black men might be elected to Congress (or even the presidency); they would marry white women; they would sexually violate young white girls; they would compete with whites for jobs. The result would be the creation of a mongrel nation, filled with degraded interracial children. The solution was removal of all African Americans, free as well as slave, to a colony somewhere in the new Louisiana Territory, where blacks could rule themselves—as well as, Branagan added, in a faint nod to his earlier arguments for human solidarity, any whites who chose to remove with them.39
How to reconcile the two Branagans? One was an idiosyncratic antislavery radical; the other, in many ways, was in the vanguard of northern racism. One Branagan argued for human equality and formed ties to men like James Forten; the other claimed that free black men were merely “up-start gentlemen” on the lookout for white wives. Such men contributed nothing to the United States; their race and their history of enslavement, not their standing or character, determined whether they could belong to the American polity.40
In the work of historian Gary Nash, Branagan reflects the rise of racism in Pennsylvania. Throughout the early national period, many whites who had once opposed slavery embraced racial exclusion. In Philadelphia, this played out in the most practical of ways, as whites forcibly excluded blacks from July Fourth celebrations in the city, enacting the racial limits of their vision of democracy. In 1813, a Jeffersonian Republican named Jacob Mitchell proposed legislation in the Pennsylvania state legislature that would both bar all black in-migration and compel all current black residents to carry a certificate proving their free status. Philadelphia petitioners also demanded that in case of certain crimes, black men and women should be indentured for a term of years to compensate their victims. James Forten fought to keep Mitchell’s proposal from becoming law, appealing to white Pennsylvanians to honor the universalism of the founding principles of the United States and their own state, and protect equality before the law for all citizens, black and white. Mitchell’s bill did not pass, but in many ways the tide was turning against Forten. In the early 1820s, Philadelphia Federalist Samuel Breck was liberal enough to meet Forten in the street and shake his hand (“knowing his respectability,” said Breck, though he mistook his name); Forten informed Breck that he had brought fifteen of his white journeymen to the polls to vote for Breck in a recent congressional election. Yet Forten himself did not vote, as Breck noted that black citizens “never presume to approach the hustings” at election time, since they were kept from the polls—as well as juries and militia musters—by “custom, prejudice or design.” These informal practices foreshadowed later attempts to formally exclude African Americans from the franchise and define full political citizenship as the exclusive prerogative of white men.41
Thomas Branagan experienced this democratic culture in formation, and did not appear to question it: in his mind, embracing democracy in Philadelphia entailed embracing racism. He intended Serious Remonstrances to be a popular work, written for the “the honest farmer and industrious mechanic”; the essay was filled with denunciations of the idle rich in the North and the slaveholding elite in the South. He adopted a Paineite vision of the United States, but one now deeply modified by race: “America,” he believed, “was appropriated by the Lord of the universe to be an asylum for the oppressed, the injured sons of Europe.” Maintaining that vision required colonization of free blacks, lest the “injured sons of Europe,” on arrival in the United States, be compelled “to associate with negroes, take them for companions, and what is much worse, be thrown out of work and precluded from getting employ to keep vacancies for blacks.”42 In other words, American citizenship was meant for white men.
Historians of whiteness have argued that white supremacy enabled immigrants in the antebellum period, especially the Irish, to separate themselves from slaves and free blacks and claim belonging as Americans in the face of nativist xenophobia. White supremacy also helped secure the consent of nonslaveholders to the coercive power that masters wielded over enslaved people.43 Focusing primarily on Jacksonian democracy, accounts of whiteness have underscored the prevalence of race and racial exclusion in American political culture. But such accounts do not fully capture the political and ideological transactions that led democratic radicals like William Duane and Thomas Branagan to embrace slaveholders as political allies in the early national period. Transnational republicans arriving in the United States found that they had to “associate,” not only with black men and women, but with slaveholders, who were a dominant presence in the early Republican coalition. Immigrant radicals did not immediately condone political alliance with slaveholders on the terms of white supremacy. Instead, they recast universal democratic principles in terms of American nationalism and partisan politics. Doing so entailed some toleration of slaveholder power, especially for immigrants who became significant members of the Jeffersonian coalition. That political encounter with slavery ultimately rendered democratic radicalism more amenable to white supremacy, as repeated accommodation of coercive power impaired egalitarian commitments.
Immigrant Radicals and American Nationalism
In the 1790s, Federalists attempted to undermine and constrain Republican agitators like Duane through the Naturalization Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts, a series of laws that directly targeted immigrants. If Branagan did not want European immigrants to “associate with negroes,” Federalists did not want immigrants to associate with the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1798 imposed a fourteen-year waiting period for citizenship, and compelled all immigrants to register themselves forty-eight hours after entering the country; the Alien Enemies Act gave the president the power to deport citizens of any country with whom the United States was at war; the more far-reaching Alien Friends Act gave the president the power to deport any alien deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States”; and the Sedition Act criminalized “false, scandalous, or malicious” statements made against the president, Congress, or the federal government.44
The Aurora General Advertiser was a principal target of the Sedition Act, as Federalists had long opposed Benjamin Franklin Bache; when Duane assumed the editorship after Bache’s death, he quickly became a target for repression as well. Pennsylvania Federalists first attempted to corral him through the charge of seditious riot, issued against Duane and three other men, including United Irishman Dr. James Reynolds, for a fracas that occurred outside a Philadelphia Catholic church, when the four attempted to obtain signatures for a memorial in protest of the Alien Friends Act. In defense of Duane, Republican Alexander Dallas argued that the charges were politically motivated, and a Philadelphia jury acquitted him. But Federalists continued to pursue Duane, and attempted to charge him twice with seditious libel, and once on a manufactured charge of contempt of the Senate of the United States. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams considered deeming Duane an alien and deporting him from the United States. More crude methods were employed by McPherson’s Blues, a Federalist militia company. Taking objection to Duane’s portrayal of their role in the suppression of Fries rebellion, a tax rebellion in eastern Pennsylvania, members of the militia company invaded Duane’s office on May 15, 1799, dragged him into the street, and beat him mercilessly. As Duane’s biographer Kim Phillips relates, Federalist editor John Ward Fenno commended the attack, noting that Duane had once insulted George Washington and that he “was not an American, but a foreigner, and not merely a foreigner, but an United Irishman.” Meanwhile, other northern Republicans, like Vermont’s Matthew Lyon and Duane’s Pennsylvania comrade Thomas Cooper, were sent to jail for violations of the Sedition Act. To militant Federalists, immigrant radicals threatened the security of the United States and therefore had to be repressed.45
Federalist repression backfired, however, as Republican printers continued to publish their papers and elevated Sedition Act victims as martyrs for democratic freedom. Cooper published essays in the Aurora dated from the Philadelphia prison where he was held, while Lyon ran for and won reelection to Congress from jail. Equally important, the Alien and Sedition Acts were critical in forming ideological and political bonds beyond northern and southern Republicans. When Republicans like Duane supported Jefferson in the election of 1800, they were seeking freedom from political repression in the form of the Sedition Act, and they
