“Race, Slavery, and Party during the First Party System in the North” Paper Presented at the SHEAR Annual Conference Providence, Rhode Island, July 2007 John Craig Hammond, University of Kentucky By 1819 the United States was on the verge of solidifying its place as “a Slaveholders’ Republic.” To explain why the federal government did so little to confront the problem of slavery between the implementation of the Constitution and the Missouri Controversy, historians often point to political divisions in the North, contrasting northern Federalists’ antislavery activism with northern Republicans’ passive acquiescence – if not active support – for the pro-slavery policies favored by southern Republicans. As Paul Finkelman contends, “Federalists were more likely than Democratic-Republicans to oppose slavery in state and national politics,” and “from the Constitutional Convention to the Missouri Compromise, Federalists often opposed the pro-slavery racism of the Jeffersonians.”1 It is an undoubtedly plausible argument. Political considerations alone gave New England Federalists abundant reason to condemn slavery. Quakers and Federalists from the Middle-Atlantic States stood at the forefront of the antislavery movement of the early republic. Conversely, northern Republicans’ devotion to white male equality had little place for African-Americans, whether free or enslaved. Finally, historians assume that northern Republicans readily silenced whatever antislavery sentiments they may have harbored, much like their dough-face Democratic successors. Yet the politics of slavery in the early republic involved far more than New England Federalists’ bellows about the three-fifths clause, Quakers and Federalists working quietly through the courthouses and statehouses of the Middle Atlantic States, and incipient dough-face Republicans unwilling to upset their fragile, bi-sectional party or its racist constituents. Between the 1790s and 1818, it was a core group of northern Republicans – not New England Federalists – who stood at the vanguard of antislavery politics and repeatedly tried forcing Congress to confront the problem of slavery where action seemed possible. Federalists from the Middle Atlantic States often worked with northern Republicans when the slavery issue came before Congress. Many New England Federalists, however, remained at best indifferent about the problem of slavery, except to the degree that they could use the issue to boost their own political influence. Restricting slavery’s western expansion offered one of the few opportunities for limiting the extent and influence of slavery in the early republic. Historians generally agree that while New England Federalists’ fought against slavery’s expansion, northern Republicans were unwilling to challenge their southern colleagues’ mania for incorporating new slave states and territories into the Union. But contra Garry Wills’s recent lionization of Timothy Pickering and his New England colleagues, it was northern Republicans who most often and most forcefully sought to restrict slavery’s expansion.2 From 1787 through 1807 speculators, slaveholders, and territorial officials repeatedly badgered Congress to repeal Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance in Indiana and Illinois. Thanks to the intense lobbying efforts of Indiana governor William Henry Harrison, Thomas Jefferson and a host of southern congressmen supported suspension of Article VI, and House committees dominated by southerners issued numerous reports 2 endorsing the pro-slavery Indianans’ petitions. Yet, northern Republican’s unwillingness to go along with their southern colleagues insured that Congress would not suspend Article VI. Northern Republicans buried the reports calling for suspension as fast as the committees produced them, and their deliberate inaction allowed an antislavery movement, led largely by northern-born Republicans, to emerge in Indiana. When antislavery Indianans sent their own petitions to Congress beginning in 1807, northern Republicans jumped on the opportunity. Speaker of the House Joseph Varnum, a Massachusetts Republican, referred the antislavery petitions to a committee stacked with northern Republicans. The Senate referred them to Republicans Aaron Kitchell of New Jersey, Edward Tiffin of Ohio, and Jesse Franklin of North Carolina, three senators with proven antislavery records. Both Republican-heavy committees then issued reports declaring Congress’s intention of maintaining Article VI during the territorial phase of government, ending Indiana’s flirtations with overturning Article VI. 3 Congress sanctioned slavery in the Mississippi and Louisiana Purchase Territories, but not without considerable dissent from northern Republicans. In 1798 Secretary of State Timothy Pickering recommended that