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CHAPTER 1

The Emancipation of New England

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

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

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

New England politics, then, were far more complex than the Jeffersonian narrative of virtuous Republicans struggling against a Federalist elite. Although Federalists openly condemned democracy, they were also severe critics of southern slaveholders, while New England Jeffersonians, who condemned the Federalist elite, made common cause with slaveholders to liberate themselves from Federalist rule. Doing so often required a complex ideological adaptation, since a number of Jeffersonians had opposed slavery early in their careers, and some maintained that opposition well after 1800. In the 1780s and 1790s, many budding Jeffersonians in the Northeast described slaveholding as a despotism fundamentally unfit for America; after 1800, these same men defended Republicans from Federalist charges that the Jeffersonian coalition was run by and on the behalf of slaveholders. In response to Federalist criticism, Republicans emphasized 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 later, Lincoln emerged as a powerful regional member of the Democratic-Republican coalition. Elected to Congress in 1800 as a Republican, Lincoln quickly gained the confidence and approbation of Thomas Jefferson, who appointed him attorney general. Lincoln resigned after one term, but continued to advise the president about the state of politics in New England and make recommendations about federal patronage. A paper he helped found in Worcester, Massachusetts, the National Aegis, became an important regional voice of Republicanism, and Lincoln returned to political office in 1807, as the Republican lieutenant governor and then, on the death of James Sullivan, governor of Massachusetts. In 1810, Jefferson and Madison hoped he would accept an appointment as a Supreme Court justice, and friends in Washington wrote to persuade him of widespread Republican support for his nomination, particularly from southern members of Congress. Those southern members were presumably unaware of Lincoln’s role in the Quock Walker case; had he become a justice and acted on the principles articulated in Jennison v. Caldwell, he might have attempted to end slavery in the United States.¹²

In the end Lincoln declined the nomination on account of age and partial blindness. Yet southern congressmen were likely right to place their faith in Lincoln. By 1810, his years of service to the Republican cause outweighed his antislavery past, and he had never publicly reasserted his bold claim from 1781 that “the air in America was too pure for a slave to breathe in.” As is it turned out, the early national air was pure enough for slavery. All the northern states provided some degree of comity to slaveholders when they entered the federal union, agreeing to the rendition of fugitives and passing sojourner laws protecting southern slave property, in what Paul Finkelman has termed a “rejection of Somerset.” In 1788, Massachusetts refused to allow nonresident African Americans to stay in the state longer than two months, preventing the state from becoming a haven for free and fugitive slaves. The Supreme Judicial Court acknowledged that masters outside Massachusetts had retained a property right to enslaved persons who fled or traveled to the state. Such legal and institutional changes made slavery an inherent part of the American polity, as the institution became more stable under the Constitution.¹³ Yet the relative security of slave property under the Constitution depended on writing slavery into the structure of the federal government, ensuring that as national political and ideological bonds developed after 1787, slavery would remain subject to sectional and partisan debate.

Slavery became a pressing issue for New England Republicans after 1800, because their political coalition had strong ties to the South, while their political convictions challenged traditional social and institutional hierarchies. Multiple Republicans followed Lincoln’s path from early criticism of slavery to embrace of the Jeffersonian cause in the 1790s and 1800s as allies of the slaveholding South. However, unlike Lincoln, many of these men did not so much forget their antislavery arguments as transform them, in order to make peace with their southern colleagues and their own political and ethical convictions.

Freedom Against Slavery

The northern Democratic-Republican coalition was socially and ideologically diverse: Levi Lincoln was a free-thinker and a Unitarian, while his fellow Jeffersonian John Leland was an evangelical Baptist minister who became a leading Republican in western Massachusetts. In terms of social status, Lincoln was similar to many Federalist leaders: he attended Harvard, practiced law, stood firmly on the side of creditors during Shays’ Rebellion, and even married the daughter of a prominent local Federalist. He was representative of the gentlemen outsiders who emerged as leading Republicans throughout Massachusetts, like the Crowinshields of Salem, Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead, and Henry Dearborn of the District of Maine.¹⁴ Leland, in contrast, born to a middling family in Grafton, Massachusetts, in 1754, had a limited education, never attended college, and spent his early career as an itinerant in Virginia. He was skeptical of lawyers and proud to note that few Baptist ministers in Virginia had “received the diploma of MA,” as it proved their “work has been of God and not of man.” He was far more representative of the new class of men Jeffersonian politics brought into power, relative unknowns who rose to prominence in the midst of a democratizing, anti-deferential political culture. Yet Lincoln and Leland had two important ideological connections: they both believed in the Republican cause and opposed Federalist rule in Massachusetts, and they were public opponents of slavery early in their careers.¹⁵

Leland’s opposition to slavery apparently originated during his years in Virginia. After a conversion experience in 1774, Leland became a Baptist minister and spent fifteen years as an itinerant in Virginia, from 1776 to 1791. He and his fellow Baptists worked to proselytize for their faith and disestablish the Anglican Church; their evangelism, in addition to the support of gentry leaders like James Madison, led to passage of the Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786. Leland became a political supporter of Madison’s during the Virginia debates over ratification of the Constitution and endorsed his election to the House in 1789; Madison in turn promised that he would defend religious liberty in the federal government. Their experiences no doubt later predisposed Leland toward the Democratic-Republicans. In an 1801 sermon on freedom of religion, Leland called Jefferson his “hero.” Ultimately, however, his ideological alliance with Jefferson developed in the very different political context of New England, where established churches retained power into the nineteenth century. Virginia introduced him to the evils of slavery, while Connecticut and Massachusetts introduced him to the evils of Federalism. In his confrontation with the New England elite, Leland found new sources of accord with Virginia Republicans and developed a new ideological relationship to southern slavery.¹⁶

Returning to New England in 1791, Leland immediately spoke out against the persistence of religious establishment, focusing first on the state of Connecticut. The title of a pamphlet he published that year gives a fair indication of his sentiments: The Rights of Conscience Inalienable, and therefore Religious Opinions not Cognizable by Law: Or, the high-flying Churchman, Stript of his legal Robe, Appears a Yaho[o]. The pamphlet contained a crucial definition of “conscience”: “the word signifies common science, a court of judicature which the Almighty has erected in every human breast: a censor morum over all his conduct. Conscience will ever judge right, when it is rightly informed, and speak the truth when it understands it.” According to Leland, conscience had never been surrendered to regulation by the state, and therefore religious establishments were ethically wrong. A few months later he brought this argument to Massachusetts, eventually settling in what would become Cheshire, Massachusetts, in 1792. Leland was thus part of a long line of thinkers whom Staughton Lynd termed “dissenting radicals,” men for whom freedom of conscience was the paramount natural right. Leland’s radical sense of religious individualism made him a firm advocate of the separation of church and state. While he was more extreme than many Baptists, he developed a strong following in Cheshire as he attacked Federalist tyranny over the individual conscience.¹⁷

