Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America

Abstract

Padraig Riley's book offers a fascinating and thoroughly documented narrative on the Democratic-Republicans' attitudes to slavery during the two decades from Thomas Jefferson's “revolution of 1800” until the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In fact, the book is so focused that it takes dozens of pages for the author to mention that there were also Federalist slaveholders in the United States. Importantly, throughout this period the Jeffersonian Republicans never ceased talking about abolition, which makes the Missouri controversy look much less unexpected than it was depicted to be in Jefferson's famous “a fire bell in the night” letter sent to John Holmes in April 1820. There is much to learn by reading this richly detailed study of congressional debates and pamphlets of the time. The 1808 prohibition of the slave trade, for example, produced the question of whether to allow the southern states to confiscate such cargo yet sell Africans into slavery rather than fund their safe return to Africa. The fact that even in New York there remained tens of thousands of slaves well after the state's gradual emancipation of 1799 offers a lively sense of how deeply all national politics related to slavery. During the Missouri debates the southern slaveholders eagerly pointed out how even free African Americans were deprived of numerous civil rights in the northern states.