Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