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5 Pirates, Sugar, Debtors, and Federalists The Paradoxes of Antislavery Political Economy Neglecting commerce and abusing slaves could bring a society to ruin. In the spring of 1786, “Americanus” sought to impress on New Yorkers these lessons from ancient history. “The method in which the Spartans treated their slaves, formed the strongest proof of the pernicious influence of their government,” wrote the pseudonymous essayist in the New-York Journal. Americanus also lamented, “The rights of mankind, gratitude, and selfinterest , were all equally neglected by them in their treatment of slaves.” Moreover, the folly of Lycurgus the lawgiver extended beyond slavery to the entire Spartan political economy. The law maintained an artificial conformity of conditions among citizens, rather than giving free play either to their “industry” or to the “natural” pursuit of “happiness.” Thus, slavery produced an internal threat to safety, while the larger system restricting consumption left Sparta unprepared to handle the wealth it inevitably acquired. Republican citizens—ancient or modern—were better off mastering commerce than mastering men.1 In the wake of independence, many New Yorkers projected for their state and nation a future of trade, growth, development, and economic autonomy. As the parable of ancient Sparta suggested, slavery fit uneasily within this project. Opponents of slavery and proponents of rapid economic expansion —who were sometimes the same people—constructed slavery as undermining the legitimacy of consumption, wealth, and power in New York’s growth-oriented political economy.2 Slavery, at home and abroad, appeared as a practical roadblock and a symbolic converse of this political and economic vision, deterring free trade and confining the potential of free labor.3 Slavery’s critics thus inserted the issue into a wide variety of debates and discourses that otherwise seemingly had little to do with domestic slavery. A willingness by New York newspapers and activists to funnel arguments from outsiders, especially Pennsylvanians, showed that antislavery in the postrevolutionary North relied on a network of determined advocates capable of acting with ideological dexterity. Many of the arguments regarding slavery during the late 1780s—which swirled around such issues as debt imprison- Pirates, Sugar, Debtors, and Federalists 79 ment, sugar production, Algerian piracy, and the powers of the national government —paid little heed to the technicalities of gradual abolition. Rather, criticism of slavery focused on New York’s projected position in the national political order and the Atlantic trading system. Opponents of slavery thus sought to build a case against slavery that matched the tenor of the times. As vulnerable as slavery was to attacks based on analysis of and analogies to political economy, such an emphasis, until the mid-1790s, also created dif- ficulties for the campaign against slavery. Successful practical applications of antislavery political economy were hard to come by. The debate over the rati fication of the U.S. Constitution temporarily trumped all other discussions of political economy, with avatars of growth and development ultimately out- flanking their Anti-Federalist rivals. As a matter of perceived tactical necessity and nationalistic priorities, Federalist opponents of slavery in New York by their silence on slavery and by their open complicity in the compromises built into the Constitution seemed to concede that slavery complemented rather than detracted from America’s economic and political ambitions. The years 1788 to 1790 thus brought an additional series of potentially debilitating compromises to state and national antislavery interests. As discussed in chapter 4, in February 1788 New York’s state legislature recodified slavery with some concessions to growing opposition within the state. That summer, after overcoming significant dissent, New York ratified a proslavery federal constitution. Subsequent debates in the first federal congress, which met in New York City through 1790, further revealed how difficult it was to apply arguments based on morality or political economy, particularly when acting on the national political stage. Even so, political expediency and federal politics did not prevent slavery’s critics from continuing to highlight a perceived incompatibility between slavery and contemporary visions of economic growth as well as emerging republican social values. Regardless of the constitutional compromise on slavery, New Yorkers pursued their own regional and, sometimes, national campaign against slavery in which indirect critiques harmonized with emerging notions of citizenship, economic ambition, and social order. The antislavery case continued to forge a broad avenue into the state’s public discourse, which, combined with shifting perceptions of race, created an ideological context in which white New Yorkers might come to regard gradual abolition...

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