national political life.6 By the end of the Jeffersonian period, slaveholders had secured considerable power in the national government, while the rise of white supremacy and racial exclusion in the North constrained abolitionism and free African American agency. On the other hand, by 1820 slaveholding had become an irrepressible problem in national democratic politics. That would not change until slavery was abolished.
Historiography
Analyzing the democratic relationship to slavery requires paying attention to local, national, and transatlantic political developments, much as Jeffersonians themselves did in the newspapers that were the foundation of the early national public sphere. There are good, detailed studies of Jeffersonian democracy in the North, but their state level or regional focus entails a lack of attention to slavery, which began to decline across the northern states in the early nineteenth century. Until quite recently, national studies of early American democracy have either overlooked slavery or taken the northern United States as indicative of a wider American reality. Thus the constant caveat, “in the North at least,” in the work of Gordon Wood, who has done the most to popularize a vision of early national politics built around the contest between deference and democracy. Collectively, these versions of early national politics imply that slavery never became a substantive problem for the Republican coalition and that it therefore had little bearing on the formative years of democratic ideology and political culture.7
In many ways, this is an argument Jefferson would have endorsed. He famously called the Missouri Crisis of 1819–1821 a “fire bell in the night,” implying that the early national period had been free from serious conflict over slavery before then. But historians have long known this was not the case. Antislavery historians writing before and after the Civil War stressed the political impact of the “slave power” from the Constitution onward. Slavery and sectional difference were less present but still potent in Henry Adams’s brilliant synthesis of the early republic, published in the 1880s. In the early twentieth century, however, the influential scholarship of Charles Beard established a new narrative for the early republic. Beard insisted that Jeffersonian democracy was driven by conflict between agrarian and financial interests, much along the lines he had laid out in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Identifying a shared hostility to finance capital between southern slaveholders and northern farmers, Beard minimized the impact of slavery on early national politics.8 The contemporaneous reinterpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction by William Dunning and his students likewise suppressed an earlier antislavery historiography. These two traditions merged in the work of popular historian, Democratic partisan, and Indiana racist Claude G. Bowers, who wrote best-selling narratives of the early republic, Jacksonian democracy and “the tragic era” of Reconstruction.9
African American historians and intellectuals contested these stories of the United States, which left little room for black people, past or present, and suppressed the influence of slavery on national political life. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Harvard dissertation on the international slave trade documented the influence of slavery on domestic politics and foreign policy, while his Black Reconstruction in America opposed the mainstream interpretations of the Dunning school.10 Finally, in the mid-twentieth century, following in the wake of new histories of slavery by John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp, and others, scholars began to bring the problem of slavery back into studies of the early republic. Inspired by abolitionist historians and the Civil Rights movement, Staughton Lynd criticized Beard and insisted on the political importance of slavery in a series of essays in the 1960s. In the 1970s, David Brion Davis and political scientist Donald Robinson wrote detailed histories of slavery as an ideological and political problem after the American Revolution. In the late 1980s, Robin Blackburn’s comparative work offered a hemispheric context for thinking about the relationship between the rise of a democratic nation-state and the expansion of slavery in the early United States.11 Yet these books did not have a major impact on early American political history as a whole, which is somewhat surprising given the intellectual power of Davis’s and Blackburn’s work. Political historians instead focused on the problem of “republicanism,” rather than slavery, for much of the 1970s and 1980s.12 Throughout the twentieth century, dominant historical interpretations of early national political life have treated slavery as a marginal institution.
This state of affairs now seems to have changed, perhaps in a permanent way. In recent years, a large number of historians have returned to the political history of slavery and abolition in the early national period. Institutional historians have examined slavery’s deep impact on the structures of American governance from the Revolution to the early republic;13 historians of political culture have shown the intricate ways slavery affected early American political ideology;14 and political historians and historians of abolitionism have documented intense debate over slavery in the early republic, in conflicts over territorial expansion, fugitive slaves, antislavery petitions to the Congress, diplomacy with Saint-Domingue, and the treatment of free African Americans in the North.15 The intensity of early national conflict did not match the Missouri debates, or the subsequent antebellum struggle over slavery. But in many ways it helped set the terms for those later debates, not least by shaping a democratic political order in which slavery was deeply entrenched.
Yet the problem of slavery for Jeffersonian democracy remains relatively unexplored. Studies of the Federalist party, the minority opposition after 1800, have collectively drawn a subtle portrait of a northern and conservative antislavery voice that was especially strong in New England.16 In contrast, analysis of the northern Jeffersonian relationship to slavery tends to be less complex, with historians generally taking one of two positions: either Jeffersonians opposed slavery on democratic grounds, or else they accepted slavery as the price of a white man’s democracy, anticipating the racialized republic of the Jacksonian period.17 Neither position captures the true dilemma of Jeffersonian politics, which tied slavery to democracy in a number of far more intricate ways, relying as much on egalitarian idealism as on racial exclusion. The reconciliation between democratization and enslavement was uneasy and never straightforward, but in pragmatic terms it was quite successful. Slavery and democracy expanded together, bound in an alliance that proved difficult to untangle.
Narrative
The Democratic-Republican coalition took form in the 1790s in order to oppose the Federalist coalition that had emerged under the presidency of George Washington. Ideological divisions over the nature and power of the new federal government were already present in the First Congress, which sat in New York, and escalated when the national capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790. The diplomatic and ideological repercussions of the French Revolution further heightened partisan conflict, and by the mid-1790s Republicans and Federalists were fighting each other from Georgia to Massachusetts and had begun to coordinate local and national struggles. Republicans were stronger in the South than in the North in the 1790s, as the presidential election of 1796 demonstrated: Jefferson won all the southern states save Maryland and Delaware. But during the Adams administration, the Republican opposition gained power in the North in response to the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which sought to suppress democratic agitators in the North and exclude immigrant radicals from the United States. In this predominantly northern struggle, southern Republicans proved key allies. In the election of 1800, the bisectional Democratic-Republican coalition recorded one of the signal triumphs in American political history. Without the organization of the mass democratic parties of the antebellum period, Republicans swept Federalists from office in the presidency and in both houses of Congress, inaugurating two decades of national dominance by Jeffersonian democracy.
The “Revolution of 1800” (as Jefferson called it) is often represented as a victory for democracy, which it no doubt was for many Republican partisans. It was also a victory for slaveholders. In the southern states, the Republicans were already the dominant party in 1800, and southern Federalism, outside Maryland and Delaware, had all but collapsed by Jefferson’s second term. The three-fifths clause in the U.S. Constitution, which gave additional electoral weight to the South based on
