Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

their own oppression at the hands of the New England elite, often claiming they were the true slaves, virtuous democrats yearning to be free.

      The fact that white men could describe their relative oppression as enslavement reflected the well-established usage of slavery as a metaphor in Anglo-American political thought. Jeffersonian politics in many ways restaged the alchemy of the Revolution, in which white men denounced their political slavery to England in a manner that often obscured or lent direct support to the presence of chattel slavery in the colonies.⁴ New England Republicans likewise protested their enslavement by Federalist masters by transforming antislavery argument in order to come to terms with chattel bondage. In the early national era these arguments circulated in a much denser, democratizing public sphere and in a nation-state that had explicitly incorporated slavery in its formation.

      Yet there was no inherent ideological accord between slavery and democracy. While the American Revolution had encouraged white men to see themselves as slaves, it also rendered African slavery an ideological problem in new ways, subject to criticism in the rebellious colonies and in England.⁵ The United States Constitution of 1787 granted slaveholders considerable institutional security, but it also incorporated slavery into a complex new political order, one that came to include partisan political competition, an expansive public sphere, and radical egalitarian ideologies. As slavery and democracy expanded throughout the early national period, they came into conflict in multiple arenas: at the national level, in the northern states, in print culture, and in the minds of the new citizens of the United States.

      In other words, slavery became a democratic problem in the early republic. Toleration of its ongoing growth and power thus required a democratic solution. In the 1790s, numerous northern Republicans had called slavery into question. While they did not threaten to overturn the Constitution, they did express antislavery arguments that challenged southern power, and they lived in states where slavery was subject to ideological and political attack. New England especially represented a potential threat to slavery, as the institution had declined rapidly across the region by 1800.⁶ However, as the Democratic-Republican relationship between North and South intensified in the late 1790s and early 1800s, New England Republicans focused not on slavery but on the power of Federalism in their states and in their lives. In doing so, they helped to build an ideological accommodation with southern slaveholders that was as important as the institutional protections of bondage in the Constitution. Although less precise than the three-fifths bonus, these ideological negotiations between democratic subjectivity and slaveholder power were essential to the formation of the Jeffersonian coalition.

      With the rise of Jefferson, democratic sentiment, instead of challenging slavery, often worked to support it: while New England men were liberated from Federalist rule, most southern slaves met the opposite fate at the hands of their Republican masters. Over time, these bonds between freedom and slavery would be reinforced by race, but early New England Jeffersonians did not found their alliance with the South on terms of white supremacy. Instead, they made their case in much more universal language, binding the egalitarian aspirations of ordinary white men to a political coalition that protected slavery at the national level.

       The Air in America Is Too Pure for Slavery

      By 1800, New England had old and deep ties to slavery. New England wealth grew in syncopation with the rise of Atlantic slavery, as New England merchants exploited the carrying trade to the Caribbean, and Rhode Islanders dominated North American participation in the African slave trade. Revolutionary era abolitionism remained limited by this history of slavery. While the institution had only a marginal presence in the region by 1800, gradual emancipation clauses in Connecticut and Rhode Island ensured that there would be slaves in both states until the 1840s. Throughout New England, free people of color faced official and informal discrimination. Yet beginning in the late eighteenth century, some New Englanders had begun to contest slavery in the region and in the new United States. An outlier in the colonial era due to the relative scarcity of chattel bondage, New England produced determined secular and religious opponents of slavery in the new United States. Antislavery critics fought to end slavery within the region and to challenge its power in the national government.⁷

      Some of these early opponents of slavery would later become important members of the New England Republican coalition. Levi Lincoln of Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, defended the freedom of Quock Walker in the 1781 case of Jennison v. Caldwell, long assumed to mark the beginning of the end of slavery in his home state. During Jefferson’s presidency, he was a key regional ally. Anticipating the growing strength of New England Republicans in September 1800, Jefferson told James Madison that Lincoln was “undoubtedly the ablest & most respectable man in the Eastern states.”⁸

      While historians have written about Lincoln’s antislavery argument on behalf of Walker and his later partisan arguments on behalf of Jefferson, they have done little to think about these two moments of his career in relationship to each other. In part, this reflects the long distance in time—close to twenty years—between Lincoln’s defense of Walker and his defense of the slaveholding Republican Jefferson. But there was far less ideological distance between those two moments in Lincoln’s career, as other New England Jeffersonians demonstrate. Antislavery argument was intertwined with early Democratic-Republican ideology in New England, as Jeffersonians turned to universalist conceptions of human freedom both to denounce slavery and to justify their own case for emancipation from Federalist rule. At least some white men expressed the logical conclusions of their beliefs in self-government, freedom of conscience, human equality, and opposition to tyranny. Slavery contradicted those principles; therefore, it was wrong and should end. But as Federalist-Republican antagonism intensified in the 1790s, tightening bonds between emergent Jeffersonians North and South, New England Republican thought turned inward, and political sentiments that once embraced a strong opposition to slavery were refigured in support of liberating white men from Federalist control. Their emancipator was Thomas Jefferson, who acted the part quite effectively. Alliance with Jefferson meant alliance with the dominant contingent of southern slaveholders in national politics, who likewise embraced the Democratic-Republican cause. Freedom in New England became harnessed to slavery in the South, which inevitably warped Republican antislavery argument.

      The Quock Walker case arose in Worcester County, Massachusetts, in 1781 when Walker, an African American, left his reputed master Nathaniel Jennison to work for Seth and John Caldwell. Jennison first attempted to retain Walker by force, and then sued the Caldwells for enticing away his servant, winning his case in the Worcester Court of Common Pleas. On appeal to the Superior Court, Lincoln argued for the Caldwells and presented an impassioned argument against the institution of slavery. Jennison’s claim had no merit, said Lincoln, because Walker was free, and therefore not subject to any man’s will. Lincoln pointed to the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which claimed “all men are born free and equal,” but he also invoked natural and divine law to argue that all men shared a foundational equality. We “are born in the same manner, our bones clothed with the same kind of flesh, live and die in the same manner.” The legality or illegality of slavery was almost beside the point—if any “law of man” established slavery, said Lincoln, it contradicted the law of God, and the latter injunction took precedence. Better to sacrifice your bodies in disobeying a corrupt human law, Lincoln told the jury, than to disregard the will of God and sacrifice “your own souls.” Lincoln also modified an argument associated with the 1772 Somerset case, declaring “the air in America was too pure for a slave to breathe in.”⁹ While Lord Mansfield’s decision in Somerset did not end slavery in England, it did destabilize the security of slavery throughout the British Empire and later influenced American antislavery legal strategy.¹⁰ In attempting to establish Walker’s freedom, Lincoln expressed far-reaching arguments that theoretically undermined slavery throughout the emerging United States. In his mind, divine and natural law, and the very nature of the American polity, opposed any positive law establishing slavery. In a separate decision in 1783, Massachusetts Superior Court Justice William Cushing would argue that the state constitution of 1780 did as well. Lincoln won his case in 1781, and a variety of similar legal actions, alongside informal challenges to bondage by African Americans, undermined slavery throughout Massachusetts.¹¹

      Twenty years