necessary. Slavery as metaphor allowed Leland to substitute his evangelical brethren for southern bondspersons, which in turn displaced slavery as fact. Thus a slaveholder like Jefferson could become the folk hero of a band of anti-aristocratic Baptists who objected to despotism in all of its forms and took pride in their free labor cheese. Jefferson encouraged these identifications and substitutions through his patronage of men like Leland. Although he never imagined Leland as a social and intellectual equal, receiving a giant cheese required more than condescension. Jefferson gave Leland $200 for the cheese and, more importantly, welcomed him in Washington as a man with political standing. Leland, in turn, gave crucial substance to Jeffersonian ideology, in a way that Jefferson himself, a quintessential Virginia slaveholder, could never have done. Leland fought for the basic objectives of political liberty and reform at the heart of the Jeffersonian message. He lived the democratic life that Jefferson, at his best, envisioned himself defending. That Leland saw Jefferson as a providential hero leading a party of the oppressed, and not as a master leading a party of slaveholders, only solidified their ideological bonds. Leland’s celebration of Jefferson did far more than parry Federalist recriminations of the “Negro President.” It helped Leland and other northern Republicans reconcile hostility toward slavery with political ties to southern masters. Imagining Jefferson as an emancipator served obvious partisan ends, but it also helped Leland believe that his aspirations for freedom were untainted by slavery. The Cheshire Republicans could celebrate their free-labor cheese and dream of liberty without acknowledging their institutional dependence on southern bondage through the Jeffersonian coalition. The giant cheese eventually moldered away, but the alliance between northern freedom and southern slavery that Leland helped form lasted well into the antebellum period.
The Rebellion of the White Slaves
Abraham Bishop had defined a vanguard position in 1791, when he defended the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and attacked the racial cast of American politics. In many ways, he defined a similarly innovative position in 1801 when he called for a new antislavery movement in New England, led by “societies for the emancipation of white slaves.” In 1791, Bishop had denied that the American British revolutionaries had ever been enslaved, disputing the comparison between imperial rule and bondage. But in Jeffersonian Connecticut white Americans had become slaves, to an insidious group of masters among the Federalist party.
This argument crystallized at a daylong celebration of Jefferson’s inauguration in Wallingford, Connecticut, on March 11, 1801. Advertised as a “day of Thanksgiving” to celebrate Jefferson’s election, the Wallingford event brought together the many strands of Connecticut Republicanism and “an immense concourse of people” that included at least 1,000 Republicans (according to the Republican paper The American Mercury). In the morning, Gideon Granger read the Declaration of Independence and the Unitarian minister Stanley Griswold gave a sermon, after which the celebrants drank several toasts. In the evening, Abraham Bishop gave an oration at Wallingford’s North Meeting House, festooned for the occasion with “the names of Jefferson and Burr in large capitals over the door.” The night ended “with a brilliant exhibition of Fireworks.”57
In his speech, Bishop delivered a blunt indictment of Federalist rule. Returning to the themes of Connecticut Republicanism, Bishop identified Federalists as the latest incarnation of the “friends of order”—the few who attempted to rule the many and suppress the message of human equality, from the days of Jesus Christ to the time of Jefferson. The “friends of order” maintained political and economic inequality by force but especially by ideology: by “enslaving the minds of men.” Connecticut Federalists pursued this object by controlling the press, through localist paternal power, and especially through the union of church and state. But their time had finally come, for “the American and French revolutions were doubtless intended to improve the moral and political condition of man by redeeming the people from the tyranny of the friends of order. All our victories, all our defeats have been so many pledges for the eventual triumph of the rights of man.” In Bishop’s eyes, Jeffersonian Republicanism was an anti-elitist political movement that would liberate New Englanders from Federalist authority.58
“Slavery” as a political metaphor appeared throughout Bishop’s speech, in attacks on the power wielded by the “friends of order.” A preface to the published version of the speech, however, indicated that Bishop was specifically thinking of southern slavery when considering the predicament of New England Republicans. These men were “white slaves,” he claimed, who had it far worse than their southern counterparts:
When a Southern slave breaks his fetters of bondage and declares for liberty, a hue and cry is raised, the daring culprit is apprehended and death is his portion. When a Northern slave declares for the emancipation of himself and his white brethren, all the masters are in an uproar, the pursuit is close, all means are fair and the daring wretch is doomed to all the vengeance of his oppressors.
But a Southern slave has only one master; a northern one has many, yea, he has a master to every power and faculty, to every thought and opinion on every subject. It is not necessary to the character of a slave that he have a chain about his leg, or a rope about his neck. Invisible slavery is more dreadful, extensive and intolerable than visible slavery, because in the first case the masters will often deny its existence.
Like Leland, Bishop did not attempt to ignore slavery in the South. Instead he incorporated slavery into a political vision that emphasized the oppression of northern white men. In doing so, he reconciled his liberation with slaveholder power, through a self-aggrandizing celebration of New England freedom. “THE REIGN OF TERROR is no more,” Bishop told his Wallingford audience, “and we are allowed, on this festive day, to render thanks for our emancipation…. Slaves in every part of the world are bursting their chains and proving that ‘man in his soul abhors tyranny.’”59 Toasts offered at the Wallingford celebration and elsewhere echoed Bishop’s salute to emancipation from tyranny. “Republican Printers,” said the Wallingford Republicans: “of all men the most hated and persecuted, because of all men the most dangerous to Tyrants.” In Torringford, Connecticut, Jeffersonians toasted “The people of the United States: May the despotic chains from which they are emancipated, teach them to form into a phalanx impenetrable to the shafts of monarchical or aristocratical delusion.”60 Republicans would defend their liberated minds.
But in many respects, these episodes of emancipation best revealed the compromises that Jeffersonians made with slavery and slaveholder power. While they continued to represent their cause in terms of egalitarian universalism, the Republican political alliance caused such principles to founder, as black slaves and white democrats met different fates in the Jeffersonian United States. In Virginia, when slaves attempted to burst their chains during Gabriel’s Rebellion in August of 1800, they were met by state violence, as the masters maintained their power by killing slaves who abhorred their condition. In Connecticut a few months later, such conflicting details disappeared in the grandiosity of Bishop’s rhetoric and its narrow focus on northern white men. Whereas cosmopolitan radicalism in the 1790s caused Bishop to turn outward, including slavery under a broad critique of unjust power, Jeffersonian politics invited a turning inward, as distant oppression became a metaphor for the self. Emphasizing their bondage in Federalist Connecticut, Bishop and his Republican comrades came to uneasy terms with slavery in Jeffersonian America.
New England Republicans accommodated the institutional power of slavery in a similar way, by insisting on their own relative oppression. Discussing the three-fifths clause in 1803, Bishop again returned to the language of white slavery: “The Southern States modestly claimed a representation only on 3 fifths of their black slaves, but the northern states insisted on estimating the whole number of their white slaves.” A year prior, he had lamented “the condition of tens of thousands of our brethren, who have no more voice in our councils than the black slaves in the Indies; men of full age and capacity, industrious, intelligent, useful members of society, who happened not to have property enough to entitle them to a vote.” In response to Federalist attacks on the institutional power of slavery in the Jeffersonian
