"Sambos" and "Black Cut-Throats": Peter Porcupine on Slavery and Race in the 1790's

William Cobbett (1763-1835) is known primarily for his activities as a radical publisher and political activist in England during the first three decades of the nineteenth century who defended the rights of the poor and denounced Britain's corrupt, aristocratic governing circles. During the 1790s, however, as an English expatriate newspaper editor in Philadelphia, Cobbett upheld reactionary ideas and shuddered at the United States' democratizing trends. ¹ His Philadelphia daily, Porcupine's Gazette, initiated in March 1797, adopted a spiritedly ultraconservative stance, protesting the extremes to which the raw republic carried individual freedom. In an early number of the paper, borrowing a metaphor from Edmund Burke, one of his favorite political thinkers, Cobbett voiced disdain for the "swinish multitude." Under the pseudonym "Harry Hedgehog," Cobbett proposed legally enslaving the naturally lazy poor: "Would it not be a kindness to themselves to take their liberty from them?" he argued. "And a material advantage to the public to whip them to their work?" He continued:

That government which promotes the general good both of the public and of individuals is certainly the best. O for monarchy, despotism, slavery, or any species of government, that will conduce to the happiness of mankind! It is our interest to be beaten and compelled to our good, when we are too ignorant and too stupid to study and pursue it ourselves. Few are fit to be their own masters. . . . Many suffer for want of better masters than themselves; such, nature intended to serve. ²

Ostensibly, Cobbett not only considered slavery natural for blacks and those whites who lacked self-discipline and frugality, he justified it as fulfilling a venerable classical republican precept, "the general good."

Throughout Cobbett's first residence in the United States, from October 1792 to June 1800 (he returned in 1817, fleeing persecution by the British government, and remained two more years), he expressed his loathing for its pushy, ill-bred citizenry and democratic government. In 1799, President John Adams' popular decision to negotiate an end to the year-long "undeclared war" with Revolutionary France further confirmed Cobbett in his Anglophile sympathies, contempt for popular ignorance and naiveté, and conviction that a broad suffrage nurtured "infamous tyrant[s]." Lamenting Philadelphia's political turbulence, he wrote conservative English publisher John Wright, "I wish the people of England could but have an adequate idea of our situation at this time. They would never more think of extending the right of voting, take my word for it." ³

In Philadelphia, Cobbett's personal tribulations further alienated him from the United States. Nearly bankrupt after losing a huge libel suit Dr. Benjamin Rush had brought against him, in June 1800 he returned to England, intent on devoting his talents to eulogizing Britain's constitutional monarchy and scourging republican government. He promised his essays "would go further in rooting up the poisonous principles of republicanism in England, than any thing that ever appeared." Cobbett confessed to William Gifford, an English Tory, that his American experience had converted him into a zealous monarchist. Expostulating that "universal suffrage" on the U.S. model resulted in the election of "frighteningly" incompetent and corrupt officials, he hoped his writings would convince Britons that they were happier and more virtuous under a king than in a republic. ⁴

Although Cobbett's life has recently received much attention from British scholars, they have virtually omitted his career in Philadelphia from 1792-1799. They have also neglected his opinions on slavery and race, topics of heated controversy in the Early Republic. Even American scholar Karen K. List's careful study of Porcupine's Gazette's political outlook ignores the newspaper's views on slavery. ⁵ David A. Wilson glosses over the topic in his scholarly introduction to selections from Cobbett's pamphlets and newspaper articles of the...