In Leland’s Republican oratory, the Jeffersonians represented the cause of political and religious freedom. The new president, Leland claimed in 1801, was “the Man of the People, the defender of the rights of man and the rights of conscience.” Yet Leland, like Lincoln and other New England Republicans, was also opposed to slavery, a sentiment presumably discordant with the emergent national Republican coalition and its deep roots in the Jeffersonian South. As Leland explained in a retrospective chronicle of his southern itinerancy published in 1790, his time in Virginia had left him disgusted with “the whole scene of slavery.” The institution afflicted his conscience and contradicted deeply held political ideals, because it embodied such abusive power. In 1789, he authored a resolution for the Baptist General Committee in Virginia that described slavery as “a violent deprivation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government.” In a 1791 letter to some of his Virginia congregants, he repeated that claim and added that slavery was likewise “destructive of every humane and benevolent passion of the soul, and subversive to that liberty absolutely necessary to ennoble the human mind.” He simply could not “endure to see one man strip and whip another, as free by nature as himself.” In essence, slavery was a violation of subjective freedom. Like many evangelicals, Leland believed that enslaved people could experience “a work of grace in their hearts”; “liberty of conscience,” he argued, “in matters of religion, is the right of slaves, beyond contradiction.” Yet many slaveholders, claimed Leland, openly violated the natural right of slaves to worship, often beating them for attending religious meetings. Like Jefferson, Leland attributed the abusiveness of masters to the institution 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 of purposes, into an unjust usurpation of those rights, which every human being is entitled to the enjoyment of without molestation. Instead of being a blessing to society, they become the greatest curse, that can be experienced in life; like the Voracious animal, they devour all that falls in their way; while millions are pining & languishing with hunger, their unrelenting hearts riot and grow fat on the labors of the distressed; they are the fomenters of all the Distressing wars which pervade the nations of the Earth; they wish to bring all men to be subservient to their views and obeisant to their Commands; when this is refused, they invidiously destroy the disobedient with unrelenting fury. I hope and trust, that the people of these states, will avoid that rock on which many Nations have foundered; and accept a system of equal justice for the General good of mankind.²⁵

Varnum articulated two key concepts that shaped northern democratic thought: a belief in human equality (in Varnum’s letter, on the basis of natural rights) and opposition to unjust political authority. Both ideas impelled Jeffersonians to think beyond the bounds of the new American nation and its constituent states and, in theory, both ideas challenged the political authority required to maintain slavery.

Anti-aristocratic universalism deeply influenced Jeffersonians in New England and throughout the North. In describing his political ambitions to Connecticut Republican Ephraim Kirby, the young printer Samuel Morse emphasized his “wish for the welfare of man, and a universal love for the human race.” At political celebrations, Republican toasts frequently looked beyond national horizons to celebrate a worldwide struggle for liberty. Honoring Jefferson’s inauguration in March 1801, Republicans in Torringford, Connecticut, offered the following tribute: “Democracy: May it bestride the universe and the whole human race become fellow citizens.”²⁶

Such universalist sentiments at times included open opposition to slavery. In July 1800, Boston’s Independent Chronicle reprinted a poem by the Liverpool writer Edward Rushton in order to commemorate the Fourth of July. The poem closes by exhorting Americans to attack slavery, in honor of the rights of man and their revolution against authority.

O perceive what your prowess procur’d

And reflect that your rights are the rights of MANKIND;

That to ALL they were bounteously given

And that he who in chains would his FELLOW MAN bind,

Uplifts his proud arm against HEAVEN.

How can you, who have felt the oppressor’s hard hand,

Who for freedom all perils did brave—

How can you enjoy ease, while one foot of your land

Is disgrac’d by the toil of a Slave?

O rouse then, in spite of a merciless few,

And pronounce this immortal decree—

That “whate’er be man’s tenets, his fortune, his HUE,

HE IS MAN—and shall therefore be free!”²⁷

Rushton took the universalist claims of transatlantic republicanism to their logical conclusion: American slavery was unjust and all men, regardless of color, should be free. The editors of the Chronicle apparently agreed.

Joseph Bradley Varnum likely would have read Rushton’s lines with approbation. On January 30, 1797, his distaste for oppression led him to speak on behalf of four black petitioners to Congress, men who had been manumitted by their Quaker masters in North Carolina, but whose manumission was retroactively abrogated by the state legislature, along with over a hundred other enslaved people who had likewise been set free. Their petition, brought to the House by a Pennsylvania Republican, described a series of harrowing journeys to temporary freedom in Philadelphia, fleeing from slave catchers first in North Carolina and then in Virginia. All left behind family members, some of whom had also been freed and then coerced back into slavery. The petitioners particularly objected to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which left them and other nominally free African Americans in the North vulnerable to kidnapping.

Southern slaveholders, Republican and Federalist alike, objected to the petition in varying degrees of outrage. Thomas Blount of North Carolina deemed the petitioners legally slaves, and therefore powerless to address the House; William Loughton Smith thought the petition should be sealed up and sent back, to express the House’s disdain; James Madison politely offered to let the petition lie on the table while just as politely insisting that nothing at all could be done to address the petitioners’ grievances.

Northerners, Republican and Federalist alike, spoke in favor of the petitioners, and Varnum joined cause with the leading antislavery Federalist in the House, George Thatcher of Massachusetts. Varnum believed the men had a right to petition the government and he believed that the Fugitive Slave Act promoted the rights of slaveholders and allowed for kidnapping. He hoped that Congress would “take all possible care that freemen should not be slaves.” Varnum lost this debate, as the House voted 50-33 to reject the petition, but he demonstrated that New England Republicans were willing to challenge the power of slavery when they believed that it violated fundamental political commitments. As Varnum explained, very much in harmony with John Leland, “to be deprived of liberty was more important than to be deprived of property.”²⁸

The case of the North Carolina freedmen, petitioning from Philadelphia, demonstrates that northern antislavery sentiment could move from theoretical objection to practical challenge to southern interests. Antislavery sentiment could also challenge northern practices of racial exclusion, since contests over slavery often brought up the problem of racial discrimination before the law. “Color and complexion,” said the black petitioners, should not exclude individuals from “common humanity”; Varnum argued that color should not be automatically identified with slave status, as the fugitive law seemed liable to do. Such antislavery arguments merged with Republican anti-aristocratic and egalitarian thought, as multiple cases from the 1790s demonstrate. But as the partisan conflict of the 1790s intensified during John Adams’s presidency, Republicans in New England and throughout the North began to focus on the oppression—the slavery, many said—that they suffered at the hands of Federalist elites. They looked to the emerging Republican coalition, and often to Thomas Jefferson himself, to free them from Federalist oppression. In doing so, they made apparent the capacity of egalitarian thought not only to deny equal justice on the basis of race, but also to make considerable allowance for the hierarchical and violent authority wielded by slaveholders. The unitary world envisioned by Varnum, in which aristocrats preyed on the weak, fractured in the American context, where slaveholders appealed to republican argument to win national power, and New Englanders appealed to slaveholders to defeat Federalism. Instead of opposing transatlantic republicanism because of its potential threat to slaveholding (as did South Carolina Federalists), the Jeffersonian coalition embraced anti-aristocratic republican thought while tempering its antislavery content. As Varnum and his colleagues clamored for equal justice in alliance with Jefferson and Virginia, southern slaves experienced tightening of the bonds of control.

