Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