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

Neither Infinite Wretchedness nor Positive Good: Mathew Carey and Henry Clay on Political Economy and Slavery during the Long 1820s

Neither Infinite Wretchedness nor Positive Good Mathew Carey and Henry Clay on Political Economy and Slavery during the Long 1820s Andrew Shankman Most Jeffersonians came to power in 1801 in broad agreement about the conditions necessary to produce their empire of liberty, an egalitarian society of independent households. First, the nation’s political economy should remain fundamentally agrarian and geared toward the export of agricultural surpluses. Second, the nation-state should remain small and aloof from domestic life. For the sake of republican liberty, the states were the critical locus of governance . Third, slavery was harmful to whites (much less importantly, also to blacks) and inconsistent with the ‘‘genius’’ of republican citizenship. Slavery, the result of a ‘‘culture of infinite wretchedness,’’ warped republican citizens and undermined their institutions. Fortunately, many Jeffersonians insisted, slavery was unprofitable, Revolutionary ideology rejected it, and it would naturally in future play an insignificant role in American life.∞ During their years in power, many Jeffersonians rejected all three assumptions .≤ Examining two central figures among the rethinkers—the American System ’s foremost publicist and popularizer, Mathew Carey, and its leading political advocate, Henry Clay—reveals how they justified a new political economy, which made full use of a burgeoning American slavery, as the way to establish the empire of liberty. During the long1820s—beginning with the Missouri Crisis and the Panic of1819 and ending with the Nullification Crisis of1832–33—Carey and Clay argued that Jeffersonian ideals required an active nation-state and a domestic economy of agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing. As a result, they 248 Andrew Shankman relied on slavery’s growing significance and planned for it to play a vital role in their new political economy. Seeking the empire of liberty required reimagining slavery as something other than infinitely wretched. Placing slavery at the center of American politics and political economy seems to work better after the mid-1830s, the decades of the gag rule, the ‘‘positive good’’ thesis, immediate abolitionism, and free-soil politics. Discussions of Jeffersonian political economy and the American System, on the other hand, focus on the years between the War of 1812 and the presidency of John Quincy Adams, and primarily treat conflicts between the nascent middle and working classes, capitalist and producer mentalities, and the connections between the rise of democracy and conflicts about capitalism. Slavery intrudes during the Missouri Crisis as an important but anomalous portent.≥ These literatures are valuable , but distributing the issues as they do obscures a crucial point: throughout the long 1820s those conceiving the American System were thoroughly preoccupied with slavery. The American System assumed slavery’s growing significance for the domestic economy. Carey and Clay accepted expansive slavery precisely because they sought a diverse economy of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures. This new political economy, they believed, would preserve a society of independent republican households. Like all Jeffersonians, their vision stemmed from the eighteenth-century Age of Revolution that had rendered slavery an intellectual and ideological problem as never before; yet during the long 1820s, Carey and Clay could no longer treat slavery as poison in the republican atmosphere. Slavery was not a positive good, but neither could it remain infinitely wretched. The new political economy required that Carey and Clay remove slavery as a source of doubt about republican institutions. During the long 1820s both explained how to view slavery as approaching something that was, under the right circumstances, distinctly ‘‘positively goodish.’’ After the War of 1812, Mathew Carey and Henry Clay argued that altered world circumstances demanded a new political economy for a new age. Clay explained, ‘‘We have shaped our industry, our navigation, and our commerce, in reference to an extraordinary war in Europe and to foreign markets, which no longer exist.’’ Now ‘‘a new epoch has arisen,’’ and we must ‘‘proclaim . . . the incontestable truth [and admit] the altered state of the world.’’ Carey agreed, adding that the ‘‘nations of Europe could not be expected to allow us to continue the commerce that naturally belonged to them.’’ The nation’s citizen-farmers now confronted ‘‘the reduction of the price of our wheat [with] the return of so many of the soldiery to the labors of the field.’’∂ Carey and Clay invoked the new Neither Infinite Wretchedness nor Positive Good 249 epoch to explain all of the nation’s ills. Only the transformation of American political economy...