Abraham Bishop’s Phi Beta Kappa Address

Antislavery feeling in New England was widespread and diverse before 1800. But as Republicans like Bishop and Lincoln joined the cause of Jefferson, Federalist “tyranny” in New England became a far more important problem than slavery. Republicans North and South drew closer together as they tried to elect Thomas Jefferson president in 1800 and overturn the administration of John Adams. Northerners were particularly outraged by the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which sought to repress the more outspoken members of the Republican coalition. By 1800, Matthew Lyon had been jailed for sedition, as had Vermont’s Anthony Haswell and Connecticut’s Charles Holt (both Haswell and Holt would later publish works by John Leland). In Connecticut, the Congregational Church remained established, and the congressional delegation was dominated by Federalists. To Republicans inside and outside New England, the state symbolized the extent of Federalist power.

It was in this context that Abraham Bishop composed his best-known oration and pamphlet, Connecticut Republicanism: An Oration, on the Extent and Power of Political Delusion. Reprinted throughout the nation, the speech became a defining document of New England Republican thought. The occasion of the speech itself demonstrated how Bishop, once a gentleman in good standing with Federalists like David Daggett and Noah Webster, revoked his ties to the New Haven elite in order to pursue the democratization of Connecticut—and power and fame as a Republican along the way. Chosen by the Phi Beta Kappa society at Yale to give its annual lecture in September 1800, Bishop wrote a blistering political indictment of Connecticut Federalism that closed with an exhortation to elect Thomas Jefferson president. When he gave the advance copy of the speech to the Phi Beta Kappa society, it decided at the last minute to revoke the invitation, immediately publicizing the decision in handbills that claimed the society was apolitical. Undeterred, Bishop gave the speech at the White Haven meetinghouse in New Haven, to a crowd estimated at 1,500 people. He opened by rejecting “literary” speeches, classical languages, and intellectual theorizing. Instead, Bishop, a Yale alumnus, allied himself with the anti-elitist intellectual culture of Republicans like John Leland. He would serve a “plain dish” full of his chosen topic, “THE EXTENT AND POWER OF POLITICAL DELUSION.”²⁹

Thus began a relentless assault on Federalism in state and nation. Bishop attacked Alexander Hamilton’s funding system, Federalist naval expenditures, banks, excessive commercial wealth, the New England clergy, and the lack of democracy in Connecticut. The indictment was meant to inspire, not simply harangue. Bishop wanted ordinary people to think freely and seize political power for themselves. He wished them to be free of delusion—to be free of the various arts that the “wise, rich, and mighty men of the world” (dating back to Satan, the primeval deluder) used to manipulate and control “the laboring and subordinate people of the world.” Here he chose a theme that resonated with Republicans throughout New England. John Leland sought to defend freedom of conscience, while the Republican printer Samuel Morse told Ephraim Kirby in July of 1800 that he had been subject to “illiberal abuse … because I dare to think for myself.” As another Republican sympathizer Philo Murray put it in September 1801, describing the rise of Connecticut Republicanism, “People have begun to dare to think.” Autonomous thought was both the highest aim of individual subjects and the means—the very medium, as Jeffrey Pasley has shown in the case of Morse and other Republican printers—of political contestation. Jeffersonians like Bishop sought not simply to inform the state but to take it over. Mobilizing public opinion, they aimed to bring ordinary men to their senses, and then to the polls.³⁰

Thus by the end of his address, Bishop turned to open electioneering, calling on Republicans to “be awake” on the upcoming Election Day, which was “more important than any day of your revolution. Now republicanism dies or lives forever.” A vote for Jefferson was a vote for “redemption” from the “great and little tyrants” who dominated men’s lives. As was true of Varnum, Bishop’s anti-aristocratic message, although focused on a male electorate in Connecticut, expanded to indict hierarchical forms of political power throughout the world. “Nearly the whole of Africa and a considerable part of Asia, are subject to the delusions of Europe,” Bishop told his audience. “Slaves in immense troops must sweat under a scorching sun to bear or follow the palanquin of a lordly master: slaves by ship loads must be dragged from their homes to serve imperious tyrants.” This passage remained general enough not to point a direct finger at the Republican slaveholders who were likewise stumping for Jefferson in the South, but it demonstrated that Bishop’s hatred of oppression, which had informed his defense of the slave rebels of Saint-Domingue in the early 1790s, retained a degree of universalism. The evils of Federalism were the evils of the deluders the world over, including the “imperious tyrants” who enslaved captive Africans.³¹

Yet Republican thought moved in a parallel direction at the same time. Instead of extending outward, in a universalizing condemnation of illicit power, it began with slavery and moved inward, employing bondage as a metaphor to define the Republican condition in New England. As Bishop warned in 1800, Federalist measures threatened to “launch this country from liberty to slavery, from a republican to a monarchical government.” Writing a year later in response to Federalist criticism, Bishop declared self-righteously that he would no longer truckle to the Connecticut elite. “I am no slave to clergy or merchants,” he declared, before symbolically renouncing his Phi Beta Kappa membership. Henceforth, he would be a member of “the great community of unprivileged men, to whose emancipation from the tyranny of the ‘friends of order’ and from the arts of political delusion I shall always chearfully devote those talents, which were never made for literary societies.” Bishop’s renunciation came in an appendix to a pamphlet in which slavery served as the central metaphor for the experience of white male Jeffersonians in Connecticut. While Bishop meant to indict Federalist economic as well as political power, the “slavery” he felt most deeply was ideological. “If you wish to reduce any man or number of men to complete slavery, the surest mode is first to enslave the mind,” he wrote in an 1802 pamphlet protesting religious establishment in Connecticut. Republicans sought what Bishop promised his New Haven audience that September evening in 1800: freedom of the self; freedom to think and choose based on one’s own conscience, unencumbered by delusion or deference. Free minds would make free men.³²

Liberation on those terms was a delicate act, however, and the slavery metaphor, an inevitable hyperbole, pointed to the liabilities of Republican ideology when it came to confronting actual chattel slavery in the American South and in the emerging Jeffersonian coalition. In seeking freedom from Federalist oppression, Bishop and his fellow partisans elevated slaveholders as their champions, transforming Jefferson in particular into a secular messiah of liberty. Their quest for autonomy became the very currency of political alliance with the slaveholding South. Federalists would not let them forget that fact, as they spent the early 1800s denouncing the slaveholding foundations of the Jeffersonian coalition. This forced Republicans to come to some sort of terms with the fact that their freedom had become intertwined with the distant oppression of others. In this respect, as in others, Abraham Bishop was in the vanguard of American political modernity.³³

