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CHAPTER 2

Philadelphia, Crossroads of Democracy

Writing in Philadelphia’s Aurora General Advertiser in 1804, Thomas Paine defined the political novelty of Jeffersonian America. According to Paine, popular sovereignty and political equality made the United States home to a new type of man. Once they left Europe and its “hereditary potentates” behind, men began to consider “government and public affairs as part of their own concern,” and thereby “found themselves in possession of a new character, the character of sovereignty.”¹ Alongside the freedom to govern one’s self, however, there was a very different type of sovereignty in America, as Paine knew well—the sovereignty of the master over the slave. Slaveholding power did not inspire all men to see government as “part of their own concern,” as it was inherently antidemocratic. But in Jeffersonian political culture, these two forms of sovereignty were closely bound to each other, as the autonomy of new men helped sustain a nation-state that perpetuated bondage.

More than any other location in the early republic, Philadelphia expressed the conflicting strands of early national democracy. Tensions between North and South, Europe and the United States, black and white, cosmopolitanism and nationalism were woven throughout the city in a complex and combustible mix. Following the path of Tom Paine, English and Irish radicals flocked to the United States in the 1790s in response to British political repression, only to encounter the nativist and anti-Jacobin sentiments of the Federalist party. In Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, such men acquired national significance in the partisan struggles that created and sustained Jeffersonian democracy. These migrants gave an international cast to the rise of American democracy, since they connected their fight against Federalism to the French Revolution, the struggle for Irish autonomy, and a global ideological war against aristocracy. They also fought, by their very presence, to achieve Paine’s vision of America as an “asylum for liberty.” Northern Jeffersonians, immigrant and native alike, were the strongest supporters of liberalizing citizenship laws in the early nation. They embodied, in their lives and experiences, some of the most egalitarian ambitions of the Jeffersonian coalition.

In the midst of such cosmopolitan ardor, the state of Pennsylvania also had an important practical role in the Jeffersonian coalition. It was by far the most crucial ally to the South and the Republican cause. Jefferson wrote multiple letters about Pennsylvania in the lead-up to the election of 1800, explaining to confidantes that Pennsylvania “nearly holds the balance between the North & South”; that through “harmonizing by it’s public authorities with those to the South,” Pennsylvania “would command respect to the Federal constitution.”² The 1799 election of Republican Thomas McKean as governor of Pennsylvania was seen as a bellwether for Republican success in the presidential contest the following year. As it turned out, Pennsylvania almost did not cast an electoral ballot in the election of 1800, since Federalists maintained enough power in the state senate to block a popular vote of the state’s electors. But Jefferson was right about Pennsylvania’s role in the Republican coalition. A relatively united South allied to one of the larger northern states, New York or Pennsylvania, could control national politics (or, in Jefferson’s more subtle rendering, “command respect to the Federal constitution”). New York joined southern Republicans in 1800 to bring Jefferson to the presidency, but it quickly proved unreliable, in part because of factional competition among the state’s Republicans, and in part because New Yorkers quickly moved to challenge Virginia for predominance in the federal government. After the election of 1800, by contrast, Pennsylvania proved to be the most reliable northern state in the Democratic-Republican column: it supported every Democratic-Republican presidential candidate and then every Democratic presidential candidate until the election of 1840. Other than Martin Van Buren in 1836, all these candidates were southern slaveholders. This record of capable support earned the state its moniker, “the keystone in the democratic arch,” a label that, for some southerners, reflected the state’s tractability as much as its position in the Union. Thus Henry Clay, in the midst of the Missouri Crisis, asked that the state remember itself as “the unambitious Pennsylvania, the keystone in the federal arch,” and cease stoking sectional discord.³ From Clay’s perspective, among Pennsylvania’s chief virtues was its ability to keep quiet on the problem of slavery.

Yet when it came to political conflict over slavery, Pennsylvania had not exactly been unambitious. In 1780, the state instituted gradual emancipation, and Jeffersonian Philadelphia was home to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the most powerful antislavery group in the early republic, as well as a significant and politically active free black community. Southerners were well aware of Pennsylvania’s antislavery tendencies, since the first major congressional crisis over slavery was sparked by antislavery petitions Pennsylvanians sent to the House. Southerners who came to Philadelphia in the 1790s, when the city served as the national capital, were wary of antislavery and free black residents; George Washington made sure to keep his slaves shuttling back and forth to Mount Vernon when he served as president, anxious that they would seek their freedom under Pennsylvania law. This reflected a common problem for slaveholders who traveled to or lived in proximity to Pennsylvania. Despite obtaining a fugitive slave law in 1793 that aided masters in recapturing their human property, slaveholders from Maryland and Virginia complained that their slaves frequently escaped to Pennsylvania, and they soon petitioned the federal government for stricter fugitive laws. Even though Pennsylvania accommodated sojourning slaveholders in state law, masters worried that Pennsylvanians, white as well as black, might refuse to tolerate the force and authority necessary to maintain power over their slaves.⁴

From the perspective of African Americans like Philadelphia’s James Forten, however, freedom in the white-dominated society of early national Pennsylvania was deeply compromised. Most Pennsylvania whites were not willing to accept African Americans as social and political equals, barring them informally from the polls, juries, militia companies, and political celebrations. Gradual emancipation itself kept blacks born before 1780 enslaved and others indentured for over twenty years, an outright denial of equal standing. Moreover, in the years after 1780, many African Americans who by rights should have become free were illegally sent to the southern states or kidnapped into slavery. Similar developments shaped the post-abolition world of New York and New Jersey as well, but not until 1799 and 1804 respectively, when those states passed gradual emancipation laws. In 1800, there were still more than 20,000 slaves in New York and 12,000 in New Jersey (compared to roughly 1,700 in Pennsylvania), and New Jersey masters frequently published runaway ads in Philadelphia papers. The unfinished state of mid-Atlantic abolition meant that antislavery efforts in Pennsylvania were constantly embattled in the local politics of race and emancipation.⁵

Philadelphia was a crossroads where multiple strands of early national politics intersected, overlapped, and collided: antislavery agitation, immigrant radicalism, slaveholder power, and democracy. Looking beyond the local struggles over race and abolition in the city that have been well documented by historians, this chapter examines the Jeffersonian encounter with slavery in terms of national and transnational ideological struggles over democracy. The major focus throughout is on three Irish American insurgents—William Duane, Thomas Branagan, and John Binns—whose lives exemplify the crucial connections between slavery, nationalism, transatlantic democracy, and race in early national Philadelphia. Taking this wider perspective suggests a more complicated genealogy for the emergence of white male democracy in the North. As Jeffersonians sought a language to explain themselves and their bonds to southern power, they increasingly turned to race, which allowed them to redefine democracy in ways that made solidarity with slaveholders seem more legitimate. Whiteness, in other words, was as much about making cognitive and ideological allowances for the extreme authority of slaveholding, as it was a method for excluding free African Americans from equal political standing.⁶

But race was always an unstable category, reflecting the complicated origins of the Jeffersonian alliance. The relationship between slaveholders and democrats was not built on open claims of white supremacy, but rather in a long political fight to democratize the American polity. Throughout the 1790s, cosmopolitan democrats sought to redefine American nationality and citizenship along egalitarian lines. Embracing the United States from the outside, such men had little respect for the claims of tradition or nativity. Yet they also confronted American slavery from an external perspective. It was not an institution that immigrants could take for granted, since they did not have historic ties to the American nation-state. Instead, they had to choose citizenship in the slaveholding republic of the United States. In doing so, immigrant radicals presented the conflict between cosmopolitan democracy and chattel slavery, a defining contradiction of the age of revolution, in one of its starkest forms. Ultimately, nation, race, and democracy fused in a complex and volatile arrangement in Pennsylvania, as immigrants claimed the slaveholding republic as their own, and as the world’s best hope for democratic government.

