Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

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СКАЧАТЬ “attempt to seduce the servants of gentlemen travelling to the seat of Government” and that their petition attempted to incite a slave rebellion. Instead of referring the petition to a committee, he was “for its laying on the table, or under the table, that they might not only have done with the business for to-day, but finally.” Rutledge, in other words, agreed with fellow South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith, who told Congress in January 1797 that slavery was “a kind of property on which the House has no power to legislate.” Some historians interpret such claims to exclusive authority over slavery, the indispensable axiom of slaveholder political thought, as arguments for the state-level regulation of the peculiar institution. But many northern Republicans in Congress saw them differently, as attempts to resist democratic governance of an institution dependent on coercive power. Such transparent claims to power in national politics only supported Duane’s portrayal of slaveholders as irredeemable enemies of liberty.¹⁷

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

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

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

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

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

      Thus, as in New England, Pennsylvania Jeffersonians demonstrated a wide range of antislavery sentiment. Of course, as Democratic-Republicans, all these men were allied to powerful slaveholders in the southern states. And as in New England, instead of rejecting that alliance, they found ways to embrace it. Immigrant Jeffersonians elevated the Jeffersonian alliance beyond partisanship, as they fought for political inclusion СКАЧАТЬ