Federalist Antislavery and Republican Nationalism

While some New England Federalists had openly opposed slavery in the 1790s, the Jeffersonian “revolution” of 1800 encouraged them to take a much stronger sectional stance. After 1800, southern Federalism quickly declined. Meanwhile, Republicans made inroads in the Federalist heartland of New England, gaining congressional seats in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the election of 1800. In the Federalist citadel of Connecticut, Republicans could not win a congressional seat until after the War of 1812, but they made limited gains at the state level before then, winning 40 percent of the seats in the state House of Representatives in 1804. In the face of this rising Republican tide, Federalists grew tired of hearing themselves denounced as tyrants and compared to slaveholders. Many shared the sentiments of Delaware Federalist James Bayard, who found it hard to understand how he and his colleagues could be indicted as aristocrats. That charge, he told Congress in 1798, was far more applicable to southern Republicans, who had “been born in a land of slavery, whose cradles had been rocked by slaves, and who had been habituated from infancy to trample on the rights of man.” New England Federalists felt similarly, and spent the months after the election of 1800 decrying the slaveholding roots of Republican electoral success, thus ensuring that local Republicans could not simply ignore slavery. Federalist criticism forced them to reckon with two obvious facts that contradicted their emerging democratic vision: the oppression of slaves and the excessive power wielded by slaveholders.³⁴

Federalist antislavery escalated in earnest after Jefferson’s election in 1800, particularly in New England. Multiple papers complained that Jefferson never won the votes of a majority of free men in America, but instead owed his election to the three-fifths clause of the Constitution. As the New-England Palladium explained, the clause “operates exclusively in favour of the southern division of the Union,” to the disadvantage of the North; worse yet, it was institutionalized hypocrisy, since the purported “men of the people” in the Republican party would “ride into the TEMPLE OF LIBERTY, upon the shoulders of slaves.”³⁵ New England Federalists labeled Jefferson a “Negro President,” because he obtained political support from the subject population of the South, in a transparent attempt to mobilize northern support by appealing to antislavery sentiment. In 1802, some papers went farther, and published claims by James Thompson Callender and others that Jefferson slept with his female slave, Sally Hemings. This led to choice remarks throughout the Federalist press, such as Thomas Green Fessenden’s “Great Men will never lack Supporters / Who manufacture their own voters.” A young John Quincy Adams joined the fray as well, ironically exhorting “Dear Thomas” to “deem it no disgrace with slaves to mend thy breed / nor let the wench’s smutty face deter thee from thy deed.”³⁶

The Federalist treatment of “Black Sal” appealed to racial prejudice and demonstrated a lack of humanitarian concern for the enslaved. Many historians consider Federalist antislavery argument a utilitarian political tactic at best. Federalists were happy to editorialize in support of slavery if it suited their cause, warning southerners of the dangers of republicanism and “French” influence on their slaves during the election of 1800. Not all Federalists fit this pattern, however. Many leading Federalists supported manumission societies in the North, and Federalists took strong anti-southern positions in national level debates over slavery. Overall, Federalists were less inclined toward racism than Republicans, as they believed in an organically ordered society in which “respectable” African Americans could find a legitimate place, and in which deference, rather than race, governed social difference. Furthermore, after 1800, they had less and less reason to reach out to the South at all, because Republican success in the region was so far-reaching. In the last Federalist Congress (1799–1801), Federalists held 23 southern seats in the House; in the first Jeffersonian Congress, the 7th, which sat in 1801–1803, they held 12; in the 8th of 1803–1805 they held 9; and by the 9th of 1805–1807, there were only 4 southern Federalists remaining in the House. Their rapidly diminishing southern wing left the Federalists more or less free to denounce the “slaveholding Lords” as they saw fit.³⁷

Republicans responded to Federalist criticism through self-aggrandizement and nationalism. In pamphlets, orations, and toasts, they emphasized their own oppression at the hands of New England elites, while building a Jeffersonian patriotism that cast Federalism as the bitter voice of regional resentment. In a June 1802 letter to Jefferson, Levi Lincoln described New England as “that difficult part of the country, of which I am an inhabitant.” As Lincoln and Jefferson tried to bring the region into a national Republican consensus, they traded malicious descriptions of Federalism back and forth: Jefferson was sure that extreme Federalists “wish to sap the republic by fraud, if they cannot destroy it by force, & to erect an English monarchy in its place”; Lincoln, who at first believed that moderate Federalists might join with Republicans in a spirit of patriotic accord, became convinced that Jefferson’s government would “never be countenanced” by Federalists and that Republicans “had to depend solely on themselves.” Jefferson promised Lincoln in October 1802 that he would “sink federalism into an abyss from which there will be no resurrection.” Their strategy was both institutional and ideological: Lincoln helped Jefferson make patronage decisions about New England federal offices, to ensure they went to sympathetic Republicans, and he helped found a newspaper in his hometown of Worcester to counteract the local Federalist press. The National Aegis debuted in December 1801, preceded by a prospectus that promised “to expose the fallacy of pretended federalism; to increase the energy of republican principle.” In conjunction with a series of letters from “A Farmer” that Lincoln began to publish in the fall of 1801, the Aegis worked to instill Republican nationalism throughout New England, by celebrating Jefferson and Republican values and marginalizing Federalist dissent as borderline treason.³⁸

Republished as a pamphlet in 1802, Lincoln’s “Farmer’s letters” indicted Federalists for slandering the president and insulting “the majesty of the people.” He was particularly upset at their fusion of religion and politics, claiming that Federalists had “prostituted” their “altars” in order to foment dissent; their political attacks, he decided, were “virtually, treason.” The New-England Palladium, source of many of the charges against Jefferson and the three-fifths clause, was his principal target. He considered the “tenor of the obnoxious paper” a fair indication “of propensity to insurrection” and argued that even subscribers to the paper should be held accountable for the seditious material they consumed. Obsessed with the political abuses of New England Congregationalists, Lincoln did not answer in detail Federalist attacks on Virginia slavery, but he did turn to the subject once, with predictable tones of nationalist affront. Federalist ideologues who attempted to place “prejudices” between “the Farmer, and his readers, the northern and the southern States, Republicans and Republicans, the people and their administration,” said Lincoln, betrayed the legacy of the American Revolution, when the “inhabitants of the South, these Virginian slave holders, with a swell of magnanimity, run to the North, and hurried about our Capital, to rescue the endangered, or to perish in the attempt.”³⁹ Intended as a sarcastic rebuff of Federalist attacks on the three-fifths clause and Republican sincerity, Lincoln’s phrase also suggests the difficulty of celebrating national unity when it came to slavery: in order to defend those “Virginian slaveholders,” he had to name them as such, and exhort New Englanders to celebrate their salvation at the hands of southern masters.

