under property qualifications for the franchise. Such comparisons may have been intended to prove Federalists hypocrites, but the metaphorical substitution of white bondsman for black also obscured the political power of Jeffersonian slaveholders. The coercive minority of southern masters became lost in the midst of Republican clamoring for emancipation and democracy.61
Leland and Bishop were not alone in thinking themselves enslaved by Federalism. The Independent Chronicle, the leading Republican paper in New England, likewise substituted northern Jeffersonian for southern slave, albeit in a much more mundane way. Like the National Aegis, the Chronicle parried Federalist criticism of the three-fifths clause, Virginia slaveholders, and Jefferson’s personal relationship to mastery and despotism. It pointed to Jefferson’s antislavery principles, on record in the Notes on the State of Virginia, and observed that the Virginia House of Burgesses had opposed slave importation (while conveniently overlooking the racist passages in the Notes and Virginia’s self-interest in curtailing the international trade). As to the three-fifths clause, the Chronicle insisted, like the National Aegis, that it was an essential part of the Constitution, a compromise Massachusetts had always supported. Moreover, the Chronicle argued, Virginians did not in fact derive additional political power from their slave population. Because of the large state-small state bargain, Virginia actually sacrificed federal representation in the interest of Union. Returning to charges that Jefferson was elected by the three-fifths clause, the Chronicle claimed the truly “subject” votes in the election of 1800 were those of Massachusetts, since the Federalist legislature had refused to allow the people to determine the electoral vote.62
In other words, the Massachusetts Republicans were the real slaves, to Federalists who controlled their votes, just as Virginian slaveholders, presumably, controlled the votes of their bondsmen. The logic here was far more convoluted than in Bishop and Leland’s comparisons, since the three-fifths clause did not deny anyone the right to vote—it simply gave additional power to slaveholders. But the Chronicle was undeterred, exclaiming in a later piece, “Let the Centinel then say that Mr. Jefferson has been chosen by slaves! If the true republicans of the United States are slaves, what is the other party?” Regardless of Federalist efforts, the paper continued, “the friends of Mr. Jefferson are not yet slaves; and under a merciful and protecting Deity, are not likely to become so.” The article likely referred to complaints in the Columbian Centinel, similar to those in the New-England Palladium, that Jefferson’s election depended on the three-fifths clause. As the Centinel put it in December 1800, “the wise and good of other countries … will regret that any policy shall impose on the United States a Chief Magistrate elected by the influence of Negro slaves.” In response, the Chronicle simply substituted northern Republicans as the referent for “slaves,” and turned Federalist criticism of the South into slander of Jeffersonian New England. Then the paper righteously protested this Federalist abuse. As sophistry, this may not inspire, but unconsciously, such a substitution expressed the essence of the Jeffersonian coalition. Jefferson’s friends in the North became the true slaves, a people fighting for freedom from oppression by aristocrats, religious zealots, nativist prejudice, and Anglophiles, while southern slaveholders became iconic leaders of northerners fighting for political and social equality.63
Abraham Bishop said it best. “Nothing could have prevented a monarchy here but the accession of Jefferson and Burr to the presidency,” he told his Wallingford audience in 1801. In terms of the wider Republican coalition, this meant that the very men who, as a class, forestalled emancipation in the South, freed the northern slaves from the shackles of aristocratic tyranny. Bishop claimed forthrightly, “if the white slaves should rise in mass, they would be too much for their masters.” The image was meant to provoke, but Bishop was not joking: in his mind, Jeffersonian democracy was a slave rebellion.64
These comparisons and substitutions seem irrational and exaggerated in retrospect, and to most Federalists, they appeared so at the time. But most New England Republicans were true believers, despite constant Federalist harping that the Republican emancipators were in fact slaveholding lords. Northern Republicans were perhaps misguided but they were not insincere. Men like Bishop and Leland believed ardently in the Republican cause, and they also believed that slavery was wrong. In contrast to most Republican commentary on the three-fifths clause, they did not try to suppress discussion of slavery or minimize southern bondage; nor did they condone the institution by appeals to race. But in substituting northern political inequality for southern slavery, they helped create a complex political alliance that in turn made it difficult to achieve antislavery objectives in national politics. For some Republicans, mere political calculation made this knot difficult to unravel, since there was no political organization more devoted to ridding New England of Federalism than Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. But for others, ideological and emotional bonds were decisive: if one really had felt liberated by the rise of Jeffersonian democracy—hardly an implausible emotion in early nineteenth century Massachusetts or Connecticut—then the temptation to magnify one’s own oppression in order to come to terms with slavery in the South must have been all the more powerful.
New England Jeffersonians, like Republicans throughout the North, helped provide American slaveholders, a distinct minority in a democratizing polity, what they needed most: tacit majority consent. They did so not by linking arms in racial fellowship, but rather by transforming themselves into slaves, and slaveholders into their emancipators. They won their freedom from Federalism, as Jefferson had promised Elbridge Gerry, but freedom on those terms proved hard to escape.
CHAPTER 2
Philadelphia, Crossroads of Democracy
Writing in Philadelphia’s Aurora General Advertiser in 1804, Thomas Paine defined the political novelty of Jeffersonian America. According to Paine, popular sovereignty and political equality made the United States home to a new type of man. Once they left Europe and its “hereditary potentates” behind, men began to consider “government and public affairs as part of their own concern,” and thereby “found themselves in possession of a new character, the character of sovereignty.”1 Alongside the freedom to govern one’s self, however, there was a very different type of sovereignty in America, as Paine knew well—the sovereignty of the master over the slave. Slaveholding power did not inspire all men to see government as “part of their own concern,” as it was inherently antidemocratic. But in Jeffersonian political culture, these two forms of sovereignty were closely bound to each other, as the autonomy of new men helped sustain a nation-state that perpetuated bondage.
More than any other location in the early republic, Philadelphia expressed the conflicting strands of early national democracy. Tensions between North and South, Europe and the United States, black and white, cosmopolitanism and nationalism were woven throughout the city in a complex and combustible mix. Following the path of Tom Paine, English and Irish radicals flocked to the United States in the 1790s in response to British political repression, only to encounter the nativist and anti-Jacobin sentiments of the Federalist party. In Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, such men acquired national significance in the partisan struggles that created and sustained Jeffersonian democracy. These migrants gave an international cast to the rise of American democracy, since they connected their fight against Federalism to the French Revolution, the struggle for Irish autonomy, and a global ideological war against aristocracy. They also fought, by their very presence, to achieve Paine’s vision of America as an “asylum for liberty.” Northern Jeffersonians, immigrant and native alike, were the strongest supporters of liberalizing citizenship laws in the early nation. They embodied, in their lives and experiences, some of the most egalitarian ambitions of the Jeffersonian coalition.
In the midst of such cosmopolitan ardor, the state of Pennsylvania also had an important practical role in the Jeffersonian coalition. It was by far the most crucial ally to the South and the Republican cause. Jefferson
