with Republican slaveholders to protect their political future in America. Through this relationship, cosmopolitan conceptions of American citizenship and a democratic public sphere became closely tied to what William Duane had defined, in 1796, as their antithesis: American slavery.
Slaves in the Bowels: Thomas Branagan
The Irish immigrant Thomas Branagan enacted the most poignant rendering of this ideological encounter, in a series of eccentric works that defined the intersection of egalitarianism, slavery, race, and conscience. A Jefferson acolyte, but not formally a Republican, Branagan began his American career relatively penniless. He appears to have come from means in Dublin, but he was disinherited for abandoning Catholicism, and arrived in Philadelphia without capital and with few connections. Before coming to the United States, Branagan, according to his autobiography, had participated in both the transatlantic slave trade and Caribbean slavery. As a young man in 1790, he joined a slave ship operating out of Liverpool and traveled to Africa and then the Caribbean to help buy and sell African slaves. He remained in the Caribbean for the next eight years, working as a seaman, a privateer, and finally as an overseer in Antigua. At some point he had a conversion experience and embraced a form of evangelical Christianity, likely Methodism; while an overseer, he experienced a more profound conversion to antislavery principle. “Impressed with a sense of the villainy and barbarity of keeping human beings in such deplorable conditions as I often saw the slaves reduced to,” Branagan abandoned his position, returned to Dublin long enough to be disinherited, and then made for the United States. He would eventually come to call himself a “Penitential Tyrant,” a man driven by remorse for his past participation in the evil of slavery.24
Branagan expressed a different side of northern democratic culture than William Duane: he was far less interested in secular politics, and on some issues, he was closer to New England Federalists than Jeffersonian Republicans. While he shared Duane’s anti-elitism and his ardor for Thomas Jefferson, Branagan ultimately believed in divine justice far more than secular redemption. God, not natural law or reason, judged the good and evil in men and provided the foundation for human solidarity and individual morality. Like many evangelicals, Branagan stressed an individual connection to God, rooted in “conscience,” but antislavery arguments radicalized his sense of religious individualism. He echoed antislavery figures from Pennsylvania’s past, like the Quaker Benjamin Lay, and pointed to future abolitionist appeals to a “higher law”: “it is better for me to hearken to, and obey the voice of conscience, (when under the influence of scripture and reason,),” said Branagan in 1807, “than the requisitions or prohibitions of men.”25 As was true of Jeffersonians throughout the North, Branagan understood democracy in terms of the freedom of the individual subject to think and act autonomously. But liberation from religious or political authority was less important to Branagan than coming to terms with human interdependence, and especially the relationship between one’s self and suffering others. As Branagan put it in verse, humans, inspired by Jesus Christ (the “guest of celestial race”),
Feel sympathetic love for all our race,
And circle mankind in one kind embrace;
Our greatest grief is to see human wo,
Yet can’t relieve, or stop the tears that flow.26
Branagan’s individual was caught in an empathic web of connections to others, oppressed and oppressors alike. One’s conscience was the arbiter of these relationships, the place where the pain of the suffering and the power of despotism were felt most keenly, and where the work of opposition began.27
Like many middling Jeffersonians, Branagan challenged the power of traditional elites to control access to knowledge. He had little faith in classical learning, and had no desire to comprehend Greek or Latin—although he did base much of his literary work on imitations of Homer and Virgil. “What in the name of common sense,” Branagan wondered, “is the use of using language that one reader in one thousand cannot understand, and which has no other tendency but to notify the reader, who is not a latinest, and notify him that his author is one.”28 This populist and peculiar writer did not achieve much in the way of literary merit, but more than any other white Pennsylvanian, he gave voice to the powerful connections and contradictions between democratic subjectivity, slaveholder power, and race in the early national North.
From 1804 to 1805, Branagan published four long works indicting the international slave trade and the power of slavery in the United States. The first, A Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa, introduced his cause and attempted to raise subscription funds for two poetic works, Avenia and The Penitential Tyrant, both published in 1805, that dramatized the evil of the slave trade and slavery. Branagan apparently caught the attention of New York Quaker and antislavery publisher Samuel Wood, who helped release Avenia in 1805 and printed an extended edition of The Penitential Tyrant in 1807.29 Finally, Branagan also published his Serious Remonstrances Addressed to the Citizens of the Northern States in 1805, a pamphlet that sought to incite northerners to confront the problem of American slavery. Serious Remonstrances also marked a departure from his other work, characterized by a deep empathy for the enslaved, as Branagan now embraced a racist paranoia and proposed to colonize all persons of African descent outside the United States. Thus in a compressed period, Branagan expressed a wide range of responses to slavery and African Americans: egalitarian disgust for slaveholders; empathy for the enslaved; and racist fear of black equality. The tensions between these positions were never reconciled in Branagan’s work. Serious Remonstrances, contrary to some interpretations of Branagan, was not a conclusive sign of his departure from the empathic politics of his earlier work, as Branagan republished Tyrant in 1807 and Avenia in 1810 and continued to publish antislavery writings in the antebellum period.30 The two Branagans, empathic and racist, were very much contemporaneous, just as egalitarian thought in the early national North was torn between indictment and accommodation of American slavery.
In many ways, Branagan defined a vanguard antislavery position for his time, combining Christian ethics, democratic sentiment, and empathy for the oppressed. He believed that all humans were fundamentally equal, and that slavery was unjust according to Christian principle; that slaveholders were despots who threatened the rights of all individuals, not only their own slaves; and, finally, that every individual had a compassionate interest in ending slavery, whether or not they owned slaves themselves. In a complex restatement of the Golden Rule, Branagan understood society as an interdependent web of humans, all spiritually equal, which made the oppression of any one human an ethical problem for all others. One should feel not only pity for the enslaved, he argued, but also guilt for tolerating the violent authority of slaveholders. Political belonging, insofar as it formalized these social ties, escalated the gravity of one’s responsibility for actions committed by the state and fellow citizens. Every free American, in other words, was culpable for the crime of slavery.
The frontispiece to the 1807 edition of The Penitential Tyrant dramatized this argument. Branagan used an engraving by David Edwin which had served as the frontispiece for a previous edition of Tyrant as well as the 1805 edition of Avenia. It depicted a man gesturing to the Goddess of Liberty, who sat beneath a pillar adorned with the motto of the state of Pennsylvania, “Liberty, Virtue, and Independence.” In the background were “African slaves, landed on the shores of America.” An accompanying description emphasized the contrast between “Practical Slavery and Professional Liberty” in the United States. As they attacked American hypocrisy, Branagan and his publisher Samuel Wood emphasized the guilt of the average citizen as much as that of the slaveholder. “Sons of Columbia, hear this truth in time,” said the description, “he who allows oppression shares the crime.” An introduction written by Wood offered a maxim that indicted the American political order and those who supported it: as “slavery and tyranny are completely inseparable … no man who holds a slave ought to be intrusted with a post, either great or small, among a free people.”31 In a democracy like