Congress apply the Northwest Ordinance to the Mississippi Territory, “with the exception respecting slaves.” When the bill made it to the House for debate, Maine Federalist George Thatcher proposed applying Article VI to the territory anyway. Not a single New England Federalist offered any support for Thatcher’s motion; Harrison Gray Otis did, however, deliver a long- winded speech that outdid even the blatantly pro-slavery polemics of his two Federalist colleagues from South Carolina, Robert Goodloe Harper and John Rutledge, Jr. With New England Federalists either silent or clearly in favor of permitting slavery’s expansion into the Southwest, it fell on Republicans Joseph Varnum of Massachusetts and Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania to defend Thatcher’s proposal, which the House overwhelmingly defeated in any case.4 In 1804, when framing governments for the Louisiana Purchase Territories, New Jersey Republican James Sloan proposed prohibiting slavery’s further expansion into the Louisianas. The Republican-controlled House passed Sloan’s proposal 40 to 36, but the House bill failed to become law when the Senate defeated Connecticut Federalist James Hillhouse’s proposal to free all slaves carried into the territory at a certain age, and then failed to concur with the House bill. The House and the Senate nonetheless agreed to prohibit the domestic and international slave trades to the Louisianas, and limited the further introduction of slaves to those carried there by actual American settlers. Partisan backing of these measures is revealing. Historians often point out that a Connecticut Federalist led the failed charge to limit severely slavery’s expansion in the Louisianas, but it was a New Jersey Republican who guided a complete prohibition on the further introduction of slaves through the House. And in the Senate, northern Republicans voted six to four in favor of Hillhouse’s failed gradual abolition proposal, and seven to two to prohibit the domestic slave trade. Conversely, New England Federalists divided three to three on both votes, with New Jersey Senator Jonathan Dayton voting with John Quincy Adams and Timothy Pickering against restricting slavery in the Louisianas.5 The restrictions on the domestic slave trade, which “seemed calculated to abolish slavery at a future day altogether,” provoked an immediate backlash from slaveholders in both Upper and Lower Louisiana, and Congress rescinded them the following year. In the ensuing decade, however, northern Republicans tried halting slavery’s expansion in what 2 3 would become Missouri. In 1811 and in 1812, Pennsylvania Republicans sought “to prohibit the admission of slaves into the said territory.” But with the nation “on the eve of war,” and “with almost one half of the community infatuated with the spirit of opposition to the Government,” Abner Lacock’s 1811 proposal mustered only seventeen supporting votes, while Jonathan Roberts voluntarily withdrew his 1812 motion.6 After the War of 1812, with a host of western territories poised for statehood, and with the United States on the verge of establishing a continental empire, northern Republicans again sought to reign in slavery’s expansion. In April 1818 New Hampshire Republican Arthur introduced a constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery “in any State hereafter admitted into the Union,” but the House quickly dismissed his proposal without debate, perhaps because of Mississippi’s pending admission. Later that year, New Yorker James Tallmadge tried delaying Illinois statehood because its constitution failed to guard against slavery. Twenty-five of sixty-eight northern Republicans voted with Tallmadge, but his proposal mustered only eight votes from the thirty-one northern Federalists in the House.7 Between 1798 and 1818, then, northern Republicans either supported or initiated measures - though nearly everyone failed - to restrict the western expansion of slavery. Federalists from the Middle-Atlantic states supported these measures too, as did some New England Federalists. But leading New Englanders such as Harrison Gray Otis and Timothy Pickering evinced little concern about slavery’s expansion beyond its effects on their own political fortunes. New England Federalists exhibited similar indifference about the most glaring excesses of slavery, and outright hostility towards proposals to protect the rights of free and enslaved blacks. Between 1796 and 1800, a small but determined group of northern Republicans, including Albert Gallatin, Philadelphian John Swanwick, and Massachusetts representative Joseph Varnum, introduced a series of abolitionist and free black petitions, then fought for a reform of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, and restrictions on the illegal slave trade out of the