George Washington, Slaveholding Tyrant

The relationship between transatlantic radicalism and Pennsylvania democracy began during the American Revolution, as exemplified by Thomas Paine, who defined a cosmopolitan argument for American independence in Common Sense and supported the radically republican Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776.⁷ The career of William Duane, who became the most important Jeffersonian editor in the United States during the election of 1800, reflected the ongoing ties between anglophone radicalism and American democracy in the early national period. Born in the North American colonies to Irish emigrant parents in 1760, Duane spent his early years on the New York frontier, near Lake Champlain.⁸ He returned to Ireland with his mother in 1771, then moved to England in the early 1780s, and then, in 1787, to Calcutta, where he edited two newspapers, the Bengal Journal and the World. By 1794, his support for the French Revolution and disgruntled officers in the army of the East India Company put Duane at odds with colonial elites, who forcibly banished him from Bengal. In a parting editorial, Duane proudly claimed American citizenship and told his fellow “Englishmen” that he planned to return to America, where he hoped to find his countrymen enjoying true liberty: “I trust in God I shall find them free, that I may forget that slavery exists anywhere.” That proved to be an impossible ambition, in the short term because he was confined to a ship (aptly named the William Pitt) bound for England.⁹

Duane arrived in England in 1795, where he worked briefly with the London Corresponding Society (LCS), a group of political radicals and reformers who sought to democratize British politics and society. In the context of war between Britain and revolutionary France, LCS members were targets for government repression, as Duane’s counterpart John Binns learned firsthand. Duane emigrated to the United States in 1796, evading Prime Minister William Pitt’s crackdown on the LCS. In America, he continued to pay close attention to British and European politics. He especially supported the United Irishmen, a group of radicals, including John Binns, who fought for an independent Irish republic. His transatlantic politics were shared by Philadelphia Jeffersonians, as the toasts at a December 1799 political celebration suggest: Republicans drank to the cause of democracy in Pennsylvania and the character of Thomas Jefferson as well as to the “rights of man,” the downfall of the “despots of Europe,” and “The United Irishmen, rebellion against tyrants is the law of God.”¹⁰

In the United States, Duane soon found himself at the center of national political conflict. He began to work for Benjamin Franklin Bache at Philadelphia’s Aurora General Advertiser, the most prominent Republican paper in the 1790s. Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, imported European political radicalism into the United States. He published Paine’s work throughout the 1790s, and repeatedly instigated conflict with the Federalist party. After Bache died of yellow fever in 1798, Duane continued to publish the Aurora on behalf of his widow, Margaret Bache. He later took over the paper on his account and married Margaret. With financial assistance from prominent Republicans, the Aurora became the most important Jeffersonian paper in the election of 1800, and Duane retained fairly close ties to Jefferson for the rest of his career. Duane’s life in the United States mirrored those of other British and Irish immigrants like Binns, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Cooper, and Thomas Addis Emmet, who achieved political standing in the United States and infused democratic politics with cosmopolitan radicalism.¹¹

As in New England, early democratic politics in Pennsylvania frequently embraced open opposition to slavery. Soon after arriving in the United States, Duane penned a blistering attack on George Washington and his 1796 farewell address to the American people. Addressing the president directly, through a public letter, Duane indicted Washington for numerous faults, from his partiality to Britain to his endorsement of Hamilton to the warnings against partisanship in the farewell address, which Duane described as “the loathings of a sick mind.” Duane saw himself as a patriot in defense of the new American nation, unafraid to criticize the hero of the Revolution. He warned his readers that republics had often faltered because of excessive “confidence placed in the virtues and talents of individuals”; he therefore sought “to expose the PERSONAL IDOLATRY into which we have been heedlessly running.” At the end of his letter, Duane ruthlessly assessed Washington’s character. He claimed that Washington’s repressive political behavior reflected his moral failures, and entertained doubts about the sincerity of his patriotism during the Revolution. Most damning of all, Washington was a slaveholder. Duane argued that future generations would look back on Washington as a hypocrite and tyrant. They would “discover,” said Duane,

that the great champion of American Freedom the rival of Timoleon and Cincinnatus, twenty years after the establishment of the Republic, was possessed of FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY, enjoying the FRUITS OF THEIR LABOUR WITHOUT REMUNERATION, OR EVEN THE CONSOLATIONS OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION—that he retained the barbarous usages of the feudal system, and kept men in LIVERY—and that he still affected to be the friend of the Christian Religion, of civil Liberty, and moral equality—and to be withal a disinterested, virtuous, liberal and unassuming man.¹²

To Duane, slaveholding was fundamentally antidemocratic.

His denunciations of Washington were echoed across the Atlantic by the Liverpool radical Edward Rushton, who published in 1797 a letter he had written Washington the previous year. A supporter of the French Revolution, Rushton marveled at the contradiction of Washington, “a man who, notwithstanding his hatred of oppression, and his ardent love of liberty, holds at this moment hundreds of fellow-beings in a state of abject bondage.”¹³ Indictments of American hypocrisy on the slavery question were not confined to conservative critics of the American and French Revolutions. Transatlantic republicans likewise attacked slavery and pointed to the gap between American political rhetoric, which celebrated freedom, and the American political economy, which depended on bondage. But in the context of the 1790s, egalitarian attacks on slavery became entangled in partisan conflict and the emergence of Jeffersonian democracy. Thus Duane sought to turn his antislavery condemnation of Washington to partisan ends. Any advocate of democracy opposed to aristocratic rule, he implied, should oppose slavery and George Washington, and support the emerging Democratic-Republican coalition.

