Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

of slavery, which instilled “pride, haughtiness, domination, cruelty, deceit and indolence” in slaveholders. He likewise tempered his antislavery views: he emphasized the moral burdens borne by truly Christian masters and he called on slaves, in his letter to Virginia Baptists, to obey their masters, be “patient in your hardships” and look to Heaven for redemption. He condemned slavery, but believed emancipation impracticable, since slaves were treated as property. The government of Virginia could hardly afford to purchase all of the state’s slaves, while emancipation without compensation would be unjust. And, like Jefferson, he worried that a post-emancipation society would be consumed by violent black retribution and interracial sexual union, whether through marriage or “forcible debauches.” Yet unlike Jefferson, Leland also criticized such racist paranoia, noting that white men would surely object to similar arguments were they enslaved in Africa. In a radical moment, Leland wondered “whether men had not better lose all their property, than deprive an individual of his birth-right blessing—freedom. If a political system is such, that common justice cannot be administered without innovation, the sooner such a system is destroyed, the better for the people.”¹⁸

      Such antislavery thoughts were not uncommon among New England Republicans in the 1790s. Connecticut’s Abraham Bishop, arguably the most important Jeffersonian ideologue in the region, went even farther, challenging not only slavery but also racism in a series of articles from 1791 published under the title “The Rights of Black Men” and widely reprinted. Comparing the American Revolution to the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue that had begun that year in August, he celebrated their shared principles, while elevating the struggle of the slave rebels, who sought to destroy real, not metaphorical, slavery. Bishop denounced theories of racial difference and minimized the political stakes of the American Revolution:

      If freedom depends upon colour, we have only to seek for the whitest man in the world, that we may find the freest, and for the blackest, that we may find the greatest slave. But the enlightened mind of Americans will not receive such ideas. We believe that Freedom is the natural right of all rational beings, and we know that the Blacks have never voluntarily resigned that freedom. Then is not their cause as just as ours? We fought with bravery, and prayed earnestly for success upon our righteous cause, when we drew the sword, and shed the blood of Englishmen—for what!—Not to gain Freedom; for we were never Slaves; but to rid ourselves of taxes, imposed without our consent, and from the growing evils of usurpation.¹⁹

      The “enlightened mind of Americans” had failed to live up to its principles. In the United States, Bishop argued, the power of slavery consistently overpowered the promise of freedom: “the blacks are still enslaved within the United States,” he complained bitterly, “the Indians are driven into the society of savage beasts, and we glory in the equal rights of men, provided that we white men can enjoy the whole of them.” Bishop’s uniqueness lay in that last ironic note, a forward-looking criticism of white male democracy and racial exclusion. He believed that race should determine political status. That presumably provided grounds not only to support the rebels of Saint-Domingue, but to support equal citizenship for all throughout the United States.²⁰

      In this respect, Bishop reflected a radical side of transatlantic republican politics. In Saint-Domingue, slave rebels pushed free men of color and eventually representatives from Revolutionary France to embrace an antislavery agenda. In August 1793, after a desperate battle over the summer to retain control of Cap Français and the Northern Province of Saint-Domingue, French commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax declared the end of slavery in the Northern Province. That decision was soon echoed throughout the island, and in February 1794, the National Convention in Paris abolished slavery “throughout the territory of the Republic.” Although such proclamations were the result of contingency as much as idealism, and depended on the constant struggle of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, they suggested the broad egalitarian potential of radical republican politics. During his brief tenure as minister to the United States, “Citizen” Edmond-Charles Genet, despite his favorable reception by slaveholders in the American South, lent support to Sonthonax’s decision and was openly hostile to white refugees from Saint-Domingue in the United States. Although many of the Democratic-Republican societies that arose in the wake of Genet’s mission overlooked the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, multiple Republican papers in the North, like the Boston Argus, which published Bishop’s essays, attacked both slavery and racism from a radical cosmopolitan perspective.²¹

      While few of his contemporaries went as far as Bishop and supported revolution by the enslaved, his combination of antislavery argument and democratic politics was not atypical. Many Jeffersonians believed, like John Leland, that slavery was “inconsistent with republican government.” Matthew Lyon of Vermont, who became infamous for spitting in the face of Connecticut Federalist Roger Griswold on the floor of Congress in February 1798, became a national icon of Jeffersonian democracy in New England later that fall as a martyr of the Federalist Sedition Act. In the midst of his egalitarian invectives in Congress, he found time to defend the right of petition on behalf of antislavery groups. John Bacon, a Presbyterian minister turned farmer turned Anti-Federalist turned Republican from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was more akin to Bishop. He too articulated an early antiracist position, by opposing a clause in the 1780 state constitution that would have barred “Negroes, Indians, and Mulattoes” from the franchise outright. During his single term in Congress in 1801–1803, he argued bluntly for national recognition of African American citizenship. Multiple individual cases suggest that Democratic-Republicans refused to condone slavery because it embodied what Jeffersonians hated most: power and oppression.²²

      In New England, such sentiments were supplemented by a regional pride in being untainted by slavery. According to Massachusetts flagship Republican paper the Independent Chronicle, “the people of New England are the only people on earth, who ever deserved to be considered as really and exclusively FREE,” since “in Massachusetts no man can be a slave, by the constitution.” As Joanne Melish has argued, such “disowning” of slavery entailed historical amnesia about the prevalence of slavery in the past and racial exclusion of nominally free African Americans in the present.²³ In addition to barring African Americans from outside Massachusetts from taking up permanent residence in the state, for example, Massachusetts outlawed interracial marriage and began to implement segregation in many areas of public life. Yet Massachusetts citizens had also opposed slavery in national politics. During the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry, later to become a Jeffersonian stalwart, attacked the three-fifths clause, and refused to sign the document in part because of its protections of slavery. Similar skepticism arose during the ratifying debates in Massachusetts, where members of the convention and ordinary citizens objected to the three-fifths clause and the slave trade clause. In contrast to the ratification debates in Virginia, Anti-Federalists in Massachusetts were suspicious of the new federal government not because it seemed liable to threaten slavery, but because it gave the institution so much support.²⁴

      New England Federalists, more so than Republicans, revised and reissued objections to the three-fifths clause in the early Jeffersonian years. Yet Republicans were hardly acquiescent on the subject of slavery. In principle, their ideological commitments were far more dangerous to slavery than Federalist thought. A Jeffersonian vanguard, influenced by the American and French Revolutions and transatlantic radicalism, began to articulate a far-reaching argument for the political transformation not just of the United States, but of the world. In their minds, hatred of aristocracy and monarchy amounted to far more than a technical argument about how the American government should be organized. Anti-aristocratic thought instead expressed a universal condemnation of all forms of political hierarchy, a plea for the oppressed of the world. Writing from Philadelphia in December 1797, Massachusetts Republican congressman Joseph Bradley Varnum exemplified this anti-aristocratic ethos in a letter to his son. “While the innate principles of Justice, humanity, the Love of rational Liberty and of Mankind, Expand the virtuous heart with affectionate concern,” he wrote,

      for the many millions of the human race, who have for a long time, been suffering under the rod of Tyranny, Oppression, War and bloodshed, in different parts of the World; the vicious hereditary Monarchs, and Aristocrats, with their selfish views and diabolical intrigues, wantonly invert the power which the people have put into their hands for the best