Jeffersonian nationalism was not always so awkward, but it was persistently defiant. The National Aegis likewise responded to charges that Jefferson was a sectional president, elected by the “votes” of black slaves, by invoking the virtues of national union. “The Monitor,” writing in March of 1802, argued that the underlying objective of Federalist sectionalism was “to divide the northern from the southern States, and on the ruins of such division, to erect a Monarchical Government.” And yet, he exclaimed, those monarchists “are the men who are reviling the present administration; comparing the President to a Nero, and calling him a Negro President! Was he not chosen under the same Constitution that Washington and Adams were, and does not the same base reflection rest on them as it does on Mr. Jefferson? Shameful disgrace to our national character !!!” The disgrace, to be clear, was not the three-fifths clause, but the fact that anyone would use the clause to criticize Jefferson. A month earlier, “A Traveler” made the same point. He acknowledged the popularity of Federalist charges that Jefferson was elected by the three-fifths clause, but, like Lincoln, decried such criticism as the suggestion of treason, as a betrayal of the Constitution and the nation. The unstated counterpart to that message was critical to Jeffersonian success in the North: being an American meant not talking about the political power of slavery.⁴⁰

Federalists were hardly deterred. Though some members in Congress worried that they might be overwhelmed by a Republican tide and “go home without their heads,” Federalist dissidents only escalated their attacks on slavery and southern power.⁴¹ In 1804, they proposed a constitutional amendment abolishing the three-fifths clause, attempting to strike a blow at both the political power of the South and the political conscience of the North. Known as the Ely amendment, for its sponsor in the Massachusetts Senate, William Ely, the proposal gained little traction, but it once again placed Jeffersonians on the defensive, as Federalists exposed the institutional contradictions of Jeffersonian democracy. John Quincy Adams, one of two Federalist senators from Massachusetts, joined the attack as “Publius Valerius” in the fall of 1804, hoping to influence the presidential contest in Massachusetts. Relatively silent on slavery in the Senate, Adams was vociferous in print, denouncing the three-fifths clause for creating “a privileged order of slave-holding Lords, and a race of men degraded to a lower station, merely because they are not slave-holders.”⁴²

Massachusetts Republicans responded with a familiar mixture of nationalism and accusation: In their minds, Ely’s proposal was yet another byproduct of disaffected, antidemocratic resentment by sectional elites. Barnabas Bidwell, soon to begin a short-lived national political career as a Jeffersonian, reminded the Massachusetts Senate of the once powerful bonds between his own state and Virginia. Those bonds were a staple trope for New England Republicans, who constantly retold the story of the Revolution, when Virginia came to the aid of Massachusetts. Rather than sons of the Revolution, Federalists were portrayed as its traitors. Virginians, in contrast, from the Revolution to the ascendancy of Jefferson, were the guarantors of New England freedom. As Elbridge Gerry explained to Thomas Jefferson in 1803, the three “antirepublican” states of New England “had great merit in establishing their independence but owe the preservation of it to the southern states.” Until the rise of “Federalism,” said the Independent Chronicle, “Massachusetts and Virginia were happily united and harmonious in their politics.” Throughout early 1805, the Chronicle reprinted criticisms of the Ely amendment from multiple state legislatures, as part of a campaign to paint Federalists as national pariahs. Republicans from the Pennsylvania House claimed that the sectional obstacles in the way of union—of both the “physical” and “moral” kind—required “a reciprocal spirit of conciliation and compromise, in the formation of a general government.” To trifle with that spirit, they claimed, might send the whole national edifice crashing to the ground. Similar comments followed from the legislatures of South Carolina, Kentucky, and Maryland. The national chorus defined the three-fifths clause as the necessary price of Union. According to the Chronicle, it was a price worth paying.⁴³

Such arguments aggravated John Quincy Adams to no end. In his mind, the three-fifths clause was unjust, and anyone who advocated against the Ely amendment on grounds of “patriotism” or “union” prostrated themselves with the “fear of giving offense by the exercise of an indisputable right.” To feel such fears was to act the slave; to instill them was to employ the “language of a negro driver on a plantation, to the wretches who tremble under his lash.” Adams doubted that such cowardly motives could truly exist “in the heart of a New England farmer.”⁴⁴ In the midst of this bombast, he had a point: New England Jeffersonians consistently attacked Federalist elitism and hierarchy, while claiming the right and power of ordinary citizens to make political decisions in their own interest and on their own terms. But when it came to the three-fifths clause they advocated either outright suppression of political debate or, at best, leaving the issue to their southern colleagues to resolve. Such arguments effectively mirrored the southern response to antislavery argument at the national level. When Joseph Bradley Varnum and other Republicans spoke on behalf of African American petitioners and against the Fugitive Slave Act in 1797, southern slaveholders responded by demanding that the subject be rejected altogether. “This is a kind of property on which the House has no power to legislate,” explained South Carolina’s William Loughton Smith; “it was not a proper subject for Legislative attention.”⁴⁵ Acceding to such autocratic claims should have galled any true democrat, implied John Quincy Adams, who was distressed as much by self-censorship among New England Republicans as by southern Republican dependence on the three-fifths clause.

But the political landscape was even more convoluted than he made it out to be. While New England Jeffersonians celebrated democracy and suppressed the problem of slavery, Federalists, who were quick to indict the political inequality created by the three-fifths clause, were also eager to scorn the degradations of democracy. In addition to denouncing the “Negro President,” the New England Palladium instructed its readers about the dangers of “universal suffrage.” In March of 1801, “Farmer Johnson” proposed that the vote be restricted to men “who hold a good character and a reasonable share of property,” lest “the bad men” (who were generally men without property) elect “bad candidates” to office. “Democracy,” the paper explained that October, “says to the destitute mob, protect the rights of man, which are two, the one vengeance and the other pillage.” In the fall of 1802, the Palladium insisted that a political system based on the “uncontrouled power of the multitude,” would lead to “the slavery of all, even of that of the blind multitude.” Such openly antidemocratic professions only justified the Republican image of Federalists as unrepentant aristocrats.⁴⁶

To Jefferson and his supporters, Federalist disdain for democracy simply reflected the perversity of New England elites, and a number of historians have remained squarely in the Jeffersonian tradition. Yet many Federalists developed a complex interpretation of American politics, one rooted in a transatlantic, conservative critique of the violent potential of unchecked popular sovereignty. This conservatism had its repressive side, as was obvious from the Alien and Sedition laws or the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries’s Rebellion in 1790s Pennsylvania; on the whole, however, Federalist “tyranny” was mild compared to either the Jacobin Terror or British political repression, on brutal display in Ireland in 1798. It was likewise far less violent than Virginia’s response to Gabriel’s failed slave rebellion in Richmond in the summer of 1800. In the end, Federalist conservatism was not driven, as Jeffersonians argued, by the simple desire to control. Many Federalists were skeptical of the human character and the human capacity for good, and they consequently favored an organic social hierarchy, tied to traditional sources of authority and order. Connecticut’s Noah Webster, for example, believed that only old men should vote and hold office because the majority of men were “ignorant, or what is worse, governed by prejudices & authority.” In contrast, Connecticut Republican Samuel Morse believed that “the human mind is capable of improvement, the human heart susceptible of much amendment, and human happiness of great extension.” To Federalists, such optimism for human progress was foolhardy at best. Republican claims that democracy and reason would liberate mankind were contradicted by the violence of the French Revolution and the slaveholding South. Yet Federalists rarely made these points in isolation from far more simplistic antidemocratic arguments, in which they derided the capacity of ordinary people to govern. This did not aid their electoral prospects and it limited the impact of their criticism of Republican hypocrisy on the slavery question. Confronted with Federalist outrage, Jeffersonians consistently refocused political debate on the purportedly true source of inequality in America: New England elitism.⁴⁷

