to the election of 1800, explaining to confidantes that Pennsylvania “nearly holds the balance between the North & South”; that through “harmonizing by it’s public authorities with those to the South,” Pennsylvania “would command respect to the Federal constitution.”2 The 1799 election of Republican Thomas McKean as governor of Pennsylvania was seen as a bellwether for Republican success in the presidential contest the following year. As it turned out, Pennsylvania almost did not cast an electoral ballot in the election of 1800, since Federalists maintained enough power in the state senate to block a popular vote of the state’s electors. But Jefferson was right about Pennsylvania’s role in the Republican coalition. A relatively united South allied to one of the larger northern states, New York or Pennsylvania, could control national politics (or, in Jefferson’s more subtle rendering, “command respect to the Federal constitution”). New York joined southern Republicans in 1800 to bring Jefferson to the presidency, but it quickly proved unreliable, in part because of factional competition among the state’s Republicans, and in part because New Yorkers quickly moved to challenge Virginia for predominance in the federal government. After the election of 1800, by contrast, Pennsylvania proved to be the most reliable northern state in the Democratic-Republican column: it supported every Democratic-Republican presidential candidate and then every Democratic presidential candidate until the election of 1840. Other than Martin Van Buren in 1836, all these candidates were southern slaveholders. This record of capable support earned the state its moniker, “the keystone in the democratic arch,” a label that, for some southerners, reflected the state’s tractability as much as its position in the Union. Thus Henry Clay, in the midst of the Missouri Crisis, asked that the state remember itself as “the unambitious Pennsylvania, the keystone in the federal arch,” and cease stoking sectional discord.3 From Clay’s perspective, among Pennsylvania’s chief virtues was its ability to keep quiet on the problem of slavery.
Yet when it came to political conflict over slavery, Pennsylvania had not exactly been unambitious. In 1780, the state instituted gradual emancipation, and Jeffersonian Philadelphia was home to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the most powerful antislavery group in the early republic, as well as a significant and politically active free black community. Southerners were well aware of Pennsylvania’s antislavery tendencies, since the first major congressional crisis over slavery was sparked by antislavery petitions Pennsylvanians sent to the House. Southerners who came to Philadelphia in the 1790s, when the city served as the national capital, were wary of antislavery and free black residents; George Washington made sure to keep his slaves shuttling back and forth to Mount Vernon when he served as president, anxious that they would seek their freedom under Pennsylvania law. This reflected a common problem for slaveholders who traveled to or lived in proximity to Pennsylvania. Despite obtaining a fugitive slave law in 1793 that aided masters in recapturing their human property, slaveholders from Maryland and Virginia complained that their slaves frequently escaped to Pennsylvania, and they soon petitioned the federal government for stricter fugitive laws. Even though Pennsylvania accommodated sojourning slaveholders in state law, masters worried that Pennsylvanians, white as well as black, might refuse to tolerate the force and authority necessary to maintain power over their slaves.4
From the perspective of African Americans like Philadelphia’s James Forten, however, freedom in the white-dominated society of early national Pennsylvania was deeply compromised. Most Pennsylvania whites were not willing to accept African Americans as social and political equals, barring them informally from the polls, juries, militia companies, and political celebrations. Gradual emancipation itself kept blacks born before 1780 enslaved and others indentured for over twenty years, an outright denial of equal standing. Moreover, in the years after 1780, many African Americans who by rights should have become free were illegally sent to the southern states or kidnapped into slavery. Similar developments shaped the post-abolition world of New York and New Jersey as well, but not until 1799 and 1804 respectively, when those states passed gradual emancipation laws. In 1800, there were still more than 20,000 slaves in New York and 12,000 in New Jersey (compared to roughly 1,700 in Pennsylvania), and New Jersey masters frequently published runaway ads in Philadelphia papers. The unfinished state of mid-Atlantic abolition meant that antislavery efforts in Pennsylvania were constantly embattled in the local politics of race and emancipation.5
Philadelphia was a crossroads where multiple strands of early national politics intersected, overlapped, and collided: antislavery agitation, immigrant radicalism, slaveholder power, and democracy. Looking beyond the local struggles over race and abolition in the city that have been well documented by historians, this chapter examines the Jeffersonian encounter with slavery in terms of national and transnational ideological struggles over democracy. The major focus throughout is on three Irish American insurgents—William Duane, Thomas Branagan, and John Binns—whose lives exemplify the crucial connections between slavery, nationalism, transatlantic democracy, and race in early national Philadelphia. Taking this wider perspective suggests a more complicated genealogy for the emergence of white male democracy in the North. As Jeffersonians sought a language to explain themselves and their bonds to southern power, they increasingly turned to race, which allowed them to redefine democracy in ways that made solidarity with slaveholders seem more legitimate. Whiteness, in other words, was as much about making cognitive and ideological allowances for the extreme authority of slaveholding, as it was a method for excluding free African Americans from equal political standing.6
But race was always an unstable category, reflecting the complicated origins of the Jeffersonian alliance. The relationship between slaveholders and democrats was not built on open claims of white supremacy, but rather in a long political fight to democratize the American polity. Throughout the 1790s, cosmopolitan democrats sought to redefine American nationality and citizenship along egalitarian lines. Embracing the United States from the outside, such men had little respect for the claims of tradition or nativity. Yet they also confronted American slavery from an external perspective. It was not an institution that immigrants could take for granted, since they did not have historic ties to the American nation-state. Instead, they had to choose citizenship in the slaveholding republic of the United States. In doing so, immigrant radicals presented the conflict between cosmopolitan democracy and chattel slavery, a defining contradiction of the age of revolution, in one of its starkest forms. Ultimately, nation, race, and democracy fused in a complex and volatile arrangement in Pennsylvania, as immigrants claimed the slaveholding republic as their own, and as the world’s best hope for democratic government.
George Washington, Slaveholding Tyrant
The relationship between transatlantic radicalism and Pennsylvania democracy began during the American Revolution, as exemplified by Thomas Paine, who defined a cosmopolitan argument for American independence in Common Sense and supported the radically republican Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776.7 The career of William Duane, who became the most important Jeffersonian editor in the United States during the election of 1800, reflected the ongoing ties between anglophone radicalism and American democracy in the early national period. Born in the North American colonies to Irish emigrant parents in 1760, Duane spent his early years on the New York frontier, near Lake Champlain.8 He returned to Ireland with his mother in 1771, then moved to England in the early 1780s, and then, in 1787, to Calcutta, where he edited two newspapers, the Bengal Journal and the World. By 1794, his support for the French Revolution and disgruntled officers in the army of the East India Company put Duane at odds with colonial elites, who forcibly banished him from Bengal. In a parting editorial, Duane proudly claimed American citizenship and told his fellow “Englishmen” that he planned to return to America, where he hoped to find his countrymen enjoying true liberty: “I trust in God I shall find them free, that I may forget that slavery exists anywhere.” That proved to be an impossible ambition, in the short term because he was confined to a ship (aptly named the William Pitt) bound for England.9
Duane arrived in England in 1795, where he worked briefly with the London Corresponding Society (LCS), a group of political radicals and reformers who sought to democratize British politics and society. In the context of war between Britain and revolutionary France, LCS members were targets
