culture. He became an American, he relates in his autobiography, not upon taking a formal oath of citizenship, but when, days after landing in the country, he saw a Pennsylvania militia company at drill, under a banner bearing the state’s motto, “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence.” “It was then,” Binns recalled, “under the broad expanse of heaven, without the adoption of any form of words, I took my first oath of allegiance and fidelity to the United States; an oath which, according to my best judgment, I have faithfully kept, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances, in peace and war.”53
The United States provided refuge for Binns, who, like Duane and Paine before him, envisioned the American nation as fulfilling a secular providence, offering an “asylum of freedom” to the world’s oppressed. Shortly after his inauguration, Jefferson endorsed this cosmopolitan image in a flattering letter to Joseph Priestley in which he expressed his “heartfelt satisfaction that, in the first moment of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender you the homage of it’s respect & esteem, cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise & good like you.” He also promised to “disclaim the legitimacy of that libel on legislation,” the Alien Friends Act.54 Jefferson offered Priestley a home, a place where he would be protected by the law as an equal. Such protection would reverse Federalist policy; it was also in essence the complete reversal of the position of the slave, who was in theory permanently alienated from equal standing in the political community and could not make the volitional choice, like Binns, to be a free American.
Historian Gordon Wood cites the Priestley letter as evidence that Jefferson was “the fount of American democracy,” the source of “American ideas and ideals that have persisted to this day.” But in many ways, it was the immigrant radicals who were the fount of democracy, as they fought with Federalists to obtain political standing in the United States. Conflicts between Federalists and Republicans over citizenship and democracy were far more than domestic squabbles, as they ultimately allowed immigrants to gain political standing in the United States, where they fought to establish democratic ideals that were transatlantic in origin. Federalists were not entirely mistaken, then, when they warned that such foreigners would revolutionize the American republic. Yet at the same time, the rise of the Democratic-Republican coalition led to a retrenchment of some of the more radical cosmopolitan arguments of the 1790s. As Duane and Binns claimed their place as Americans, they redefined an internationalist agenda for democratic reform in nationalist terms. Much like Paine before them, they helped build the case for American exceptionalism. Binns, for example, in the first issue of his Democratic Press, identified his lifelong struggle against political tyranny with the United States, whose “extensive, federative, democratic republic is, indeed, and in truth, the only hope of the world.” The American nation now enclosed the universal principles of democratic radicalism, and Binns promised that he would “regard every attempt to dismember its territory, or violate the principles of its government, not only as a Treason against the Government and People of the United States, but as a Treason, of the deepest dye, against the whole human race.”55
Judged on these terms, the fight between immigrant radicals and the Federalist party appears a straightforward conflict between democratic idealism and conservative reaction. But in the context of the Republican movement as a whole, the struggles of men like Duane and Binns were far more complicated, insofar as they worked to bind northern democrats to the slaveholding South. Although they did not join them in jail cells, many southern Republicans embraced the democratic martyrs of the North. Stevens Thomson Mason, a Republican senator from Virginia, traveled to Vermont with funds collected from prominent Virginians to pay Matthew Lyon’s Sedition Act fine, and he was duly outraged at Thomas Cooper’s conviction. Irishman John Daly Burk fled from New York to Virginia to avoid having to leave the United States and remained there for much of the rest of his life. Mason provided refuge for James Thompson Callender, who had fled from Philadelphia to Virginia in fear of the Adams administration in 1798. When Callender was tried by Judge Samuel Chase in Richmond, making him the only “southern” victim of the Sedition Act, Virginia Republicans again came to his defense, raising funds on his behalf and contributing legal talent to his defense. Callender proved a turncoat, and by 1802 he had disowned Jefferson and exposed the president’s relationship to Sally Hemings. But many Republican victims of Federalist repression were grateful for the patronage of southern Republicans, and some later took up residence in the South. Lyon toured Virginia in support of Jefferson in 1800 and Burk subsequently wrote a celebratory history of the state, which he dedicated to Jefferson. Like Burk, Lyon later moved to the South, eventually settling in Kentucky. In Vermont, Lyon and his son published a paper known as The Scourge of Aristocracy; after moving to Kentucky, he soon became a slaveholder. Defending the three-fifths clause in Congress in 1803, he claimed that it represented a sacrifice by southerners, who “gave up two-fifths of their slaves” in order to compromise with the North. “The blacks who are slaves,” Lyon went on to observe, “are much more useful and beneficial to the community and to the nation, according to their number, than those that are free.” Thomas Cooper, who had published an early attack on the slave trade in the 1780s, maintained strong connections to the South after his prosecution for sedition: he eventually moved to South Carolina, where he became an instructor of the planter elite at South Carolina College and an early exponent of states’ rights.56
These episodes point to a more widespread ideological accommodation with slavery in the early Democratic-Republican party. In claiming their place in America through an alliance with Virginia Republicans, Duane and other radicals tempered their criticism of slaveholders. Immigrant radicals infused American nationalism with transatlantic republican idealism, but at the same time, the political context of the American nation-state worked to constrain their cosmopolitan principles. For Republicans like John Binns, defending the United States as the representative of the entire “human race” marked a crooked path toward accommodation with American slaveholders and toleration of human bondage.
Republican Masters Versus Rebellious Slaves
Jeffersonian politics was formed by multiple bonds between the subjective experience of freedom and the reality of the American political system, where slavery was powerful and protected. Democrats in Pennsylvania in the early 1800s had a clear sense of what it meant to be politically free: it meant participating in a government based on popular sovereignty, in which individual citizens had the power to influence political decisions. William Duane believed that all humans had equal rights to political freedom, and that freedom was best protected by democracy. “Democracy upholds, as Christianity upholds,” said the Aurora in 1806, “that all men are equal.” Democracy was likewise the only practical defense against political oppression: “the only foundation of free and virtuous Government.” Theoretically then, the Aurora supported the simple idealism of a Republican toast from 1799: to defend the rights of man “until all oppressed nations are emancipated from tyranny.” Such principles seemed, logically, to pose a serious danger to any institution based on coercive authority, including slavery. Duane had made the connection himself on more than one occasion, and he insisted in 1805 that the Aurora had always been an advocate “for the freedom of the Africans.”57
Practically, however, democracy in the United States was a much more complicated affair, as the institutional power of slaveholders in the federal government and the Republican coalition proved a powerful check on northern antislavery sentiment. As Duane’s son William John remembered, his father taught him “to entertain an hereditary dislike of all privileged classes.”58 But William Duane’s anti-elitism wavered when it came to slavery. As Duane was well aware, the political strength of the Republican party lay in the southern states, and Jefferson was the most important political icon for the Republican movement. Given these political ties, Duane attempted to accommodate slavery and slaveholders in his larger political worldview. In doing so, he at times turned to the language and ideology of race, instigating white paranoia of black Americans. However, while white solidarity served as a key method of accommodation for Duane, it was never his primary motivation. Instead, he wanted to ensure that the Democratic-Republican party won and maintained institutional power,
