an open society, in which a free press protected and expanded democratic freedom and European immigrants could claim citizenship and belonging in the United States. “The press is the engine which every tyrant fears,” said Duane’s Aurora in 1806; “put out the press, and there is an end to democracy.” John Binns, an Irish republican who arrived in the United States in 1801, and eventually became a rival of Duane’s, put this principle on the masthead of his paper, underneath an image of a printing press: The Democratic Press was “the tyrant’s foe, the people’s friend.” The fight against the Sedition Act was, in many ways, a struggle over language, as Duane and later Binns used their newspapers to celebrate “democracy,” a word and idea Federalists disparaged as unchecked, illegitimate popular rule. As Duane would write to Jefferson many years later, the rise of Jeffersonian democracy was as much a “revolution in speech” as a revolution in government. The Republicans won on both counts, driving the Federalists from power and building democracy in the United States, as practice and idea.46
Immigrant radicals like Duane and Binns likewise responded to Federalist nativism by championing cosmopolitanism and ethnic diversity. Duane claimed that he was born in colonial New York and that he was therefore an American citizen, but Federalists disputed that claim, and eventually won a court ruling that deemed Duane an alien and a British subject. He became a naturalized citizen in 1802.47 As much as he liked to imagine himself a freeborn American, Duane also delighted in celebrating his checkered ethnic and national past. Nativism did not automatically create incentives to claim a blanket white identity, as immigrant radicals instead argued for the political and cultural value of ethnic diversity. “It continues to distress the tories,” wrote Duane, “that a half Irish, half Indian, making for a while a whole American British subject—should be found so fond of the Declaration of Independence—it is downright rebellion against the Lord’s anointed!”48
The conflict between nativism and ethnic heterogeneity persisted well after the triumph of the Democratic-Republicans in 1800. In Jeffersonian Pennsylvania, elite Republicans were skeptical of Duane’s attachment to European immigrants and opposed Philadelphia’s Tammany Society because it accepted aliens as members. When Duane ran for a seat in the Pennsylvania state Senate in 1807, he was attacked by Federalist editors, in particular George Helmbold, who edited the satirical paper The Tickler under the moniker “Toby Scratch’em.” Helmbold, son of a German immigrant, had once published a German-language paper and even written for the Aurora, but had come to embrace a nativist worldview. He promised that The Tickler “shall invariably be purely American—excluding all foreign partialities or prejudices.” He deemed Duane “a literary adventurer” whose “abilities are comprised in the single faculty of abusing” and mocked immigrants as “Imported Patriots.” Such men were “the scum of Europe,” said Helmbold, modifying Shakespeare’s Richard III, “rascals, runaways / whom their o’er cloyed country vomits forth.” Particular scorn was reserved for the Irish, whose speech, appearance, and intellect were subject to constant ridicule. The Tickler’s intemperance reflected an ongoing battle for control of the American political system and American political culture. Although Federalists managed to keep Duane from the state Senate, they were losing the larger struggle to keep the Aurora editor and 1his supporters out of the United States.49
Figure 3. Masthead of John Binns’s Democratic Press, March 27, 1807. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Duane and other radical Jeffersonians saw their fight for democracy in international terms. Duane consistently identified himself as Irish, and openly declared his ideological sympathy for the United Irishmen, as part of a wider program of resistance to the British government. He organized Irish immigrants in Philadelphia to help support the Democratic-Republican party, inaugurating a long relationship between urban democratic political organizations and the immigrant vote.50 Meanwhile, Federalists like Connecticut’s Uriah Tracy warned that Duane and the United Irishmen were bringing revolution to American soil. In many respects Tracy was correct, as the case of John Binns makes clear. Duane had only briefly spent time in England during the heyday of Paineite radicalism in the 1790s; he had returned from India to England in July 1795, but remained for only ten months before leaving for the United States. Binns, in contrast, lived through the height of William Pitt’s repression of British political dissent. Both he and Duane took part in a London Corresponding Society (LCS) meeting of over 100,000 men near Copenhagen House on October 26, 1795; a few days after the meeting, King George III was attacked by a mob while riding in his carriage. Binns, for one, thought it might have been beneficial had the king been “trampled to death,” as his demise might have led to the establishment of a republic in England. The attack on the king was linked to the meeting near Copenhagen House and the LCS, leading to the passage of the Two Acts on November 13, 1795, which gave the British government broad powers to outlaw “seditious practices” that threatened the king, as well as “seditious assemblies.” Duane, still in London at this point, chaired an even larger meeting to protest the Two Acts on November 12, 1795, where he defended the right of petition and free assembly. Despite widespread public protest, the acts were approved the following day. Had Duane remained in England, he no doubt would have soon found himself at odds with William Pitt, the prime minister who led the suppression on the LCS. But in May 1796, Duane fled for the United States.51
Binns, in contrast, remained in England and repeatedly came into conflict with the British state. In March 1796, he was arrested for delivering “seditious and inflammatory lectures” in Birmingham. He was acquitted, only to be arrested again in February 1798, along with four other Irishmen, on the charge of treason. Binns had attempted to find passage to France for United Irish leader Arthur O’Connor so that he could join the French army to plan for an invasion of Ireland. Once again, Binns was ultimately found innocent, but James Coigley, a Catholic priest who had been caught along with him, and who had on his person a letter discussing potential French support for revolution in Ireland, England, and Scotland, was not so fortunate. He was found guilty of treason and executed June 7, 1798. In the summer and fall of 1798, the British ruthlessly suppressed multiple uprisings in Ireland and defeated two French invasion forces, which effectively put an end to the United Irishmen’s vision of an independent Irish Republic.52
Binns, meanwhile, was arrested again in March 1799 and detained in prison until 1801, under a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. When he was finally freed, he emigrated to the United States. Thus Binns arrived in Pennsylvania, even more so than Duane, with a visceral sense of the oppressive power of the British state. After landing in Baltimore in the late summer of 1801, he found his way to Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he became close friends with Joseph Priestley, the more famous Birmingham radical who had come to the United States in 1794, as well as Thomas Cooper, who had arrived from Manchester in 1794 as well, after joining Paine’s attack on Edmund Burke. This triumvirate had counterparts all throughout the northern states, from Duane in Philadelphia to the Irishman Thomas Addis Emmet in New York (whose brother, Robert Emmet, was executed for treason after a final United Irish uprising in Dublin in 1803). Such men, who had fled British tyranny to find political asylum in the United States, often found new political influence in the Democratic-Republican party as well. Their politics were inherently transatlantic, both because they understood the American nation from the perspective of past British abuse, and because Federalists in the United States saw these foreign radicals as an inherent danger to American sovereignty.
Irish Americans thus became vocal supporters of what historian James Kettner eloquently termed “volitional allegiance,” the fairly radical notion that one’s political affiliation should result from conscious choice, rather than nativity or longstanding residence. After Jefferson’s election, the new Republican Congress repealed the Federalist Naturalization Act of 1798, shortening the waiting period for citizenship from fourteen to five years. Republicans in the northern states pushed for even more lenient provisions, while portraying the United States as a haven for the oppressed democrats of the world. Binns, who called himself an “Irishman by birth, American by choice,
