Duane emigrated to the United States in 1796, evading Prime Minister William Pitt’s crackdown on the LCS. In America, he continued to pay close attention to British and European politics. He especially supported the United Irishmen, a group of radicals, including John Binns, who fought for an independent Irish republic. His transatlantic politics were shared by Philadelphia Jeffersonians, as the toasts at a December 1799 political celebration suggest: Republicans drank to the cause of democracy in Pennsylvania and the character of Thomas Jefferson as well as to the “rights of man,” the downfall of the “despots of Europe,” and “The United Irishmen, rebellion against tyrants is the law of God.”10
In the United States, Duane soon found himself at the center of national political conflict. He began to work for Benjamin Franklin Bache at Philadelphia’s Aurora General Advertiser, the most prominent Republican paper in the 1790s. Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, imported European political radicalism into the United States. He published Paine’s work throughout the 1790s, and repeatedly instigated conflict with the Federalist party. After Bache died of yellow fever in 1798, Duane continued to publish the Aurora on behalf of his widow, Margaret Bache. He later took over the paper on his account and married Margaret. With financial assistance from prominent Republicans, the Aurora became the most important Jeffersonian paper in the election of 1800, and Duane retained fairly close ties to Jefferson for the rest of his career. Duane’s life in the United States mirrored those of other British and Irish immigrants like Binns, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Cooper, and Thomas Addis Emmet, who achieved political standing in the United States and infused democratic politics with cosmopolitan radicalism.11
As in New England, early democratic politics in Pennsylvania frequently embraced open opposition to slavery. Soon after arriving in the United States, Duane penned a blistering attack on George Washington and his 1796 farewell address to the American people. Addressing the president directly, through a public letter, Duane indicted Washington for numerous faults, from his partiality to Britain to his endorsement of Hamilton to the warnings against partisanship in the farewell address, which Duane described as “the loathings of a sick mind.” Duane saw himself as a patriot in defense of the new American nation, unafraid to criticize the hero of the Revolution. He warned his readers that republics had often faltered because of excessive “confidence placed in the virtues and talents of individuals”; he therefore sought “to expose the PERSONAL IDOLATRY into which we have been heedlessly running.” At the end of his letter, Duane ruthlessly assessed Washington’s character. He claimed that Washington’s repressive political behavior reflected his moral failures, and entertained doubts about the sincerity of his patriotism during the Revolution. Most damning of all, Washington was a slaveholder. Duane argued that future generations would look back on Washington as a hypocrite and tyrant. They would “discover,” said Duane,
that the great champion of American Freedom the rival of Timoleon and Cincinnatus, twenty years after the establishment of the Republic, was possessed of FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY, enjoying the FRUITS OF THEIR LABOUR WITHOUT REMUNERATION, OR EVEN THE CONSOLATIONS OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION—that he retained the barbarous usages of the feudal system, and kept men in LIVERY—and that he still affected to be the friend of the Christian Religion, of civil Liberty, and moral equality—and to be withal a disinterested, virtuous, liberal and unassuming man.12
To Duane, slaveholding was fundamentally antidemocratic.
His denunciations of Washington were echoed across the Atlantic by the Liverpool radical Edward Rushton, who published in 1797 a letter he had written Washington the previous year. A supporter of the French Revolution, Rushton marveled at the contradiction of Washington, “a man who, notwithstanding his hatred of oppression, and his ardent love of liberty, holds at this moment hundreds of fellow-beings in a state of abject bondage.”13 Indictments of American hypocrisy on the slavery question were not confined to conservative critics of the American and French Revolutions. Transatlantic republicans likewise attacked slavery and pointed to the gap between American political rhetoric, which celebrated freedom, and the American political economy, which depended on bondage. But in the context of the 1790s, egalitarian attacks on slavery became entangled in partisan conflict and the emergence of Jeffersonian democracy. Thus Duane sought to turn his antislavery condemnation of Washington to partisan ends. Any advocate of democracy opposed to aristocratic rule, he implied, should oppose slavery and George Washington, and support the emerging Democratic-Republican coalition.
Antislavery Republicans
Duane was hardly alone in combining opposition to Federalism with opposition to slavery. The more genteel Republican Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant, had become a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1793, and supported a resolution in the Pennsylvania legislature to abolish slavery in the state, as the institution was “inconsistent with every principle of humanity, justice, and right.” Gallatin briefly served as a U.S. senator in the winter of 1793–1794, until Federalists ejected him on the grounds that he had not been a citizen of the United States the required nine years. In 1795, he returned to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives, where he argued on behalf of antislavery causes. He presented a Quaker antislavery petition to the House in November 1797, and fought southern Federalists to have it read and sent to committee; he likewise defended, albeit in a more circumspect way, the right of free blacks from Philadelphia to petition the House in 1800.14
In defense of the Quaker petitioners, Gallatin told southern members of Congress that “all men are free when they set their foot within the State” (of Pennsylvania), the only exception being slaves of southern congressmen. That was a considerable overstatement, since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed masters to recapture enslaved people who escaped into Pennsylvania, while state law permitted slaveholders to reside for up to six months in Pennsylvania, slaves in tow. Congressmen, as Gallatin noted, were immune even from the six-month limit, a clear sign of Pennsylvania’s willingness to accommodate the slaveholders of the American federal government. On the other hand, Gallatin, one of the more important Republicans in the House, had no qualms about uttering such openly antislavery sentiments in Congress. His southern Federalist colleagues took him seriously and were fairly incensed by his idealization of an antislavery Pennsylvania. In their eyes, at least, northern Republican hostility to slavery was far from superficial.15
Gallatin’s colleague John Swanwick, a Republican merchant from Philadelphia, also supported the November 1797 Quaker petition. Back in December 1796, Swanwick had argued for federal intervention to prevent kidnapping of free African Americans. He provoked a debate with South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith, in the course of which Swanwick claimed that free African Americans “ought to be protected in their freedom, not only by the State Legislatures but by the General Government.” In January 1797, Swanwick presented a petition from North Carolina freemen (at the time, residents of Philadelphia), protesting the abrogation of their manumissions in North Carolina and the racist operation of the fugitive slave law. Like Republican Joseph Bradley Varnum of Massachusetts, Swanwick believed free African Americans had the right to petition the government, for “if men were aggrieved, and conceive they have the claim to attention, petitioning was their sacred right, and that right should never suffer innovation.” For most southerners, granting legitimacy to black petitioners was dangerous in and of itself, since it implied some recognition of African American political standing. In the case of the North Carolina freemen, accepting the petition also implied that Congress might investigate southern slavery. The status of slaves from North Carolina, southerners argued, was the proper concern of North Carolina, not the federal government. Northern petitioners and their congressional advocates threatened to instigate a struggle over the control of slavery, one which southern slaveholders wanted by all means to suppress.16
They consistently failed to do so. Slaveholders successfully blocked northern antislavery proposals, but they could not control the legislative discussion of slavery. When they attempted to suppress discussion, they often demonstrated an antidemocratic authority that further agitated antislavery northerners. In response