Antislavery Republicans

Duane was hardly alone in combining opposition to Federalism with opposition to slavery. The more genteel Republican Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant, had become a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1793, and supported a resolution in the Pennsylvania legislature to abolish slavery in the state, as the institution was “inconsistent with every principle of humanity, justice, and right.” Gallatin briefly served as a U.S. senator in the winter of 1793–1794, until Federalists ejected him on the grounds that he had not been a citizen of the United States the required nine years. In 1795, he returned to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives, where he argued on behalf of antislavery causes. He presented a Quaker antislavery petition to the House in November 1797, and fought southern Federalists to have it read and sent to committee; he likewise defended, albeit in a more circumspect way, the right of free blacks from Philadelphia to petition the House in 1800.¹⁴

In defense of the Quaker petitioners, Gallatin told southern members of Congress that “all men are free when they set their foot within the State” (of Pennsylvania), the only exception being slaves of southern congressmen. That was a considerable overstatement, since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed masters to recapture enslaved people who escaped into Pennsylvania, while state law permitted slaveholders to reside for up to six months in Pennsylvania, slaves in tow. Congressmen, as Gallatin noted, were immune even from the six-month limit, a clear sign of Pennsylvania’s willingness to accommodate the slaveholders of the American federal government. On the other hand, Gallatin, one of the more important Republicans in the House, had no qualms about uttering such openly antislavery sentiments in Congress. His southern Federalist colleagues took him seriously and were fairly incensed by his idealization of an antislavery Pennsylvania. In their eyes, at least, northern Republican hostility to slavery was far from superficial.¹⁵

Gallatin’s colleague John Swanwick, a Republican merchant from Philadelphia, also supported the November 1797 Quaker petition. Back in December 1796, Swanwick had argued for federal intervention to prevent kidnapping of free African Americans. He provoked a debate with South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith, in the course of which Swanwick claimed that free African Americans “ought to be protected in their freedom, not only by the State Legislatures but by the General Government.” In January 1797, Swanwick presented a petition from North Carolina freemen (at the time, residents of Philadelphia), protesting the abrogation of their manumissions in North Carolina and the racist operation of the fugitive slave law. Like Republican Joseph Bradley Varnum of Massachusetts, Swanwick believed free African Americans had the right to petition the government, for “if men were aggrieved, and conceive they have the claim to attention, petitioning was their sacred right, and that right should never suffer innovation.” For most southerners, granting legitimacy to black petitioners was dangerous in and of itself, since it implied some recognition of African American political standing. In the case of the North Carolina freemen, accepting the petition also implied that Congress might investigate southern slavery. The status of slaves from North Carolina, southerners argued, was the proper concern of North Carolina, not the federal government. Northern petitioners and their congressional advocates threatened to instigate a struggle over the control of slavery, one which southern slaveholders wanted by all means to suppress.¹⁶

They consistently failed to do so. Slaveholders successfully blocked northern antislavery proposals, but they could not control the legislative discussion of slavery. When they attempted to suppress discussion, they often demonstrated an antidemocratic authority that further agitated antislavery northerners. In response to Gallatin’s Quaker petition in November 1797, John Rutledge, Jr., complained that Philadelphia Quakers “attempt to seduce the servants of gentlemen travelling to the seat of Government” and that their petition attempted to incite a slave rebellion. Instead of referring the petition to a committee, he was “for its laying on the table, or under the table, that they might not only have done with the business for to-day, but finally.” Rutledge, in other words, agreed with fellow South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith, who told Congress in January 1797 that slavery was “a kind of property on which the House has no power to legislate.” Some historians interpret such claims to exclusive authority over slavery, the indispensable axiom of slaveholder political thought, as arguments for the state-level regulation of the peculiar institution. But many northern Republicans in Congress saw them differently, as attempts to resist democratic governance of an institution dependent on coercive power. Such transparent claims to power in national politics only supported Duane’s portrayal of slaveholders as irredeemable enemies of liberty.¹⁷

Congressional conflict would eventually tear at the sectional bonds of the Jeffersonian coalition, but in the early years of Republican enthusiasm many northerners managed to maintain antislavery principles alongside support for Thomas Jefferson, who was no less a master than George Washington. In Congress, this was made possible in part by the fact that southern Federalists were the most voluble defenders of slavery. They were likewise exceedingly hostile to immigrant Republicans like Gallatin. In March 1798, Gallatin, along with Joseph Bradley Varnum, supported Massachusetts Federalist George Thatcher’s plan to restrict expansion of slavery in the new Mississippi Territory. It was very much a minority position, as only twelve members of the House ended up backing Thatcher’s visionary plan. Gallatin, in other words, much like Duane, was not afraid to speak out against slavery, and he likely felt an extra motivation when attacking arch-Federalists like the South Carolinians John Rutledge, Jr., and Robert Goodloe Harper. An opponent of Thatcher’s motion in March 1798, Harper would soon be denouncing immigrants like Gallatin in debates over the Federalist Naturalization Act of 1798. In May 1798, Harper told Congress that citizenship should be confined to those born in the United States, and “that none but persons born in this country should be permitted to take a part in the Government.”¹⁸

In contrast to men like Rutledge and Harper, it was hard for Thomas Jefferson not to appear liberal-minded. Nor was it difficult for northern Republicans, into the early 1800s, to maintain antislavery arguments alongside devotion to Jefferson. James Sloan, a Quaker who lived across the Delaware River from Philadelphia in Gloucester County, New Jersey, was a defiant Republican and Jefferson adulator: “Instead of a haughty Monarchist,” he told fellow Republicans in 1801, after Jefferson’s election, “we are now blest with a meek and amiable Democrat in the presidential chair.” He was likewise a confirmed opponent of slavery: he was a member of a local abolition society, and after arriving in Congress in 1803, he fought consistently against slavery at the federal level, at one point proposing the emancipation of all the slaves in Washington, D.C.¹⁹ Sloan was often joined in his antislavery attacks by two long-serving Pennsylvania representatives, William Findley and John Smilie. All three men embodied the democratizing impulse of Jeffersonian politics. Findley, in many ways the unspoken hero of the work of historian Gordon Wood, immigrated from Ireland in 1763 and began his American life as a weaver. Smilie had immigrated from Ireland in 1741, almost starving to death en route. He survived to become a prosperous farmer, and then spent a long career representing western Pennsylvania in Congress. These men owed their prominence, and their sense of political belonging, to the success of Jeffersonian democracy at the state and national levels.²⁰

That success was subject to constant Federalist rebuke, as the case of James Sloan indicates. He often marketed his goods (including, presumably, hogs and cattle) in Philadelphia, leading Federalists to lampoon him as a common tradesman unfit for political power. In 1806, a Federalist paper mocked “Jemmy Sloan, who has been so often seen with his apron, his steel, and his cleaver, in the Philadelphia shambles, grease and blood to the eyes.” His colleague in the House, Massachusetts Federalist Samuel Taggart, called him “emphatically the small end of small things,” and could not understand how men like Sloan were elected to office. Taggart took solace in a frequently used metaphor for the rise of Jeffersonian democracy: “the faster the pot boils the sooner it will throw off the scum.”²¹ The pot was democracy, and Sloan was the scum. Such vitriol reflected the democratizing effect of Jeffersonian politics, which brought men like Sloan into political power.

