augmented the national power of southern Republicans. Southern preponderance was most obvious in the fact that Republicans elected Virginia slaveholders to the presidency for six terms in a row: Thomas Jefferson (1801–1808), James Madison (1809–1816), and James Monroe (1817–1824). Beyond the presidency, slaveholders held sway in the early Jeffersonian Congresses, where they defended the rights of masters to govern their slaves, and the institution of slavery, as they saw fit. A coalition that promoted democracy in the North also protected the prerogatives of slaveholders in the South.
The heyday of Jeffersonian democracy coincided with a pivotal period in the history of American slavery. From the 1790s to the 1820s, masters began to aggressively push the peculiar institution to the West, as they exploited enslaved labor to produce short-staple cotton for the British market. The slave population of the South surged from roughly 700,000 to 1.5 million between 1790 and 1820, and the United States entered the antebellum period poised to become the dominant slaveholding society in the Western Hemisphere. Jeffersonians played a critical role in this process. Aggressive foreign and military policies helped cement territorial sovereignty over the new states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The defense of slaveholder property rights by southern Jeffersonians facilitated the rise of a massive domestic trade in enslaved people after 1808. By 1820, Republican victories at the state and national levels had confirmed the triumph of democracy for white men in the North. Meanwhile, slaveholder power in the Republican coalition, in conjunction with southwestern expansion, cotton production, and the domestic slave trade, ensured the dominance of slavery in the antebellum South.18
This book integrates the two main developments of Jeffersonian America by trying to understand how white northerners, in the midst of their democratic transformation, came to terms with the growing power of slavery. The northern Republican response to slavery varied from individual to individual and, in many cases, an individual’s response to slavery varied across time, shifting from opposition to accommodation—and then, in more cases than one, back to opposition. The strength of Jeffersonian political culture lay less in its ability to impose any one uniform response to the problem of slavery than in its ability to contain contradictory sentiments about the institution in a wider culture of democratic nationalism.
Jeffersonian democracy thus followed a crooked path, but not a haphazard one. The political intensity of the 1790s created powerful pressures and incentives for northerners to join southern masters in the fight against Federalism, and that entailed some accommodation of slaveholder power. The first two chapters explore this process in two different locations, Federalist New England and Jeffersonian Philadelphia, where negotiating the problem of slavery was an inevitable condition of democratic politics.
In New England, Federalists contested Republican claims to be persecuted democrats by arguing that Jeffersonian political power depended directly on the institution of slavery. This forced Republicans to publicly come to terms with their ties to the South. They did so by insisting on their own political oppression, aggrandized throughout the Jeffersonian press. The experience of northern freedom served as collateral in an ideological alliance that brought democracy to New England while entrenching slavery in the South.
Similar transactions defined the nature of Jeffersonian democracy in Philadelphia, but the terrain was very different. Philadelphia, was in many ways the most heterogeneous and egalitarian place in the early United States, home to a large free black community, an influential antislavery organization, and articulate immigrant radicals who imported European struggles against aristocracy into the United States. Philadelphia was a crossroads where democracy collided with slavery and cosmopolitanism collided with race. Chapter 2 examines these intersections from the perspective of three Irish American immigrants, John Binns, Thomas Branagan, and William Duane. All three believed that America should serve, as Tom Paine had argued, as an “asylum of freedom” and an exemplar of democratic rule. They reframed personal and transatlantic struggles for liberation in terms of American nationalism, lending the illusion of universality to the recently invented United States. At the same time, all three men came to some sort of accommodation with slavery, a coercive institution bent on denying asylum to enslaved people.
In New England and Pennsylvania, the rise of the Republican coalition demanded some accommodation of slavery. Jeffersonian success, however, also produced new sources of sectional discord. Chapters 3 and 4 examine sectional conflicts over slavery in the Republican coalition, which often turned on the relationship between slaveholder power and democratic governance. The relative ideological accord between slavery and democracy developed by white men in the North repeatedly broke down when it came to the institutional politics of slavery at the national level.
As Chapter 3 demonstrates, from the 1790s onward, conflict over slavery was no longer resolved by brokering between regional elites. Instead, slavery was entangled in partisan struggles between Federalists and Republicans, and thus in the national politics of democracy. When northern Jeffersonians came to Washington after 1800, they encountered some of the most powerful slaveholders in the nation, who were often far more adamant in the defense of slavery than Thomas Jefferson. On issue after issue, from fugitive slave rendition, to the end of the international slave trade, to the expansion of slavery to the West, southerners confronted northern Republicans and fought to control slavery on their own terms. Effectively, they demanded that democracy check its advance where slavery was concerned. On that question, slaveholders alone should rule. As northern Republicans repeatedly encountered the antidemocratic posture of slaveholders, they turned to dissidence, disillusion, and in some cases revocation of the Jeffersonian alliance.
Slavery was hardly the only issue that fueled northern discontent with the Democratic-Republican coalition. Republican attempts to respond to the diplomatic crises of the Napoleonic wars by restricting American commerce alienated many men in the North, catalyzing sectionalism and regional envy of southern power. Once northerners began to think in sectional terms, it was difficult to prevent them from attacking the political power of slavery in the federal government. Chapter 4 outlines the emergence of northern sectionalist thought in the Democratic-Republican coalition, from the early Jeffersonian years to the onset of the War of 1812. Tracing debates over Jeffersonian foreign policy and northern resentment of Virginia rule, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the Clintonian campaigns of 1808 and 1812, when George and then DeWitt Clinton challenged James Madison for the presidency. In 1812, DeWitt Clinton came close to defeating Madison and undoing Virginia’s hold on the presidency, while some of Clinton’s supporters broke with the ideological structure of Jeffersonian democracy created in the 1790s.
Yet in the midst of internal dissent and renewed Federalist attacks, Jeffersonian democracy demonstrated a remarkable resilience. The Democratic-Republican coalition’s true strength became apparent in the critical year of 1812. Faced with domestic and diplomatic challenges, Jeffersonians managed to maintain their preponderance in national politics and redefine American nationalism on Republican terms. Northerners played a critical role in this process, as Chapter 5 argues. Pennsylvania Republicans resolutely supported declaration of war against Great Britain on June 18, 1812 and they likewise backed the reelection of James Madison later that fall. Despite military and political setbacks during the war, martial nationalism became a new and potent ideological bond between Republicans North and South. Chapter 5 follows the ideological war of 1812, in which immigrant radicals once again played a pivotal role. Republicans redefined the United States as an aggrieved democracy, struggling against internal and external enemies. Nationalism suppressed the problem of slavery, as Federalists and enslaved people who challenged bondage during the war were cast as allies of Britain and opponents of the United States.
Once again,
