Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley
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 by the state, and therefore religious establishments were ethically wrong. A few months later he brought this argument to Massachusetts, eventually settling in what would become Cheshire, Massachusetts, in 1792. Leland was thus part of a long line of thinkers whom Staughton Lynd termed “dissenting radicals,” men for whom freedom of conscience was the paramount natural right. Leland’s radical sense of religious individualism made him a firm advocate of the separation of church and state. While he was more extreme than many Baptists, he developed a strong following in Cheshire as he attacked Federalist tyranny over the individual conscience.17
In Leland’s Republican oratory, the Jeffersonians represented the cause of political and religious freedom. The new president, Leland claimed in 1801, was “the Man of the People, the defender of the rights of man and the rights of conscience.” Yet Leland, like Lincoln and other New England Republicans, was also opposed to slavery, a sentiment presumably discordant with the emergent national Republican coalition and its deep roots in the Jeffersonian South. As Leland explained in a retrospective chronicle of his southern itinerancy published in 1790, his time in Virginia had left him disgusted with “the whole scene of slavery.” The institution afflicted his conscience and contradicted deeply held political ideals, because it embodied such abusive power. In 1789, he authored a resolution for the Baptist General Committee in Virginia that described slavery as “a violent deprivation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government.” In a 1791 letter to some of his Virginia congregants, he repeated that claim and added that slavery was likewise “destructive of every humane and benevolent passion of the soul, and subversive to that liberty absolutely necessary to ennoble the human mind.” He simply could not “endure to see one man strip and whip another, as free by nature as himself.” In essence, slavery was a violation of subjective freedom. Like many evangelicals, Leland believed that enslaved people could experience “a work of grace in their hearts”; “liberty of conscience,” he argued, “in matters of religion, is the right of slaves, beyond contradiction.” Yet many slaveholders, claimed Leland, openly violated the natural right of slaves to worship, often beating them for attending religious