book studies a diverse set of white men who helped build Jeffersonian democracy in the North from the late 1790s to the early 1820s. As a group, these northerners present a very different intellectual problem from that posed by a slaveholder who believed in universal human freedom yet could not free his slaves. They force us to think about how slavery was tolerated not by the minority of masters in the early American electorate, but by the majority of non-slaveholders, whose relationships to slavery were often far less direct. To trace these relationships is to examine the pervasiveness of slavery, a complex institution that affected masters, non-slaveholders, and slaves alike. Masters and slaves understood slavery as governed first and foremost by individual control and domination; such power was necessary to maintain property rights in slaves. But the masters themselves were governed by a national polity in which non-slaveholders predominated. Slavery thus required some degree of toleration, if not consent, by non-slaveholders. Beyond the individualized dominion of masters, slavery required individual acts of accommodation on the part of the masterless majority, daily decisions to accept life in the midst of the extreme authority necessary to enslave. Without such accommodation, the slaveholding republic of the United States could not have survived as long as it did.2
And yet such accommodation could never be taken for granted, for the very ideological commitments that brought Jeffersonians together threatened to drive them apart. This was especially true at the national level, despite the protections of slaveholder property rights and power in the U.S. Constitution. Had the Democratic-Republican coalition simply been a racial compact between white men, all of whom agreed that perpetuating slavery served their political, social, and economic interests, it would have been far more reliable from the perspective of slaveholders. Instead, ties to slavery were often more subtle, formed out of universalist ideals and aspirations as much as narrow prejudice and self-interest. Northerners embraced the Democratic-Republican coalition for two primary and often intertwined reasons: to advance democracy and build the American nation-state. Throughout the early republic, democracy and nationalism bound whites to a slave society, as northern Republicans looked to southern masters like Jefferson to lead them to political freedom. This ideological encounter with slavery inevitably warped democratic ideals. Accommodation of slaveholder power subdued antislavery argument and promoted disregard for African Americans as legitimate political subjects. Institutional and ideological pressures to reconcile with Jeffersonian slaveholders constrained democratic universalism, as race and national belonging began to take precedence over more cosmopolitan ethical and political commitments.
But the democratic reconciliation with slavery always remained uneasy. Northern Republicans frequently challenged southern power at the national level, and they occasionally made universalist claims in defense of free African Americans, even as the northern polity became more restricted by race. Slaveholders, meanwhile, consistently demanded autonomous control over the regulation of slavery. These demands were produced by the nature of slaveholder power, not simply by a general desire to limit the power of the new federal government over the states. And they were rarely acceded to by all northerners. In practical terms, the accord between slavery and American democracy was clearly successful, as both institutions expanded dramatically throughout the early national period. But in ideological terms, it remained tenuous, because slaveholder power could never fully be incorporated into a democratic ethos.
This book reexamines the rise of early national democratic ideology in the context of slavery, tracing northern responses to slaveholder power as they shifted back and forth between accommodation and dissent. While I include some figures from the northern political elite, relative equals to southern gentry like Jefferson, the majority of characters in this book come from the “middling” ranks of early national American society—tradesmen and farmers who rose to political prominence through the Republican coalition, newspaper editors, a Baptist minister, and a number of European immigrants and democratic radicals.3 These white men were the principal agents and beneficiaries of Jeffersonian democracy, and their words and actions constitute the main sources used in this book.4
The predominance of white men in the narrative reflects their predominance in the Democratic-Republican coalition and in the United States government, but it also obscures the more complex world of early national politics. As a number of historians have shown, women played an active role in early national political life. They also engaged in wider ideological debates over slavery in civil society. Likewise, free African-Americans had an important impact on northern politics and particularly on the politics of slavery, even in places where they were barred from the polls by various mechanisms. Yet formal democratic politics—voting and office-holding—were confined to men and, over time, to white men especially. While there are good studies that document how race and gender shaped the rise of American democracy, this book focuses instead on the impact of slavery which, as I argue throughout, had a determinative influence on the politics of race in the northern states.5 Taking white male democrats on their own terms, through the political institutions and political culture that they developed, I focus my analysis on how their responses to slavery shaped democracy in the North and at the national level.
I focus primarily on ideology and political argument in Congress, in newspapers and pamphlets, and in political celebrations. But I also pay close attention to the individual political actors whose thoughts and words compose the primary evidence in this study, in order to capture the subjective dimension of early national political life. Jeffersonians believed that to be a democrat was to think for oneself: to form independent political opinions and exercise autonomous judgment. Mobilizing individuals was therefore a task not for customary authorities but for self-conscious political actors, men who employed ideology to build connections between individual subjects and partisan and state institutions. Opponents sometimes castigated Jeffersonian ideologues as schemers with purely instrumental ends, but to true believers, political argument had a higher purpose—to liberate men from arbitrary rule so that they could think and vote on their own behalf. Democracy thus depended on individual conscience as much as political institutions.
What was true for democracy was true for slavery, since these two institutions were inseparable in the Democratic-Republican party and in Jeffersonian America. Slavery affected democratic thought and practice from the outset, and it posed an ideological problem that democratic subjects had to address. Contending with slavery was an almost daily act for anyone who read the main Jeffersonian paper from Washington, the National Intelligencer, as fugitive advertisements and slave sales consistently lined its pages. It was an even more pressing issue for northerners who traveled to Washington after 1800, since slavery was a viable institution in the new national capital and southern slaveholders predominated in the federal government. This book emphasizes that all of these individual encounters with slavery mattered deeply to the development of democratic politics and political culture in the United States. In a far more pervasive and deeper way than Jefferson’s by turns agonized and racist musings in Notes on the State of Virginia, it was countless individual acts of conscience—decisions to accept, ignore, challenge, and attack slavery—that defined the relationship between bondage and freedom in the early United States.
That relationship, this book argues, was ultimately ambivalent. On the one hand, northern democrats made significant concessions to slavery, both ideological and institutional. That allowed slaveholders considerable freedom under the United States government, which they used to protect and expand human bondage. On the other hand, when faced with blunt manifestations of slaveholder power, northern Jeffersonians tended to oppose their southern colleagues. At times, they also defended the rights of free African Americans. In practical terms, this dialectic between accommodation and conflict was decided in favor of slaveholders, who were by any measure more powerful and more secure in the 1820s than they were in the 1790s. Taking the long view, however, Jeffersonian democracy did reveal a potential threat to the institution of slavery: the possibility that a majority of American citizens would refuse to tolerate the coercion necessary to maintain it. That threat existed not because the founding documents or fathers of the United States somehow possessed an inherent antislavery idealism, but because enslaved people, free blacks, abolitionists, slaveholders, and nonslaveholding whites, in various ways and with various