In Taggart’s New England, antagonism between Federalists and Republican often served to deflect attention from the national politics of slavery. But in Congress, Republican commitments to democracy and equality often led to conflicts over slavery with southern Federalist masters. In January 1800, Smilie, like Gallatin, defended the right of Absalom Jones and other free blacks from Philadelphia to petition the federal government, in the face of pronounced southern hostility. The Philadelphia petitioners requested reconsideration of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, an end to the international slave trade and, most alarming of all to slaveholders, “measures as shall in due course emancipate the whole of their brethren.” Southerners immediately moved to reject the petition and suppress any discussion of slavery. John Rutledge, Jr., scorned the petition as an expression of “this new-fangled French philosophy of liberty and equality,” and deemed its contents “unconstitutional to discuss.” The young Virginia Republican John Randolph, serving his first term in Congress, “wish[ed] that the conduct of the House would have been so indignant as to have passed it over without discussion.” But John Smilie wanted to discuss the petition, for he believed parts of it fell under the purview of the House; more important, he contended that free blacks in the North were “a part of the human species, equally capable of suffering and enjoying with others, and equally objects of attention, and therefore they had a claim to be heard.” Smilie admitted that the House could not grant all the petitioners’ requests—by which he meant their plea for a plan of national gradual emancipation—and he later voted with the overwhelming majority of the House (85-1) to affirm this point and appease slaveholders like Rutledge. Yet his defense of the right of petition, like Gallatin’s and John Swanwick’s, should not be taken lightly, since it suggested that in resistance to southern arguments for absolute control over slavery, northerners might acknowledge the political standing of free African Americans and their “claim to be heard.”²²

Smilie’s appeal to the rights of the “human species” indicated the importance of cosmopolitan and universalist conceptions of political freedom among northern Republicans. These beliefs, Rutledge acknowledged, could challenge slavery by inciting sympathy for the enslaved or by granting free African Americans in the North a limited degree of political standing. In a related way, egalitarian sentiments could challenge slavery by inciting antipathy for slaveholders. Although by no means economic levelers, many northern Jeffersonians opposed elite privilege, in part because so many Federalists treated upstart Republicans as men who did not deserve to govern. Pennsylvania’s Republican governor from 1808 to 1817, Simon Snyder, had once been a tanner. Pennsylvania representative and then senator Jonathan Roberts’s father was engaged in politics, but Roberts began his own career as an apprentice wheelwright. Duane scrambled for money throughout his career, constantly imploring subscribers to the Aurora to pay their bills, and requesting patronage from gentlemen Republicans in positions of power. Such men were not accustomed to luxury; they made a virtue of their middling backgrounds, and, like the more genteel Abraham Bishop in Connecticut, they were often indignant at the wealth and power of “the great, the wise, the rich and mighty men of the world.” Such attitudes, often generated by disputes with northern Federalists, could also engender hostility to slaveholders, as in Duane’s attack on George Washington. As Pennsylvania Republican John B. C. Lucas (originally Jean-Baptiste, a republican immigrant from France) argued in Congress in 1804, slavery was an institution run by and for “the rich part of the community.”²³

Thus, as in New England, Pennsylvania Jeffersonians demonstrated a wide range of antislavery sentiment. Of course, as Democratic-Republicans, all these men were allied to powerful slaveholders in the southern states. And as in New England, instead of rejecting that alliance, they found ways to embrace it. Immigrant Jeffersonians elevated the Jeffersonian alliance beyond partisanship, as they fought for political inclusion in the United States. In response to Federalist nativism, immigrants leagued with Republican slaveholders to protect their political future in America. Through this relationship, cosmopolitan conceptions of American citizenship and a democratic public sphere became closely tied to what William Duane had defined, in 1796, as their antithesis: American slavery.

Slaves in the Bowels: Thomas Branagan

The Irish immigrant Thomas Branagan enacted the most poignant rendering of this ideological encounter, in a series of eccentric works that defined the intersection of egalitarianism, slavery, race, and conscience. A Jefferson acolyte, but not formally a Republican, Branagan began his American career relatively penniless. He appears to have come from means in Dublin, but he was disinherited for abandoning Catholicism, and arrived in Philadelphia without capital and with few connections. Before coming to the United States, Branagan, according to his autobiography, had participated in both the transatlantic slave trade and Caribbean slavery. As a young man in 1790, he joined a slave ship operating out of Liverpool and traveled to Africa and then the Caribbean to help buy and sell African slaves. He remained in the Caribbean for the next eight years, working as a seaman, a privateer, and finally as an overseer in Antigua. At some point he had a conversion experience and embraced a form of evangelical Christianity, likely Methodism; while an overseer, he experienced a more profound conversion to antislavery principle. “Impressed with a sense of the villainy and barbarity of keeping human beings in such deplorable conditions as I often saw the slaves reduced to,” Branagan abandoned his position, returned to Dublin long enough to be disinherited, and then made for the United States. He would eventually come to call himself a “Penitential Tyrant,” a man driven by remorse for his past participation in the evil of slavery.²⁴

Branagan expressed a different side of northern democratic culture than William Duane: he was far less interested in secular politics, and on some issues, he was closer to New England Federalists than Jeffersonian Republicans. While he shared Duane’s anti-elitism and his ardor for Thomas Jefferson, Branagan ultimately believed in divine justice far more than secular redemption. God, not natural law or reason, judged the good and evil in men and provided the foundation for human solidarity and individual morality. Like many evangelicals, Branagan stressed an individual connection to God, rooted in “conscience,” but antislavery arguments radicalized his sense of religious individualism. He echoed antislavery figures from Pennsylvania’s past, like the Quaker Benjamin Lay, and pointed to future abolitionist appeals to a “higher law”: “it is better for me to hearken to, and obey the voice of conscience, (when under the influence of scripture and reason,),” said Branagan in 1807, “than the requisitions or prohibitions of men.”²⁵ As was true of Jeffersonians throughout the North, Branagan understood democracy in terms of the freedom of the individual subject to think and act autonomously. But liberation from religious or political authority was less important to Branagan than coming to terms with human interdependence, and especially the relationship between one’s self and suffering others. As Branagan put it in verse, humans, inspired by Jesus Christ (the “guest of celestial race”),

Feel sympathetic love for all our race,

And circle mankind in one kind embrace;

Our greatest grief is to see human wo,

Yet can’t relieve, or stop the tears that flow.²⁶

Branagan’s individual was caught in an empathic web of connections to others, oppressed and oppressors alike. One’s conscience was the arbiter of these relationships, the place where the pain of the suffering and the power of despotism were felt most keenly, and where the work of opposition began.²⁷

Like many middling Jeffersonians, Branagan challenged the power of traditional elites to control access to knowledge. He had little faith in classical learning, and had no desire to comprehend Greek or Latin—although he did base much of his literary work on imitations of Homer and Virgil. “What in the name of common sense,” Branagan wondered, “is the use of using language that one reader in one thousand cannot understand, and which has no other tendency but to notify the reader, who is not a latinest, and notify him that his author is one.”²⁸ This populist and peculiar writer did not achieve much in the way of literary merit, but more than any other white Pennsylvanian, he gave voice to the powerful connections and contradictions between democratic subjectivity, slaveholder power, and race in the early national North.

