Nathaniel Jennison to work for Seth and John Caldwell. Jennison first attempted to retain Walker by force, and then sued the Caldwells for enticing away his servant, winning his case in the Worcester Court of Common Pleas. On appeal to the Superior Court, Lincoln argued for the Caldwells and presented an impassioned argument against the institution of slavery. Jennison’s claim had no merit, said Lincoln, because Walker was free, and therefore not subject to any man’s will. Lincoln pointed to the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which claimed “all men are born free and equal,” but he also invoked natural and divine law to argue that all men shared a foundational equality. We “are born in the same manner, our bones clothed with the same kind of flesh, live and die in the same manner.” The legality or illegality of slavery was almost beside the point—if any “law of man” established slavery, said Lincoln, it contradicted the law of God, and the latter injunction took precedence. Better to sacrifice your bodies in disobeying a corrupt human law, Lincoln told the jury, than to disregard the will of God and sacrifice “your own souls.” Lincoln also modified an argument associated with the 1772 Somerset case, declaring “the air in America was too pure for a slave to breathe in.”9 While Lord Mansfield’s decision in Somerset did not end slavery in England, it did destabilize the security of slavery throughout the British Empire and later influenced American antislavery legal strategy.10 In attempting to establish Walker’s freedom, Lincoln expressed far-reaching arguments that theoretically undermined slavery throughout the emerging United States. In his mind, divine and natural law, and the very nature of the American polity, opposed any positive law establishing slavery. In a separate decision in 1783, Massachusetts Superior Court Justice William Cushing would argue that the state constitution of 1780 did as well. Lincoln won his case in 1781, and a variety of similar legal actions, alongside informal challenges to bondage by African Americans, undermined slavery throughout Massachusetts.11
Twenty years later, Lincoln emerged as a powerful regional member of the Democratic-Republican coalition. Elected to Congress in 1800 as a Republican, Lincoln quickly gained the confidence and approbation of Thomas Jefferson, who appointed him attorney general. Lincoln resigned after one term, but continued to advise the president about the state of politics in New England and make recommendations about federal patronage. A paper he helped found in Worcester, Massachusetts, the National Aegis, became an important regional voice of Republicanism, and Lincoln returned to political office in 1807, as the Republican lieutenant governor and then, on the death of James Sullivan, governor of Massachusetts. In 1810, Jefferson and Madison hoped he would accept an appointment as a Supreme Court justice, and friends in Washington wrote to persuade him of widespread Republican support for his nomination, particularly from southern members of Congress. Those southern members were presumably unaware of Lincoln’s role in the Quock Walker case; had he become a justice and acted on the principles articulated in Jennison v. Caldwell, he might have attempted to end slavery in the United States.12
In the end Lincoln declined the nomination on account of age and partial blindness. Yet southern congressmen were likely right to place their faith in Lincoln. By 1810, his years of service to the Republican cause outweighed his antislavery past, and he had never publicly reasserted his bold claim from 1781 that “the air in America was too pure for a slave to breathe in.” As is it turned out, the early national air was pure enough for slavery. All the northern states provided some degree of comity to slaveholders when they entered the federal union, agreeing to the rendition of fugitives and passing sojourner laws protecting southern slave property, in what Paul Finkelman has termed a “rejection of Somerset.” In 1788, Massachusetts refused to allow nonresident African Americans to stay in the state longer than two months, preventing the state from becoming a haven for free and fugitive slaves. The Supreme Judicial Court acknowledged that masters outside Massachusetts had retained a property right to enslaved persons who fled or traveled to the state. Such legal and institutional changes made slavery an inherent part of the American polity, as the institution became more stable under the Constitution.13 Yet the relative security of slave property under the Constitution depended on writing slavery into the structure of the federal government, ensuring that as national political and ideological bonds developed after 1787, slavery would remain subject to sectional and partisan debate.
Slavery became a pressing issue for New England Republicans after 1800, because their political coalition had strong ties to the South, while their political convictions challenged traditional social and institutional hierarchies. Multiple Republicans followed Lincoln’s path from early criticism of slavery to embrace of the Jeffersonian cause in the 1790s and 1800s as allies of the slaveholding South. However, unlike Lincoln, many of these men did not so much forget their antislavery arguments as transform them, in order to make peace with their southern colleagues and their own political and ethical convictions.
Freedom Against Slavery
The northern Democratic-Republican coalition was socially and ideologically diverse: Levi Lincoln was a free-thinker and a Unitarian, while his fellow Jeffersonian John Leland was an evangelical Baptist minister who became a leading Republican in western Massachusetts. In terms of social status, Lincoln was similar to many Federalist leaders: he attended Harvard, practiced law, stood firmly on the side of creditors during Shays’ Rebellion, and even married the daughter of a prominent local Federalist. He was representative of the gentlemen outsiders who emerged as leading Republicans throughout Massachusetts, like the Crowinshields of Salem, Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead, and Henry Dearborn of the District of Maine.14 Leland, in contrast, born to a middling family in Grafton, Massachusetts, in 1754, had a limited education, never attended college, and spent his early career as an itinerant in Virginia. He was skeptical of lawyers and proud to note that few Baptist ministers in Virginia had “received the diploma of MA,” as it proved their “work has been of God and not of man.” He was far more representative of the new class of men Jeffersonian politics brought into power, relative unknowns who rose to prominence in the midst of a democratizing, anti-deferential political culture. Yet Lincoln and Leland had two important ideological connections: they both believed in the Republican cause and opposed Federalist rule in Massachusetts, and they were public opponents of slavery early in their careers.15
Leland’s opposition to slavery apparently originated during his years in Virginia. After a conversion experience in 1774, Leland became a Baptist minister and spent fifteen years as an itinerant in Virginia, from 1776 to 1791. He and his fellow Baptists worked to proselytize for their faith and disestablish the Anglican Church; their evangelism, in addition to the support of gentry leaders like James Madison, led to passage of the Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786. Leland became a political supporter of Madison’s during the Virginia debates over ratification of the Constitution and endorsed his election to the House in 1789; Madison in turn promised that he would defend religious liberty in the federal government. Their experiences no doubt later predisposed Leland toward the Democratic-Republicans. In an 1801 sermon on freedom of religion, Leland called Jefferson his “hero.” Ultimately, however, his ideological alliance with Jefferson developed in the very different political context of New England, where established churches retained power into the nineteenth century. Virginia introduced him to the evils of slavery, while Connecticut and Massachusetts introduced him to the evils of Federalism. In his confrontation with the New England elite, Leland found new sources of accord with Virginia Republicans and developed a new ideological relationship to southern slavery.16
Returning to New England in 1791, Leland immediately spoke out against the persistence of religious establishment, focusing first on the state of Connecticut. The title of a pamphlet he published that year gives a fair indication of his sentiments: The Rights of Conscience Inalienable, and therefore Religious Opinions not Cognizable by Law: Or, the high-flying Churchman, Stript of his legal Robe, Appears a Yaho[o]. The pamphlet contained a crucial definition of “conscience”: “the word signifies common science, a court of judicature which the Almighty has erected in every human breast: a censor morum over all his conduct. Conscience will ever judge right, when it is rightly informed, and speak the truth when it understands it.” According to Leland, conscience had never been surrendered to regulation
