Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation

Slavery and the Problem of Democracy in Jeffersonian America

Slavery and the Problem of Democracy in Jeffersonian America Padraig Riley From the American Revolution to the Civil War, antislavery critics of the United States converged on a stock image of American hypocrisy: the slaveholding republican who yelped for freedom while he drove his Negroes, declaimed in the legislature by day and abused his human chattels by night. From Samuel Johnson to Frances Trollope and beyond, the slaveholding republican was a damning metaphor, capturing in one instant the contradictory reality of early American political culture. Yet it was also fundamentally inaccurate. For many enslaved African Americans, masters who spoke of liberty while they raised the lash were an all-too-frequent reality. The large majority of white Americans, however, confronted slavery far less directly: they were neither slaves nor masters, but members of a nation in which slavery was both extremely powerful and yet not always so ominously present. All white Americans remained connected to slavery, because it was such a powerful institution in the Southern and national economies and because slaveholders held considerable power in national politics. Yet for many non-slaveholders, slavery remained both geographically and ideologically distant. Even those who confronted slavery struggled to explain their complex ties to the power and oppression at the heart of the institution. This was especially the case in the post-Revolutionary North after 1790, as the Democratic-Republican and Federalist Parties became consumed by an intense conflict over freedom and power in representative government. During the heyday of what came to be called ‘‘Jeffersonian democracy,’’ Northern Republicans fought to obtain the basic institutional conditions of a democratic political order: they removed suffrage restrictions and qualifications for political office based on wealth; they elected lesser men to positions of power; they fought against nativ- 228 Padraig Riley ism and religious establishments; and they built an impressive political coalition that brought Thomas Jefferson to the presidency in 1800.∞ Yet as Federalists observed in 1800, and as more and more historians have come to argue in recent years, Jefferson’s election was marked not by the triumph of democracy but by the triumph of slavery. Jefferson’s base was in the Southern states, and the Democratic-Republican Party would remain strongest there throughout its history . While post-Revolutionary Northerners acted to bring slavery to an end, gradually but decisively, Southern Republicans were the political face of an expanding and powerful slave society. They often restrained democratic practices for white men in their own states, while fighting to protect and expand slavery in the new American nation.≤ These two conflicting visions of Jeffersonian politics—one based on democracy , one based on slavery—dominate current historiography, but historians have been hesitant to integrate them. Doing so requires moving beyond the metaphor of the republican slaveholder and looking more closely at how non-slaveholding Americans encountered the power of slavery in the early nation. We especially need to know more about how Northern Democratic-Republicans, the vanguard of democratization in the 1790s and 1800s, came to terms with their supposed antithesis—the powerful slaveholders who were their comrades and leaders in the Jeffersonian coalition. Some historians see racism as the primary explanation for these Northern Jeffersonians: by emphasizing the grievances of white men, excluding free blacks from political and social life, and embracing slaveholders’ fears of emancipation, Northern Republicans formed a powerful racial bond to the slaveholding South.≥ Others historians seem to believe that ignorance of slavery was possible, to some degree. In their view, Northern politics were primarily local, while Southern slavery was a distant problem that most Northerners overlooked in favor of political struggles closer to home.∂ More recently, historians have begun to dissent from both of these arguments, by claiming that Northern Republicans frequently opposed slavery at the national level. While Northern Federalists made the boldest attacks against slavery, Northern Republicans routinely fought against proslavery legislation in Congress and maligned slaveholders (much as they maligned Federalist elites) as an anti-democratic force.∑ Together, these three conceptions of the Northern Jeffersonian relationship to slavery seem inconsistent, yet all can claim equal validity, depending on who one is looking at and when. The infamous Jeffersonian printer, William Duane, for example, opposed slavery in 1796; reconciled himself to the institution after 1800; attacked slavery again after the War of1812; and then ended his political career by reaffirming the commitments that had suppressed his antislavery convictions in Slavery and the...