From 1804 to 1805, Branagan published four long works indicting the international slave trade and the power of slavery in the United States. The first, A Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa, introduced his cause and attempted to raise subscription funds for two poetic works, Avenia and The Penitential Tyrant, both published in 1805, that dramatized the evil of the slave trade and slavery. Branagan apparently caught the attention of New York Quaker and antislavery publisher Samuel Wood, who helped release Avenia in 1805 and printed an extended edition of The Penitential Tyrant in 1807.²⁹ Finally, Branagan also published his Serious Remonstrances Addressed to the Citizens of the Northern States in 1805, a pamphlet that sought to incite northerners to confront the problem of American slavery. Serious Remonstrances also marked a departure from his other work, characterized by a deep empathy for the enslaved, as Branagan now embraced a racist paranoia and proposed to colonize all persons of African descent outside the United States. Thus in a compressed period, Branagan expressed a wide range of responses to slavery and African Americans: egalitarian disgust for slaveholders; empathy for the enslaved; and racist fear of black equality. The tensions between these positions were never reconciled in Branagan’s work. Serious Remonstrances, contrary to some interpretations of Branagan, was not a conclusive sign of his departure from the empathic politics of his earlier work, as Branagan republished Tyrant in 1807 and Avenia in 1810 and continued to publish antislavery writings in the antebellum period.³⁰ The two Branagans, empathic and racist, were very much contemporaneous, just as egalitarian thought in the early national North was torn between indictment and accommodation of American slavery.

In many ways, Branagan defined a vanguard antislavery position for his time, combining Christian ethics, democratic sentiment, and empathy for the oppressed. He believed that all humans were fundamentally equal, and that slavery was unjust according to Christian principle; that slaveholders were despots who threatened the rights of all individuals, not only their own slaves; and, finally, that every individual had a compassionate interest in ending slavery, whether or not they owned slaves themselves. In a complex restatement of the Golden Rule, Branagan understood society as an interdependent web of humans, all spiritually equal, which made the oppression of any one human an ethical problem for all others. One should feel not only pity for the enslaved, he argued, but also guilt for tolerating the violent authority of slaveholders. Political belonging, insofar as it formalized these social ties, escalated the gravity of one’s responsibility for actions committed by the state and fellow citizens. Every free American, in other words, was culpable for the crime of slavery.

The frontispiece to the 1807 edition of The Penitential Tyrant dramatized this argument. Branagan used an engraving by David Edwin which had served as the frontispiece for a previous edition of Tyrant as well as the 1805 edition of Avenia. It depicted a man gesturing to the Goddess of Liberty, who sat beneath a pillar adorned with the motto of the state of Pennsylvania, “Liberty, Virtue, and Independence.” In the background were “African slaves, landed on the shores of America.” An accompanying description emphasized the contrast between “Practical Slavery and Professional Liberty” in the United States. As they attacked American hypocrisy, Branagan and his publisher Samuel Wood emphasized the guilt of the average citizen as much as that of the slaveholder. “Sons of Columbia, hear this truth in time,” said the description, “he who allows oppression shares the crime.” An introduction written by Wood offered a maxim that indicted the American political order and those who supported it: as “slavery and tyranny are completely inseparable … no man who holds a slave ought to be intrusted with a post, either great or small, among a free people.”³¹ In a democracy like the United States, one’s own life, however remote from the scene of a plantation, bore some responsibility for the tyranny of slaveholding.

Branagan’s sense of racial equality was fairly straightforward—all humans were racially the same, he argued in his Preliminary Essay, and contending otherwise “subverts the whole fabric of revealed religion.” He mocked scientific speculations that diversity of physical appearance indicated diversity of species.³² Avenia, arguably his most ambitious production, rendered this sense of human equality in poetic form, by presenting a gory epic of the African slave trade, told from the perspective of the title character, an African princess, and her friends and relations. Much of the poem recounts a brutal battle on the African coast between slave trading “Christians,” as Branagan sarcastically called Europeans, and virtuous Africans. Modeled on the Iliad, the poem indulges in depictions of violence—characters are burned alive, have spears thrown through their heads, and are struck by lightning in an act of divine retribution. The narrative has a simple moral lesson: the so-called Christians are violent men and hypocrites, while the Africans are heroic individuals who represent the true spirit of Christianity. Branagan remained within the model of the “virtuous slave,” as identified by François Furstenberg, in which white representations of slave resistance typically end not with liberty for the enslaved but rather with tragic death.³³ Having proved their capacity for freedom by resisting enslavement, all the Africans in Avenia eventually die. The Christians win the battle on the African coast and bring captive slaves to the Caribbean, where Avenia, after being raped by her master, decides to kill herself in a noble and predictably ghastly plunge from a cliff, looking back toward her African homeland. Because violent claims of black autonomy were safely contained by literary demise, Branagan and his readers did not have to imagine how slaves who demonstrated the capacity for freedom would achieve it in fact.

Figure 1. Frontispiece from Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant, or Slave Trader Reformed (New York: Samuel Wood, 1807). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Figure 2. Description of frontispiece from Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant.

Yet Branagan’s work had a disruptive potential, and it often broke down the boundaries of the “virtuous slave” narrative. He relished describing the deaths of Christians at the hands of Africans, clearly endorsing African resistance and, by extension, slave resistance in the Americas. He named one of his African heroes Louverture, after Toussaint Louverture of the Haitian Revolution; his counterpart among the Christian enslavers was Leclerc, the name of the French general who tried to reconquer Saint-Domingue for Napoleon in 1802. Both men die in the course of the poem, but meet different fates. Leclerc is electrocuted by God’s retributive lightning bolt, while Louverture, killed by Christian treachery, ascends into heaven, to take a seat alongside other virtuous men, including George Washington, John Wesley, George Whitfield, Branagan’s infant son (who died in 1802), and Jesus Christ. That mental picture of the after-life encapsulates Branagan’s idiosyncratic political imagination. Like most moments in Avenia, the scene is elaborately overworked, and it salvages Christianity even as it indicts “Christian” slave traders. Christian faith remains the fundamental determinant of goodness and truth, judging Europeans and Africans alike. Yet the scene also exemplifies Branagan’s more complex political motivation, which runs throughout much of his early work: to advocate empathetic identification with the victims of slavery.³⁴

In The Penitential Tyrant, his second poetic endeavor, Branagan argued for a human universalism based on empathetic recognition. Inspired by God, humans should “feel our brother’s grief, our brother’s wo; / Feel sympathetic love for all our race, / And circle man in one kind embrace.” For Branagan, sympathy was rooted not in pity for the weak, but rather in empathetic acknowledgment of another’s suffering. In an essay appended to the 1807 edition of the poem, Branagan asked white Americans to put themselves in the position of the slave. Imagine, Branagan asked his readers, that a French army had invaded New York, captured 10,000 white Americans (including one’s family members) and enslaved them in the West Indies. The thought experiment sought to provoke white Americans to regard African slaves as their “brothers and sisters indeed, children of the same primeval parents, but dispersed over the face of the earth by the accumulation of intermediate generations.” African slaves were not alienated from the American body politic, but rather equal members of the human family. Their slavery was as morally revolting as the slavery of one’s own kin.³⁵

Many northern Jeffersonians, like Duane, understood slavery as an institution that embodied unjust power. They perceived the authority and wealth of a man like George Washington from an ideological distance and deemed slavery wrong because slaveholders behaved like aristocrats. Although Branagan made similar arguments, he constantly asked his readers to think of slavery from the perspective of the slave and thus to understand slaveholder power in terms of the suffering it caused. This shift in perspective enabled Branagan to interrogate how non-slaveholders participated in such suffering. Whereas Duane’s attack on Washington emphasized his and like-minded democrats’ distance from slavery, Branagan emphasized his and his readers’ proximity to the institution and their complicity in sustaining it. For example, like other early antislavery radicals, he opposed the use of sugar, because it was tainted by slavery. He implored his readers (especially those “desirous of vindicating the propriety of using the produce of slavery”) to put themselves,

for one moment, in the same condition in which the poor unhappy slaves now are; and view, from the West-Indies, the votaries of liberty and religion, in America, drinking out of their jovial bowls, or China tea cups, the produce of thy labour, thy sweat, and thy blood—and then, and not till then, let thy conscience answer, is it right or wrong? is it just or unjust? is it pleasing or not to that impartial holy Being who is no respecter of persons?³⁶

The passage illuminates the importance of empathy in Branagan’s work, and the critical role of conscience as the seat of ethical judgment—the intersection in the mind between one’s own life, the lives of the oppressed, and abstract principles of equality and justice.