Doing so, as in the debate over the Ely Amendment, sidelined Federalist challenges to slavery. This had obvious practical benefits for Republicans. The ideological virtues of “union” and the Republican cause were frequently supplemented by the virtues of patronage and political favors. Levi Lincoln, for example, along with prominent Republicans like Gideon Granger, Henry Dearborn, William Eustis, and Elbridge Gerry, joined the Jefferson and Madison administrations in Washington; Republicans like Abraham Bishop and Ephraim Kirby were rewarded with federal patronage. As Jeffrey Pasley has argued, less genteel Republicans, like the Connecticut printers Charles Holt and Samuel Morse, did not fare as well when it came to political rewards.⁴⁸ Democratization had obvious institutional limits tied to class and status, even among white male Republicans. Yet on the whole, national success helped sustain the Republican movement locally. New England Jeffersonians gained power at home after 1800 by employing the political capital of the nationally dominant Republican party. Jeffersonian nationalism helped Republicans remain competitive in Massachusetts from Jefferson’s election until the War of 1812: They held the governorship outright in four of thirteen elections, and garnered a majority of the Massachusetts delegation to the House of Representatives in two elections before the war. Republicans fared well in Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire as well. They had a harder road in Connecticut, but after the War of 1812 they eventually defeated the reigning Federalists.⁴⁹ The alliance between men like Lincoln, John Leland, and Abraham Bishop and men like Jefferson and Madison was thus in many ways pragmatic. And as long as the power of Federalist aristocrats over their own lives seemed more ominous to northern Jeffersonians than the power of southern slaveholders over their slaves, joining the Virginians at the national level made eminent sense. Raising the issue of slavery would only destabilize an effective political coalition, so the subject was best left in silence.

The Big Cheese

Yet Jeffersonian political behavior constantly exceeded instrumental explanation, as the now often told story of John Leland and the “Mammoth Cheese” indicates. For many ordinary people, Jeffersonian politics offered a new understanding of one’s self and national political culture, rather than direct institutional benefits in the form of patronage. John Leland’s hometown of Cheshire, Massachusetts, settled by Rhode Island Baptists, was apparently overwhelmed with Republican enthusiasm. The town voted 181-0 for Jeffersonian electors in the presidential election of 1804.⁵⁰ In the election 1800, the Massachusetts legislature, controlled by Federalists, cast all of the state’s electoral votes for John Adams rather than allow the presidential contest to be fought out in separate electoral districts. Cheshire Republicans managed to find a way to demonstrate their loyalty to Jefferson nonetheless. Likely spurred by Leland, the town decided to commemorate Jefferson’s rise to the presidency by producing a giant cheese. Requiring a cheese vat six feet in diameter and the milk of 900 cows, the cheese had preposterous proportions: the finished product weighed in at 1,235 pounds. Even before it was completed, the so-called “mammoth cheese” became a topic of national discussion. Federalists mocked the proposed endeavor, while Republican papers from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania reported on its production and anticipated its arrival at Washington in early 1802.⁵¹

Leland did not disappoint. Starting in November 1801, he traveled overland to the Hudson River, then by boat to New York, where the cheese was briefly on display, then by ship to Baltimore, and finally by wagon to Washington, where he delivered the cheese to the president on January 1, 1802. Jefferson called the cheese “an ebullition of the passion of republicanism in a state where it has been under heavy persecution.” On the day of its delivery, he cemented his ties to New England Baptists by writing a letter to the Danbury Association in Connecticut, where he employed his now famous metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state,” lending his charisma to the dissenters’ fight for religious disestablishment.⁵² Federalists in Washington were far less fond of Leland’s cheese. Manasseh Cutler, with a flourish of disdain, referred to it as “this monument of human weakness and folly.” He was even less impressed by Leland’s preaching abilities when the “Mammoth Priest” gave a sermon in the House of Representatives a few days later. William Plumer, the New Hampshire senator, had the chance to sample the cheese two years later while dining with Jefferson, and remarked simply that it “is very far from being good.” Samuel Taggart of Massachusetts was served some of the cheese a week before Plumer and described it as “wretched enough.” Similarly arch comments echoed in Washington throughout the cheese’s career.⁵³

The people of Cheshire had inscribed on the cheese the motto that Benjamin Franklin had proposed for the seal of the United States, a succinct expression of their evangelical political radicalism: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” In an address from his townsmen read by Leland at the presentation of the cheese, religion and politics were similarly combined. “We believe the supreme Ruler of the Universe,” said Leland, “has raised up a Jefferson at this critical day, to defend Republicanism and to baffle the arts of Aristocracy.” Leland then went on to note that “The Cheese was produced by the personal labor of Freeborn Farmers, with the voluntary and cheerful aid of their wives and daughters, without the assistance of a single slave.” As the historian Jeffrey Pasley has suggested, we may today be surprised by such language, “given the modern view of Jefferson as an avatar of slavery.”⁵⁴ But one might have expected contemporaries to be somewhat surprised at the language too, since, avatar or not, Jefferson surely partook of the fruits of slave labor. In Washington, Jefferson preferred to employ “white servants” rather than his own slaves, and his chef was a Frenchman, Honoré Julien. Yet he did have both slaves and free blacks in his presidential household, including Edith Fossett, whom he brought to Washington to be trained under Julien. She became Jefferson’s cook at Monticello after his retirement, and she remained enslaved until his death, at which point she was sold along with her children to settle Jefferson’s many debts. Fortunately, her husband, freed by Jefferson’s will, later managed to purchase Edith and the rest of their family.⁵⁵ While Jefferson did not have much compunction about the political status of those who produced his food, one might have expected Leland to be aware of the irony in offering a glorified free-labor cheese to a slaveholder, since his own writings demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the everyday despotism inherent in slaveholding. What is surprising when one reads his address is not that we moderns view Jefferson and the southern Republicans as so closely bound to slavery, but that Leland did not.

