Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