Branagan put his vision of human solidarity into practice during his time in Philadelphia, as he formed relationships with elite African Americans in the city, who helped support his literary efforts. Readers of the Preliminary Essay were asked to contribute funds for Avenia by way of Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and James Forten, three of the most prominent black men in Philadelphia; Allen had paid for the printing of Branagan’s first work, perhaps believing Branagan an ally in the antislavery cause. Yet when Branagan spoke directly to white northerners, he spurned Allen’s generosity by endorsing racial exclusion in Pennsylvania. In his Serious Remonstrances … to the Citizens of the Northern States, also published in 1805, Branagan set out to explain the dangers of slavery to the North. He indicted the abusive power of the masters over their slaves, and their institutional power under the three-fifths clause of the Constitution. But he also contended that the northern states had to end slavery because the institution foisted free and runaway blacks onto them—or rather, into them, as their very “bowels” were filled with “three hundred thousand well informed and aspiring Negroes.” The metaphor indicated Branagan’s convoluted thought: “bowels” in this case referred to either the stomach or simply the interior of the body; the incorporation of “Negroes” promised internal explosion. But in the early nineteenth century, “bowels” also referred to the seat of sympathy, or sympathy itself. As Branagan would ask in one of his later essays, “Can we be so unreasonable as to suppose, that God will hear the prayers of the person who shutteth up his bowels of compassion against his brother?”³⁷ Yet Branagan had trouble maintaining the two main senses of “bowels” alongside each other. Pennsylvania was beset by an internal enemy, and Branagan, who had befriended slaves in Antigua and glorified Africans in Avenia, now argued “that the Northern States would have flourished far more, if there was not a negro in the Union.”³⁸ He turned to a series of racist phobias to explain why these free and “aspiring Negroes” were a danger to northern whites: black men might be elected to Congress (or even the presidency); they would marry white women; they would sexually violate young white girls; they would compete with whites for jobs. The result would be the creation of a mongrel nation, filled with degraded interracial children. The solution was removal of all African Americans, free as well as slave, to a colony somewhere in the new Louisiana Territory, where blacks could rule themselves—as well as, Branagan added, in a faint nod to his earlier arguments for human solidarity, any whites who chose to remove with them.³⁹

How to reconcile the two Branagans? One was an idiosyncratic antislavery radical; the other, in many ways, was in the vanguard of northern racism. One Branagan argued for human equality and formed ties to men like James Forten; the other claimed that free black men were merely “up-start gentlemen” on the lookout for white wives. Such men contributed nothing to the United States; their race and their history of enslavement, not their standing or character, determined whether they could belong to the American polity.⁴⁰

In the work of historian Gary Nash, Branagan reflects the rise of racism in Pennsylvania. Throughout the early national period, many whites who had once opposed slavery embraced racial exclusion. In Philadelphia, this played out in the most practical of ways, as whites forcibly excluded blacks from July Fourth celebrations in the city, enacting the racial limits of their vision of democracy. In 1813, a Jeffersonian Republican named Jacob Mitchell proposed legislation in the Pennsylvania state legislature that would both bar all black in-migration and compel all current black residents to carry a certificate proving their free status. Philadelphia petitioners also demanded that in case of certain crimes, black men and women should be indentured for a term of years to compensate their victims. James Forten fought to keep Mitchell’s proposal from becoming law, appealing to white Pennsylvanians to honor the universalism of the founding principles of the United States and their own state, and protect equality before the law for all citizens, black and white. Mitchell’s bill did not pass, but in many ways the tide was turning against Forten. In the early 1820s, Philadelphia Federalist Samuel Breck was liberal enough to meet Forten in the street and shake his hand (“knowing his respectability,” said Breck, though he mistook his name); Forten informed Breck that he had brought fifteen of his white journeymen to the polls to vote for Breck in a recent congressional election. Yet Forten himself did not vote, as Breck noted that black citizens “never presume to approach the hustings” at election time, since they were kept from the polls—as well as juries and militia musters—by “custom, prejudice or design.” These informal practices foreshadowed later attempts to formally exclude African Americans from the franchise and define full political citizenship as the exclusive prerogative of white men.⁴¹

Thomas Branagan experienced this democratic culture in formation, and did not appear to question it: in his mind, embracing democracy in Philadelphia entailed embracing racism. He intended Serious Remonstrances to be a popular work, written for the “the honest farmer and industrious mechanic”; the essay was filled with denunciations of the idle rich in the North and the slaveholding elite in the South. He adopted a Paineite vision of the United States, but one now deeply modified by race: “America,” he believed, “was appropriated by the Lord of the universe to be an asylum for the oppressed, the injured sons of Europe.” Maintaining that vision required colonization of free blacks, lest the “injured sons of Europe,” on arrival in the United States, be compelled “to associate with negroes, take them for companions, and what is much worse, be thrown out of work and precluded from getting employ to keep vacancies for blacks.”⁴² In other words, American citizenship was meant for white men.

Historians of whiteness have argued that white supremacy enabled immigrants in the antebellum period, especially the Irish, to separate themselves from slaves and free blacks and claim belonging as Americans in the face of nativist xenophobia. White supremacy also helped secure the consent of nonslaveholders to the coercive power that masters wielded over enslaved people.⁴³ Focusing primarily on Jacksonian democracy, accounts of whiteness have underscored the prevalence of race and racial exclusion in American political culture. But such accounts do not fully capture the political and ideological transactions that led democratic radicals like William Duane and Thomas Branagan to embrace slaveholders as political allies in the early national period. Transnational republicans arriving in the United States found that they had to “associate,” not only with black men and women, but with slaveholders, who were a dominant presence in the early Republican coalition. Immigrant radicals did not immediately condone political alliance with slaveholders on the terms of white supremacy. Instead, they recast universal democratic principles in terms of American nationalism and partisan politics. Doing so entailed some toleration of slaveholder power, especially for immigrants who became significant members of the Jeffersonian coalition. That political encounter with slavery ultimately rendered democratic radicalism more amenable to white supremacy, as repeated accommodation of coercive power impaired egalitarian commitments.

