During the 1780s Massachusetts abolished slavery. After that, the abolition society in Massachusetts stopped taking part in Philadelphia’s annual abolition convention.[1]
After the economically crippling policies of Jefferson and Madison, the Federalists regained power in New England. The authorities segregated churches and schools. Even Jedidiah Morse, delivering a sermon at Boston’s African Meeting House, told the congregation to “be contented in the humble station in which Providence has placed you.”[2]
New England’s moderate Federalist politicians did not want to abolish slavery in the South. They wanted to remove the three-fifths clause of the Constitution.[3] To a growing number of devout New Divinity adherents, however, slavery remained a moral issue. That morality entered the minds of Federalist editors. It merged with the need to demonize Southerners.
In 1814, Mathew Carey pointed out in the Olive Branch, the Connecticut Courant published a defamatory article about Southern slave holders in 1796.[4] Carey added, “…many paragraphs have occasionally appeared in the Boston papers intended and calculated to excite the Negroes of the southern states to rise and massacre their masters.” Carey noted that Federalist newspapers used the slavery issue to incite hostility between New England and the South.[5]
Still, to the moderate Federalist politicians in New England, the issue was the three-fifths clause of the Constitution. When William Lloyd Garrison promoted abolitionism in the 1830s, older Federalists such as Harrison Gray Otis still linked Garrison’s views to the menace of slaves giving Southerners a disproportionate representation in the House of Representatives.[6]
After the antislavery movement rekindled in the 1830s, abolitionists republished and read the works of Samuel Hopkins. The Congregational cleric first advanced the idea of slavery as a sin in 1776, in A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans.[7]
Next: How New England’s Federalists Regarded the Union
Look for it Monday, October 14
[1]James M. Banner, To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts 1789-1815, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970) 104-5.
[2] Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 106.
[3] Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 107.
[4] See blog posted May 26, 2013 “How the Federalists excited jealousy and discord painting a ‘hateful picture’ of the South.”
[5] Mathew Carey, The Olive Branch: Or Faults on Both Sides (Philadelphia: M. Carey, November 8, 1814) 187.
[6] Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 108.
[7] Joseph Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins” American National Biography
