressed slaveholder power by supporting the United States Constitution, while their “deep prejudice against the coloured man” constricted African American freedom. Upon returning to the United States a few months later, Douglass bitterly noted:

      I have no love for America, as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man. I am not thought of, or spoken of, except as a piece of property belonging to some Christian slaveholder, and all the religious and political institutions of this country, alike pronounce me a slave and a chattel.

      As Douglass was well aware, abolishing slavery would require overturning that state of affairs, so that a slave could become a man. There was far more at stake in that transformation than a physical contest with mastery. Abolition would require non-slaveholders to reject the legitimacy of slaveholder power and to accept the legitimacy of Frederick Douglass and other African Americans as equal political subjects. That effectively meant reconstructing a democratic culture that had been built through the toleration of slaveholding authority.²⁰

      It would take a concerted and complex struggle by antislavery politicians, abolitionists, enslaved people, and white northerners to dislodge slaveholder power from the center of national political life and to destroy slavery during the American Civil War. Yet in many ways, after the war, as after multiple crises over slavery in the past, the institutional and ideological constraints of Jeffersonian democracy returned in new forms, as racist violence and racial union displaced black emancipation. The postbellum Democratic party, a descendant of the Jeffersonian coalition, maintained an alliance between northern freedom and southern oppression well into the twentieth century.²¹ In order to liberate individuals and build democracy, northern Jeffersonians embraced slaveholders and accommodated bondage. The toleration of coercive, antidemocratic authority has been a dominant aspect of American political culture ever since.

      CHAPTER 1

      The Emancipation of New England

      In a letter to Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts in 1801, Thomas Jefferson reached out in sympathy to an oppressed compatriot. “Your part of the Union tho’ as absolutely republican as ours,” said Jefferson, “had drunk deeper of the delusion [of Federalism], & is therefore slower in recovering from it. The aegis of government, & the temples of religion & of justice, have all been prostituted there to toll us back to the times when we burnt witches. But your people will rise again.” Characteristically, Jefferson’s exaggerated metaphor had an element of truth: after the election of 1800, in which Jefferson became president and his Democratic-Republican party took control of Congress, New England became a bastion of Federalist resistance.¹ Republicans quickly came to predominate in the middle states and the South, but they remained a minority in New England, where they confronted the proud remnant of the Federalist party. New England Republicans thus faced a difficult electoral and ideological challenge. In Connecticut, Republicans did not gain significant congressional power until 1819, and Federalists likewise controlled state politics until 1817. Massachusetts was competitive throughout the Jeffersonian era, as were Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont, but Republicans never achieved the widespread success in New England that they did in the mid-Atlantic states and the South. Thus, in many ways, the political contests of the 1790s continued in New England throughout the Jeffersonian era, as Republicans intent on democratizing the political order confronted Federalists who sought to maintain existing social and political hierarchies.

      The Jeffersonian fight against Federalism induced paroxysms of hyperbole on both sides, but it did have considerable substance. Outside Rhode Island, suffrage in New England was fairly widespread in the early nineteenth century, but few regional elites endorsed the idea of “democracy,” whether as institution or culture. There were established churches in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut long after 1800, and in the latter state, Federalists protected their hegemony through the notorious stand-up law, compelling citizens to vote in public in order to buttress the paternalist power of local elites. While Connecticut was most hostile to Republicans, Massachusetts Federalists held out the longest, defeating a determined opposition in 1820 to retain crucial conservative features in the state constitution. In addition, Federalists cultivated an antidemocratic political culture in newspapers, pamphlets, and orations, scorning the naïve idealism of men who assumed that “the people” were inherently good and prepared to govern in their own best interest.² In response, Republicans championed political freedom for ordinary white men, while a Jeffersonian vanguard defended democracy as an ideal system of government.

      These New England struggles had national significance: in the months before the election of 1800, Republican newspapers North and South documented the perfidy of Federalists in the “Eastern states,” and such rhetoric continued well after Jefferson’s election. Jefferson appointed three New Englanders to major executive positions in his first term, and he reached out to religious and political dissidents from the region.³ New England Republicans believed Jefferson would lead them toward a bountiful political future of self-government and religious freedom. New England Federalists, in contrast, contested the very premises of the Republican coalition. Instead of a party of liberation, said Federalists, the Republicans were a party of slavery, dominated by the masters of the South. Acerbic and at times cynical, such comments rested on an obvious truth: the Democratic-Republican party was the dominant political organization in the slaveholding states, and during the twenty-four years of the Virginia dynasty, Republicans North and South helped slaveholders win and maintain national political power. Federalists thus forced New England Republicans to confront the contradiction at the heart of their political coalition, which fought simultaneously to expand democracy in the North and protect the power of slavery in the South.

      New England politics, then, were far more complex than the Jeffersonian narrative of virtuous Republicans struggling against a Federalist elite. Although Federalists openly condemned democracy, they were also severe critics of southern slaveholders, while New England Jeffersonians, who condemned the Federalist elite, made common cause with slaveholders to liberate themselves from Federalist rule. Doing so often required a complex ideological adaptation, since a number of Jeffersonians had opposed slavery early in their careers, and some maintained that opposition well after 1800. In the 1780s and 1790s, many budding Jeffersonians in the Northeast described slaveholding as a despotism fundamentally unfit for America; after 1800, these same men defended Republicans from Federalist charges that the Jeffersonian coalition was run by and on the behalf of slaveholders. In response