Immigrant Radicals and American Nationalism

In the 1790s, Federalists attempted to undermine and constrain Republican agitators like Duane through the Naturalization Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts, a series of laws that directly targeted immigrants. If Branagan did not want European immigrants to “associate with negroes,” Federalists did not want immigrants to associate with the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1798 imposed a fourteen-year waiting period for citizenship, and compelled all immigrants to register themselves forty-eight hours after entering the country; the Alien Enemies Act gave the president the power to deport citizens of any country with whom the United States was at war; the more far-reaching Alien Friends Act gave the president the power to deport any alien deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States”; and the Sedition Act criminalized “false, scandalous, or malicious” statements made against the president, Congress, or the federal government.⁴⁴

The Aurora General Advertiser was a principal target of the Sedition Act, as Federalists had long opposed Benjamin Franklin Bache; when Duane assumed the editorship after Bache’s death, he quickly became a target for repression as well. Pennsylvania Federalists first attempted to corral him through the charge of seditious riot, issued against Duane and three other men, including United Irishman Dr. James Reynolds, for a fracas that occurred outside a Philadelphia Catholic church, when the four attempted to obtain signatures for a memorial in protest of the Alien Friends Act. In defense of Duane, Republican Alexander Dallas argued that the charges were politically motivated, and a Philadelphia jury acquitted him. But Federalists continued to pursue Duane, and attempted to charge him twice with seditious libel, and once on a manufactured charge of contempt of the Senate of the United States. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams considered deeming Duane an alien and deporting him from the United States. More crude methods were employed by McPherson’s Blues, a Federalist militia company. Taking objection to Duane’s portrayal of their role in the suppression of Fries rebellion, a tax rebellion in eastern Pennsylvania, members of the militia company invaded Duane’s office on May 15, 1799, dragged him into the street, and beat him mercilessly. As Duane’s biographer Kim Phillips relates, Federalist editor John Ward Fenno commended the attack, noting that Duane had once insulted George Washington and that he “was not an American, but a foreigner, and not merely a foreigner, but an United Irishman.” Meanwhile, other northern Republicans, like Vermont’s Matthew Lyon and Duane’s Pennsylvania comrade Thomas Cooper, were sent to jail for violations of the Sedition Act. To militant Federalists, immigrant radicals threatened the security of the United States and therefore had to be repressed.⁴⁵

Federalist repression backfired, however, as Republican printers continued to publish their papers and elevated Sedition Act victims as martyrs for democratic freedom. Cooper published essays in the Aurora dated from the Philadelphia prison where he was held, while Lyon ran for and won reelection to Congress from jail. Equally important, the Alien and Sedition Acts were critical in forming ideological and political bonds beyond northern and southern Republicans. When Republicans like Duane supported Jefferson in the election of 1800, they were seeking freedom from political repression in the form of the Sedition Act, and they were fighting to reverse the nativist limits to American citizenship imposed by the Naturalization Act. They argued for an open society, in which a free press protected and expanded democratic freedom and European immigrants could claim citizenship and belonging in the United States. “The press is the engine which every tyrant fears,” said Duane’s Aurora in 1806; “put out the press, and there is an end to democracy.” John Binns, an Irish republican who arrived in the United States in 1801, and eventually became a rival of Duane’s, put this principle on the masthead of his paper, underneath an image of a printing press: The Democratic Press was “the tyrant’s foe, the people’s friend.” The fight against the Sedition Act was, in many ways, a struggle over language, as Duane and later Binns used their newspapers to celebrate “democracy,” a word and idea Federalists disparaged as unchecked, illegitimate popular rule. As Duane would write to Jefferson many years later, the rise of Jeffersonian democracy was as much a “revolution in speech” as a revolution in government. The Republicans won on both counts, driving the Federalists from power and building democracy in the United States, as practice and idea.⁴⁶

Immigrant radicals like Duane and Binns likewise responded to Federalist nativism by championing cosmopolitanism and ethnic diversity. Duane claimed that he was born in colonial New York and that he was therefore an American citizen, but Federalists disputed that claim, and eventually won a court ruling that deemed Duane an alien and a British subject. He became a naturalized citizen in 1802.⁴⁷ As much as he liked to imagine himself a freeborn American, Duane also delighted in celebrating his checkered ethnic and national past. Nativism did not automatically create incentives to claim a blanket white identity, as immigrant radicals instead argued for the political and cultural value of ethnic diversity. “It continues to distress the tories,” wrote Duane, “that a half Irish, half Indian, making for a while a whole American British subject—should be found so fond of the Declaration of Independence—it is downright rebellion against the Lord’s anointed!”⁴⁸

The conflict between nativism and ethnic heterogeneity persisted well after the triumph of the Democratic-Republicans in 1800. In Jeffersonian Pennsylvania, elite Republicans were skeptical of Duane’s attachment to European immigrants and opposed Philadelphia’s Tammany Society because it accepted aliens as members. When Duane ran for a seat in the Pennsylvania state Senate in 1807, he was attacked by Federalist editors, in particular George Helmbold, who edited the satirical paper The Tickler under the moniker “Toby Scratch’em.” Helmbold, son of a German immigrant, had once published a German-language paper and even written for the Aurora, but had come to embrace a nativist worldview. He promised that The Tickler “shall invariably be purely American—excluding all foreign partialities or prejudices.” He deemed Duane “a literary adventurer” whose “abilities are comprised in the single faculty of abusing” and mocked immigrants as “Imported Patriots.” Such men were “the scum of Europe,” said Helmbold, modifying Shakespeare’s Richard III, “rascals, runaways / whom their o’er cloyed country vomits forth.” Particular scorn was reserved for the Irish, whose speech, appearance, and intellect were subject to constant ridicule. The Tickler’s intemperance reflected an ongoing battle for control of the American political system and American political culture. Although Federalists managed to keep Duane from the state Senate, they were losing the larger struggle to keep the Aurora editor and 1his supporters out of the United States.⁴⁹

Figure 3. Masthead of John Binns’s Democratic Press, March 27, 1807. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Duane and other radical Jeffersonians saw their fight for democracy in international terms. Duane consistently identified himself as Irish, and openly declared his ideological sympathy for the United Irishmen, as part of a wider program of resistance to the British government. He organized Irish immigrants in Philadelphia to help support the Democratic-Republican party, inaugurating a long relationship between urban democratic political organizations and the immigrant vote.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, Federalists like Connecticut’s Uriah Tracy warned that Duane and the United Irishmen were bringing revolution to American soil. In many respects Tracy was correct, as the case of John Binns makes clear. Duane had only briefly spent time in England during the heyday of Paineite radicalism in the 1790s; he had returned from India to England in July 1795, but remained for only ten months before leaving for the United States. Binns, in contrast, lived through the height of William Pitt’s repression of British political dissent. Both he and Duane took part in a London Corresponding Society (LCS) meeting of over 100,000 men near Copenhagen House on October 26, 1795; a few days after the meeting, King George III was attacked by a mob while riding in his carriage. Binns, for one, thought it might have been beneficial had the king been “trampled to death,” as his demise might have led to the establishment of a republic in England. The attack on the king was linked to the meeting near Copenhagen House and the LCS, leading to the passage of the Two Acts on November 13, 1795, which gave the British government broad powers to outlaw “seditious practices” that threatened the king, as well as “seditious assemblies.” Duane, still in London at this point, chaired an even larger meeting to protest the Two Acts on November 12, 1795, where he defended the right of petition and free assembly. Despite widespread public protest, the acts were approved the following day. Had Duane remained in England, he no doubt would have soon found himself at odds with William Pitt, the prime minister who led the suppression on the LCS. But in May 1796, Duane fled for the United States.⁵¹