Leland did not overlook Jefferson’s attachment to slavery simply because it served his interest to do so. Instead of discarding his criticism of slavery as he embraced Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican cause, Leland harnessed it to a critique of New England Federalism and religious oppression. He truly believed that Jefferson had a providential role in American history, and that an aristocracy, in the form of the Federalist party, controlled the government of Massachusetts and oppressed Republicans and evangelicals alike. To Leland, the subjection of conscience in New England was not only analogous but somehow equivalent to the subjection of African American slaves. In a Fourth of July oration at Cheshire in 1802, Leland lamented that “a great number of thousands of people, within the United States, are still held in lasting slavery,” forced to “drag the galling chain of vassalage under their despotic masters.” He then made a remarkable transition from the South to New England: “As personal slavery exists chiefly in the southern states,” he explained, “so religious slavery abounds exclusively in three or four of the New England states. Here the rights of conscience are made articles of merchandise, and men, who differ in opinion from the majority of a town, have to buy them.” These were patently different forms of oppression, but in essence, Leland argued, “tyranny is always the same.” He closed with a prayer that both tyrannies would be abolished together, in some far off “halcyon day … when the chains of personal slavery, and the manacles of religious despotism may be broken asunder, and freedom and religion pervade the whole earth.”⁵⁶ In theory, Leland’s vision of universal freedom was both compelling and coherent. But in terms of the Jeffersonian alliance, it had some major problems: Leland relied on the Democratic-Republicans to bring religious liberty to New England, while southern Republicans relied on the same coalition to represent their interests, including the protection of slavery, at the national level. The institutional context of Jeffersonian democracy, in other words, made Leland’s “halcyon day” incredibly unlikely.

In contrast, the ideological context of Jeffersonian democracy made such contradictory relationships between northern liberation and southern slavery not only possible but necessary. Slavery as metaphor allowed Leland to substitute his evangelical brethren for southern bondspersons, which in turn displaced slavery as fact. Thus a slaveholder like Jefferson could become the folk hero of a band of anti-aristocratic Baptists who objected to despotism in all of its forms and took pride in their free labor cheese. Jefferson encouraged these identifications and substitutions through his patronage of men like Leland. Although he never imagined Leland as a social and intellectual equal, receiving a giant cheese required more than condescension. Jefferson gave Leland $200 for the cheese and, more importantly, welcomed him in Washington as a man with political standing. Leland, in turn, gave crucial substance to Jeffersonian ideology, in a way that Jefferson himself, a quintessential Virginia slaveholder, could never have done. Leland fought for the basic objectives of political liberty and reform at the heart of the Jeffersonian message. He lived the democratic life that Jefferson, at his best, envisioned himself defending. That Leland saw Jefferson as a providential hero leading a party of the oppressed, and not as a master leading a party of slaveholders, only solidified their ideological bonds. Leland’s celebration of Jefferson did far more than parry Federalist recriminations of the “Negro President.” It helped Leland and other northern Republicans reconcile hostility toward slavery with political ties to southern masters. Imagining Jefferson as an emancipator served obvious partisan ends, but it also helped Leland believe that his aspirations for freedom were untainted by slavery. The Cheshire Republicans could celebrate their free-labor cheese and dream of liberty without acknowledging their institutional dependence on southern bondage through the Jeffersonian coalition. The giant cheese eventually moldered away, but the alliance between northern freedom and southern slavery that Leland helped form lasted well into the antebellum period.

The Rebellion of the White Slaves

Abraham Bishop had defined a vanguard position in 1791, when he defended the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and attacked the racial cast of American politics. In many ways, he defined a similarly innovative position in 1801 when he called for a new antislavery movement in New England, led by “societies for the emancipation of white slaves.” In 1791, Bishop had denied that the American British revolutionaries had ever been enslaved, disputing the comparison between imperial rule and bondage. But in Jeffersonian Connecticut white Americans had become slaves, to an insidious group of masters among the Federalist party.

This argument crystallized at a daylong celebration of Jefferson’s inauguration in Wallingford, Connecticut, on March 11, 1801. Advertised as a “day of Thanksgiving” to celebrate Jefferson’s election, the Wallingford event brought together the many strands of Connecticut Republicanism and “an immense concourse of people” that included at least 1,000 Republicans (according to the Republican paper The American Mercury). In the morning, Gideon Granger read the Declaration of Independence and the Unitarian minister Stanley Griswold gave a sermon, after which the celebrants drank several toasts. In the evening, Abraham Bishop gave an oration at Wallingford’s North Meeting House, festooned for the occasion with “the names of Jefferson and Burr in large capitals over the door.” The night ended “with a brilliant exhibition of Fireworks.”⁵⁷

In his speech, Bishop delivered a blunt indictment of Federalist rule. Returning to the themes of Connecticut Republicanism, Bishop identified Federalists as the latest incarnation of the “friends of order”—the few who attempted to rule the many and suppress the message of human equality, from the days of Jesus Christ to the time of Jefferson. The “friends of order” maintained political and economic inequality by force but especially by ideology: by “enslaving the minds of men.” Connecticut Federalists pursued this object by controlling the press, through localist paternal power, and especially through the union of church and state. But their time had finally come, for “the American and French revolutions were doubtless intended to improve the moral and political condition of man by redeeming the people from the tyranny of the friends of order. All our victories, all our defeats have been so many pledges for the eventual triumph of the rights of man.” In Bishop’s eyes, Jeffersonian Republicanism was an anti-elitist political movement that would liberate New Englanders from Federalist authority.⁵⁸

“Slavery” as a political metaphor appeared throughout Bishop’s speech, in attacks on the power wielded by the “friends of order.” A preface to the published version of the speech, however, indicated that Bishop was specifically thinking of southern slavery when considering the predicament of New England Republicans. These men were “white slaves,” he claimed, who had it far worse than their southern counterparts:

When a Southern slave breaks his fetters of bondage and declares for liberty, a hue and cry is raised, the daring culprit is apprehended and death is his portion. When a Northern slave declares for the emancipation of himself and his white brethren, all the masters are in an uproar, the pursuit is close, all means are fair and the daring wretch is doomed to all the vengeance of his oppressors.

But a Southern slave has only one master; a northern one has many, yea, he has a master to every power and faculty, to every thought and opinion on every subject. It is not necessary to the character of a slave that he have a chain about his leg, or a rope about his neck. Invisible slavery is more dreadful, extensive and intolerable than visible slavery, because in the first case the masters will often deny its existence.

Like Leland, Bishop did not attempt to ignore slavery in the South. Instead he incorporated slavery into a political vision that emphasized the oppression of northern white men. In doing so, he reconciled his liberation with slaveholder power, through a self-aggrandizing celebration of New England freedom. “THE REIGN OF TERROR is no more,” Bishop told his Wallingford audience, “and we are allowed, on this festive day, to render thanks for our emancipation…. Slaves in every part of the world are bursting their chains and proving that ‘man in his soul abhors tyranny.’”⁵⁹ Toasts offered at the Wallingford celebration and elsewhere echoed Bishop’s salute to emancipation from tyranny. “Republican Printers,” said the Wallingford Republicans: “of all men the most hated and persecuted, because of all men the most dangerous to Tyrants.” In Torringford, Connecticut, Jeffersonians toasted “The people of the United States: May the despotic chains from which they are emancipated, teach them to form into a phalanx impenetrable to the shafts of monarchical or aristocratical delusion.”⁶⁰ Republicans would defend their liberated minds.

