under the same Constitution that Washington and Adams were, and does not the same base reflection rest on them as it does on Mr. Jefferson? Shameful disgrace to our national character !!!” The disgrace, to be clear, was not the three-fifths clause, but the fact that anyone would use the clause to criticize Jefferson. A month earlier, “A Traveler” made the same point. He acknowledged the popularity of Federalist charges that Jefferson was elected by the three-fifths clause, but, like Lincoln, decried such criticism as the suggestion of treason, as a betrayal of the Constitution and the nation. The unstated counterpart to that message was critical to Jeffersonian success in the North: being an American meant not talking about the political power of slavery.40
Federalists were hardly deterred. Though some members in Congress worried that they might be overwhelmed by a Republican tide and “go home without their heads,” Federalist dissidents only escalated their attacks on slavery and southern power.41 In 1804, they proposed a constitutional amendment abolishing the three-fifths clause, attempting to strike a blow at both the political power of the South and the political conscience of the North. Known as the Ely amendment, for its sponsor in the Massachusetts Senate, William Ely, the proposal gained little traction, but it once again placed Jeffersonians on the defensive, as Federalists exposed the institutional contradictions of Jeffersonian democracy. John Quincy Adams, one of two Federalist senators from Massachusetts, joined the attack as “Publius Valerius” in the fall of 1804, hoping to influence the presidential contest in Massachusetts. Relatively silent on slavery in the Senate, Adams was vociferous in print, denouncing the three-fifths clause for creating “a privileged order of slave-holding Lords, and a race of men degraded to a lower station, merely because they are not slave-holders.”42
Massachusetts Republicans responded with a familiar mixture of nationalism and accusation: In their minds, Ely’s proposal was yet another byproduct of disaffected, antidemocratic resentment by sectional elites. Barnabas Bidwell, soon to begin a short-lived national political career as a Jeffersonian, reminded the Massachusetts Senate of the once powerful bonds between his own state and Virginia. Those bonds were a staple trope for New England Republicans, who constantly retold the story of the Revolution, when Virginia came to the aid of Massachusetts. Rather than sons of the Revolution, Federalists were portrayed as its traitors. Virginians, in contrast, from the Revolution to the ascendancy of Jefferson, were the guarantors of New England freedom. As Elbridge Gerry explained to Thomas Jefferson in 1803, the three “antirepublican” states of New England “had great merit in establishing their independence but owe the preservation of it to the southern states.” Until the rise of “Federalism,” said the Independent Chronicle, “Massachusetts and Virginia were happily united and harmonious in their politics.” Throughout early 1805, the Chronicle reprinted criticisms of the Ely amendment from multiple state legislatures, as part of a campaign to paint Federalists as national pariahs. Republicans from the Pennsylvania House claimed that the sectional obstacles in the way of union—of both the “physical” and “moral” kind—required “a reciprocal spirit of conciliation and compromise, in the formation of a general government.” To trifle with that spirit, they claimed, might send the whole national edifice crashing to the ground. Similar comments followed from the legislatures of South Carolina, Kentucky, and Maryland. The national chorus defined the three-fifths clause as the necessary price of Union. According to the Chronicle, it was a price worth paying.43
Such arguments aggravated John Quincy Adams to no end. In his mind, the three-fifths clause was unjust, and anyone who advocated against the Ely amendment on grounds of “patriotism” or “union” prostrated themselves with the “fear of giving offense by the exercise of an indisputable right.” To feel such fears was to act the slave; to instill them was to employ the “language of a negro driver on a plantation, to the wretches who tremble under his lash.” Adams doubted that such cowardly motives could truly exist “in the heart of a New England farmer.”44 In the midst of this bombast, he had a point: New England Jeffersonians consistently attacked Federalist elitism and hierarchy, while claiming the right and power of ordinary citizens to make political decisions in their own interest and on their own terms. But when it came to the three-fifths clause they advocated either outright suppression of political debate or, at best, leaving the issue to their southern colleagues to resolve. Such arguments effectively mirrored the southern response to antislavery argument at the national level. When Joseph Bradley Varnum and other Republicans spoke on behalf of African American petitioners and against the Fugitive Slave Act in 1797, southern slaveholders responded by demanding that the subject be rejected altogether. “This is a kind of property on which the House has no power to legislate,” explained South Carolina’s William Loughton Smith; “it was not a proper subject for Legislative attention.”45 Acceding to such autocratic claims should have galled any true democrat, implied John Quincy Adams, who was distressed as much by self-censorship among New England Republicans as by southern Republican dependence on the three-fifths clause.
But the political landscape was even more convoluted than he made it out to be. While New England Jeffersonians celebrated democracy and suppressed the problem of slavery, Federalists, who were quick to indict the political inequality created by the three-fifths clause, were also eager to scorn the degradations of democracy. In addition to denouncing the “Negro President,” the New England Palladium instructed its readers about the dangers of “universal suffrage.” In March of 1801, “Farmer Johnson” proposed that the vote be restricted to men “who hold a good character and a reasonable share of property,” lest “the bad men” (who were generally men without property) elect “bad candidates” to office. “Democracy,” the paper explained that October, “says to the destitute mob, protect the rights of man, which are two, the one vengeance and the other pillage.” In the fall of 1802, the Palladium insisted that a political system based on the “uncontrouled power of the multitude,” would lead to “the slavery of all, even of that of the blind multitude.” Such openly antidemocratic professions only justified the Republican image of Federalists as unrepentant aristocrats.46
To Jefferson and his supporters, Federalist disdain for democracy simply reflected the perversity of New England elites, and a number of historians have remained squarely in the Jeffersonian tradition. Yet many Federalists developed a complex interpretation of American politics, one rooted in a transatlantic, conservative critique of the violent potential of unchecked popular sovereignty. This conservatism had its repressive side, as was obvious from the Alien and Sedition laws or the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries’s Rebellion in 1790s Pennsylvania; on the whole, however, Federalist “tyranny” was mild compared to either the Jacobin Terror or British political repression, on brutal display in Ireland in 1798. It was likewise far less violent than Virginia’s response to Gabriel’s failed slave rebellion in Richmond in the summer of 1800. In the end, Federalist conservatism was not driven, as Jeffersonians argued, by the simple desire to control. Many Federalists were skeptical of the human character and the human capacity for good, and they consequently favored an organic social hierarchy, tied to traditional sources of authority and order. Connecticut’s Noah Webster, for example, believed that only old men should vote and hold office because the majority of men were “ignorant, or what is worse, governed by prejudices & authority.” In contrast, Connecticut Republican Samuel Morse believed that “the human mind is capable of improvement, the human heart susceptible of much amendment, and human happiness of great extension.” To Federalists, such optimism for human progress was foolhardy at best. Republican claims that democracy and reason would liberate mankind were contradicted by the violence of the French Revolution and the slaveholding South. Yet Federalists rarely made these points in isolation from far more simplistic antidemocratic arguments, in which they derided the capacity of ordinary people to govern. This did not aid their electoral prospects and it limited the impact of their criticism of Republican hypocrisy on the slavery question. Confronted with Federalist outrage, Jeffersonians consistently refocused political debate on the purportedly true source of inequality in America: New England elitism.47
Doing so, as in the debate over the Ely Amendment, sidelined Federalist challenges to slavery. This had obvious practical benefits for Republicans.