Binns, in contrast, remained in England and repeatedly came into conflict with the British state. In March 1796, he was arrested for delivering “seditious and inflammatory lectures” in Birmingham. He was acquitted, only to be arrested again in February 1798, along with four other Irishmen, on the charge of treason. Binns had attempted to find passage to France for United Irish leader Arthur O’Connor so that he could join the French army to plan for an invasion of Ireland. Once again, Binns was ultimately found innocent, but James Coigley, a Catholic priest who had been caught along with him, and who had on his person a letter discussing potential French support for revolution in Ireland, England, and Scotland, was not so fortunate. He was found guilty of treason and executed June 7, 1798. In the summer and fall of 1798, the British ruthlessly suppressed multiple uprisings in Ireland and defeated two French invasion forces, which effectively put an end to the United Irishmen’s vision of an independent Irish Republic.⁵²

Binns, meanwhile, was arrested again in March 1799 and detained in prison until 1801, under a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. When he was finally freed, he emigrated to the United States. Thus Binns arrived in Pennsylvania, even more so than Duane, with a visceral sense of the oppressive power of the British state. After landing in Baltimore in the late summer of 1801, he found his way to Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he became close friends with Joseph Priestley, the more famous Birmingham radical who had come to the United States in 1794, as well as Thomas Cooper, who had arrived from Manchester in 1794 as well, after joining Paine’s attack on Edmund Burke. This triumvirate had counterparts all throughout the northern states, from Duane in Philadelphia to the Irishman Thomas Addis Emmet in New York (whose brother, Robert Emmet, was executed for treason after a final United Irish uprising in Dublin in 1803). Such men, who had fled British tyranny to find political asylum in the United States, often found new political influence in the Democratic-Republican party as well. Their politics were inherently transatlantic, both because they understood the American nation from the perspective of past British abuse, and because Federalists in the United States saw these foreign radicals as an inherent danger to American sovereignty.

Irish Americans thus became vocal supporters of what historian James Kettner eloquently termed “volitional allegiance,” the fairly radical notion that one’s political affiliation should result from conscious choice, rather than nativity or longstanding residence. After Jefferson’s election, the new Republican Congress repealed the Federalist Naturalization Act of 1798, shortening the waiting period for citizenship from fourteen to five years. Republicans in the northern states pushed for even more lenient provisions, while portraying the United States as a haven for the oppressed democrats of the world. Binns, who called himself an “Irishman by birth, American by choice, and a United Irishman from principle,” is a powerful example of this emergent democratic political culture. He became an American, he relates in his autobiography, not upon taking a formal oath of citizenship, but when, days after landing in the country, he saw a Pennsylvania militia company at drill, under a banner bearing the state’s motto, “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence.” “It was then,” Binns recalled, “under the broad expanse of heaven, without the adoption of any form of words, I took my first oath of allegiance and fidelity to the United States; an oath which, according to my best judgment, I have faithfully kept, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances, in peace and war.”⁵³

The United States provided refuge for Binns, who, like Duane and Paine before him, envisioned the American nation as fulfilling a secular providence, offering an “asylum of freedom” to the world’s oppressed. Shortly after his inauguration, Jefferson endorsed this cosmopolitan image in a flattering letter to Joseph Priestley in which he expressed his “heartfelt satisfaction that, in the first moment of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender you the homage of it’s respect & esteem, cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise & good like you.” He also promised to “disclaim the legitimacy of that libel on legislation,” the Alien Friends Act.⁵⁴ Jefferson offered Priestley a home, a place where he would be protected by the law as an equal. Such protection would reverse Federalist policy; it was also in essence the complete reversal of the position of the slave, who was in theory permanently alienated from equal standing in the political community and could not make the volitional choice, like Binns, to be a free American.

Historian Gordon Wood cites the Priestley letter as evidence that Jefferson was “the fount of American democracy,” the source of “American ideas and ideals that have persisted to this day.” But in many ways, it was the immigrant radicals who were the fount of democracy, as they fought with Federalists to obtain political standing in the United States. Conflicts between Federalists and Republicans over citizenship and democracy were far more than domestic squabbles, as they ultimately allowed immigrants to gain political standing in the United States, where they fought to establish democratic ideals that were transatlantic in origin. Federalists were not entirely mistaken, then, when they warned that such foreigners would revolutionize the American republic. Yet at the same time, the rise of the Democratic-Republican coalition led to a retrenchment of some of the more radical cosmopolitan arguments of the 1790s. As Duane and Binns claimed their place as Americans, they redefined an internationalist agenda for democratic reform in nationalist terms. Much like Paine before them, they helped build the case for American exceptionalism. Binns, for example, in the first issue of his Democratic Press, identified his lifelong struggle against political tyranny with the United States, whose “extensive, federative, democratic republic is, indeed, and in truth, the only hope of the world.” The American nation now enclosed the universal principles of democratic radicalism, and Binns promised that he would “regard every attempt to dismember its territory, or violate the principles of its government, not only as a Treason against the Government and People of the United States, but as a Treason, of the deepest dye, against the whole human race.”⁵⁵

Judged on these terms, the fight between immigrant radicals and the Federalist party appears a straightforward conflict between democratic idealism and conservative reaction. But in the context of the Republican movement as a whole, the struggles of men like Duane and Binns were far more complicated, insofar as they worked to bind northern democrats to the slaveholding South. Although they did not join them in jail cells, many southern Republicans embraced the democratic martyrs of the North. Stevens Thomson Mason, a Republican senator from Virginia, traveled to Vermont with funds collected from prominent Virginians to pay Matthew Lyon’s Sedition Act fine, and he was duly outraged at Thomas Cooper’s conviction. Irishman John Daly Burk fled from New York to Virginia to avoid having to leave the United States and remained there for much of the rest of his life. Mason provided refuge for James Thompson Callender, who had fled from Philadelphia to Virginia in fear of the Adams administration in 1798. When Callender was tried by Judge Samuel Chase in Richmond, making him the only “southern” victim of the Sedition Act, Virginia Republicans again came to his defense, raising funds on his behalf and contributing legal talent to his defense. Callender proved a turncoat, and by 1802 he had disowned Jefferson and exposed the president’s relationship to Sally Hemings. But many Republican victims of Federalist repression were grateful for the patronage of southern Republicans, and some later took up residence in the South. Lyon toured Virginia in support of Jefferson in 1800 and Burk subsequently wrote a celebratory history of the state, which he dedicated to Jefferson. Like Burk, Lyon later moved to the South, eventually settling in Kentucky. In Vermont, Lyon and his son published a paper known as The Scourge of Aristocracy; after moving to Kentucky, he soon became a slaveholder. Defending the three-fifths clause in Congress in 1803, he claimed that it represented a sacrifice by southerners, who “gave up two-fifths of their slaves” in order to compromise with the North. “The blacks who are slaves,” Lyon went on to observe, “are much more useful and beneficial to the community and to the nation, according to their number, 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.