Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