But in many respects, these episodes of emancipation best revealed the compromises that Jeffersonians made with slavery and slaveholder power. While they continued to represent their cause in terms of egalitarian universalism, the Republican political alliance caused such principles to founder, as black slaves and white democrats met different fates in the Jeffersonian United States. In Virginia, when slaves attempted to burst their chains during Gabriel’s Rebellion in August of 1800, they were met by state violence, as the masters maintained their power by killing slaves who abhorred their condition. In Connecticut a few months later, such conflicting details disappeared in the grandiosity of Bishop’s rhetoric and its narrow focus on northern white men. Whereas cosmopolitan radicalism in the 1790s caused Bishop to turn outward, including slavery under a broad critique of unjust power, Jeffersonian politics invited a turning inward, as distant oppression became a metaphor for the self. Emphasizing their bondage in Federalist Connecticut, Bishop and his Republican comrades came to uneasy terms with slavery in Jeffersonian America.

New England Republicans accommodated the institutional power of slavery in a similar way, by insisting on their own relative oppression. Discussing the three-fifths clause in 1803, Bishop again returned to the language of white slavery: “The Southern States modestly claimed a representation only on 3 fifths of their black slaves, but the northern states insisted on estimating the whole number of their white slaves.” A year prior, he had lamented “the condition of tens of thousands of our brethren, who have no more voice in our councils than the black slaves in the Indies; men of full age and capacity, industrious, intelligent, useful members of society, who happened not to have property enough to entitle them to a vote.” In response to Federalist attacks on the institutional power of slavery in the Jeffersonian coalition, Bishop pointed to the political slavery of northern whites, suffering under property qualifications for the franchise. Such comparisons may have been intended to prove Federalists hypocrites, but the metaphorical substitution of white bondsman for black also obscured the political power of Jeffersonian slaveholders. The coercive minority of southern masters became lost in the midst of Republican clamoring for emancipation and democracy.⁶¹

Leland and Bishop were not alone in thinking themselves enslaved by Federalism. The Independent Chronicle, the leading Republican paper in New England, likewise substituted northern Jeffersonian for southern slave, albeit in a much more mundane way. Like the National Aegis, the Chronicle parried Federalist criticism of the three-fifths clause, Virginia slaveholders, and Jefferson’s personal relationship to mastery and despotism. It pointed to Jefferson’s antislavery principles, on record in the Notes on the State of Virginia, and observed that the Virginia House of Burgesses had opposed slave importation (while conveniently overlooking the racist passages in the Notes and Virginia’s self-interest in curtailing the international trade). As to the three-fifths clause, the Chronicle insisted, like the National Aegis, that it was an essential part of the Constitution, a compromise Massachusetts had always supported. Moreover, the Chronicle argued, Virginians did not in fact derive additional political power from their slave population. Because of the large state-small state bargain, Virginia actually sacrificed federal representation in the interest of Union. Returning to charges that Jefferson was elected by the three-fifths clause, the Chronicle claimed the truly “subject” votes in the election of 1800 were those of Massachusetts, since the Federalist legislature had refused to allow the people to determine the electoral vote.⁶²

In other words, the Massachusetts Republicans were the real slaves, to Federalists who controlled their votes, just as Virginian slaveholders, presumably, controlled the votes of their bondsmen. The logic here was far more convoluted than in Bishop and Leland’s comparisons, since the three-fifths clause did not deny anyone the right to vote—it simply gave additional power to slaveholders. But the Chronicle was undeterred, exclaiming in a later piece, “Let the Centinel then say that Mr. Jefferson has been chosen by slaves! If the true republicans of the United States are slaves, what is the other party?” Regardless of Federalist efforts, the paper continued, “the friends of Mr. Jefferson are not yet slaves; and under a merciful and protecting Deity, are not likely to become so.” The article likely referred to complaints in the Columbian Centinel, similar to those in the New-England Palladium, that Jefferson’s election depended on the three-fifths clause. As the Centinel put it in December 1800, “the wise and good of other countries … will regret that any policy shall impose on the United States a Chief Magistrate elected by the influence of Negro slaves.” In response, the Chronicle simply substituted northern Republicans as the referent for “slaves,” and turned Federalist criticism of the South into slander of Jeffersonian New England. Then the paper righteously protested this Federalist abuse. As sophistry, this may not inspire, but unconsciously, such a substitution expressed the essence of the Jeffersonian coalition. Jefferson’s friends in the North became the true slaves, a people fighting for freedom from oppression by aristocrats, religious zealots, nativist prejudice, and Anglophiles, while southern slaveholders became iconic leaders of northerners fighting for political and social equality.⁶³

Abraham Bishop said it best. “Nothing could have prevented a monarchy here but the accession of Jefferson and Burr to the presidency,” he told his Wallingford audience in 1801. In terms of the wider Republican coalition, this meant that the very men who, as a class, forestalled emancipation in the South, freed the northern slaves from the shackles of aristocratic tyranny. Bishop claimed forthrightly, “if the white slaves should rise in mass, they would be too much for their masters.” The image was meant to provoke, but Bishop was not joking: in his mind, Jeffersonian democracy was a slave rebellion.⁶⁴

These comparisons and substitutions seem irrational and exaggerated in retrospect, and to most Federalists, they appeared so at the time. But most New England Republicans were true believers, despite constant Federalist harping that the Republican emancipators were in fact slaveholding lords. Northern Republicans were perhaps misguided but they were not insincere. Men like Bishop and Leland believed ardently in the Republican cause, and they also believed that slavery was wrong. In contrast to most Republican commentary on the three-fifths clause, they did not try to suppress discussion of slavery or minimize southern bondage; nor did they condone the institution by appeals to race. But in substituting northern political inequality for southern slavery, they helped create a complex political alliance that in turn made it difficult to achieve antislavery objectives in national politics. For some Republicans, mere political calculation made this knot difficult to unravel, since there was no political organization more devoted to ridding New England of Federalism than Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. But for others, ideological and emotional bonds were decisive: if one really had felt liberated by the rise of Jeffersonian democracy—hardly an implausible emotion in early nineteenth century Massachusetts or Connecticut—then the temptation to magnify one’s own oppression in order to come to terms with slavery in the South must have been all the more powerful.

New England Jeffersonians, like Republicans throughout the North, helped provide American slaveholders, a distinct minority in a democratizing polity, what they needed most: tacit majority consent. They did so not by linking arms in racial fellowship, but rather by transforming themselves into slaves, and slaveholders into their emancipators. They won their freedom from Federalism, as Jefferson had promised Elbridge Gerry, but freedom on those terms proved hard to escape.