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7 Slavery and the Politics of Upheaval The 1790s “Men have not thus a right to trifle with truth, and with social confidence and happiness,” lectured Noah Webster in 1797. Unscrupulous parties would have the public believe that urban America’s destructive encounter with yellow fever had its origins in Africa. They wished to sabotage the development of an African free-labor cotton colony, which might signal the end of the transatlantic slave trade, a projection of antislavery political economy akin to earlier hopes for maple sugar. Webster, a Federalist editor and publisher with powerful sponsors and broad nationalist ambitions, had taken a moment of his lengthy disquisition on the domestic origin of disease outbreak to castigate slavery’s apologists, indicating that their falsehoods poisoned public dialogue itself.1 Webster refused to accept yellow fever as a permanent feature of life, at best kept at bay, just as he, a member of the New York Manumission Society (NYMS), refused elsewhere to accept slavery as a natural facet of economic life. Humans, he made clear, constructed their own living environments for good or ill.2 Urging officials to enact appropriate urban public-health practices , Webster provided a glimpse of the American public sphere’s highest aspirations: “a free inquiry, after combating innumerable prejudices and mountains of obstacles, will prevail and correct the errors of other nations.”3 During the 1790s, New Yorkers—whose political inquiries were increasingly as fractious as they were free—continued to ascend toward the summit of gradual abolition, drawing on the errors of other parts of the nation to correct their own missteps. As they worked through a tangled thicket of regional resentments and partisan competition, the state’s writers and politicians increasingly perceived the wrongs of bondage as amenable to political resolution. Continuing to consider slavery’s place in their own state, New Yorkers evaluated themselves in terms of a national contrast between north and south. The process by which politically engaged New Yorkers worked out their relationship to slavery and section was, however, a slow and uneven one. In the 1780s, New Yorkers failed to traverse the distance between de- Slavery and the Politics of Upheaval: The 1790s 131 nunciation of metaphorical political enslavement to the British Empire and abolition of actual slavery in their midst. In the first half of the 1790s, New York Republicans even attempted to make political hay out of the alleged antislavery leanings of their Federalist opponents. By contrast, regional differences stimulated morally charged or contemptuous rhetoric, in which the south’s vulnerability served as an irresistible target, especially for Webster’s fellow Federalists. As the decade moved forward, white New Yorkers of both parties distinguished between their position as a northern state and the needs and threats faced by southern states. National perspective helped New Yorkers focus attention on their own regional identity and interests in ways that further undermined slavery’s domestic political cover.4 Despite and because of the atmosphere of partisan upheaval, the century’s end witnessed bipartisan support for the gradual abolition of slavery in New York. Amid bruising partisan-inflected rhetorical battles for political hegemony, relatively few Federalists or Republicans in New York found themselves holding a political stake in saving slavery. I. Racial discourse and partisan competition converged in New York’s 1792 gubernatorial election. The George Clinton–John Jay contest was a harbinger of the rancorous political environment of the 1790s and a product of a long history of competition for political authority in the state. Clinton supporters found in slavery a tempting tactical weapon, the use of which may have affected the outcome of this extremely close battle for political supremacy in New York. It was perhaps the first time, but certainly not the last, that partisanship and the debate over slavery intersected in the state’s newspapers during this turbulent decade. New York politicians and printers were instrumental to the partisan polarization of national public debate.5 Indeed, by the mid-1790s, partisanship in New York, as elsewhere in the new nation, would be fueled by a growing number of newspapers founded in part to advance the ambitions of contending Federalist and Republican factions. New Republican journals such as the Time Piece and the New York City Argus joined established Republican-leaning papers to participate in the increasingly intense political debates sparked by the Jay Treaty and the apparent Federalist hegemony in national and state politics. Meanwhile, Noah Webster’s American Minerva, which also published the...

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