A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  At the time, political campaigns in Maryland featured debates between candidates or their representatives. “These are always held,” one observer noted in 1800, “where there is known to be a great concourse of people, [such as] at a horse race, a cock-fight, or a Methodist quarterly meeting.” In Maryland during the summer of 1800, despite the lull in campaigning elsewhere, candidates for the offices of state legislator and presidential elector began making the rounds of these public gatherings and engaging their debating skills. Presidential politics dominated the debates, even those between would-be legislators, with the candidates offering themselves as loyal supporters of either Adams or Jefferson. Despite all the speculation about Pinckney and Burr by party insiders, the debaters rarely mentioned them. With the executive branch having moved to Washington during June, and that town still part of Maryland, some of the officials transplanted to the nation’s new capital saw their first candidate debates that summer. Although a tradition in Maryland, open-air public debates between candidates did not then typically occur elsewhere.

  “The candidates on both sides are now traveling through their districts soliciting the favor of individuals with whom they associate on no other occasion,” Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott observed in August. “Men of the first [rank] condescend to collect dissolute and ignorant mobs of hundreds of individuals to whom they make long speeches in the open air.” The President’s son, Thomas, described the scene in a letter to his father’s private secretary. “Here the candidates for political honors or preferment assemble with their partisans,” he wrote. “They mount the rostrum, made out of an empty barrel or hogshead, [and] harangue the sovereign people—prais[ing] and recommend[ing] themselves at the expense of their adversary’s character and pretensions.” Steeped in politics, Wolcott and Thomas Adams clearly enjoyed the show.

  The speakers gave voice to familiar arguments for and against Adams and Jefferson. Indeed, these debates showed just how universal the campaign themes had become. Despite the lack of mass media and national party organizations, virtually the same partisan messages reached citizens everywhere. In Maryland, newspapers captured the arguments as they were spoken rather than in the more studied formulation of a written essay or printed pamphlet.

  The debate format facilitated a rapid exchange of views. Republicans pounded the Federalists’ record of high taxes, rising national debt, a standing army and excessive navy, hostilities with France, and repressive domestic policies. They condemned the Sedition Act as unconstitutional and warned of monarchies afoot. “The measures of the present administration were conceived in wisdom and executed with firmness, uprightness, and ability…to ensure justice from abroad and tranquility at home,” replied Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, a Maryland native who participated in local debates on behalf of his cousin, a Federalist candidate for elector. Appealing to moderates, Chase’s cousin, the candidate, praised Adams as “a tried, firm, dedicated patriot [who will] resist the influence of party and will pursue that line of conduct which will best support the rights and liberties of the people.” Times are good, various Federalists declared. “You may be certain never to be more happy than you have been under Mr. Adams’s administration,” one partisan declared. Not so, a Republican statement countered. “If ever an occasion justified public addresses and individual exertions to rouse the people to a sense of duty, the present is undoubtedly such an occasion,” it claimed. “You will plainly see and feel that your present rulers have exercised unauthorized powers and undue influence over you.”

  Maryland Federalists faced their hardest task in selling voters on their proposal to have the legislature appoint the state’s electors in 1800, rather than allow the people to elect them as before. Republican candidates for the state legislature characterized the proposal as an eleventh-hour power grab by desperate partisans. They made it their main issue in the campaign. It nicely reinforced the image of Federalists as monarchists. “The right of election is the very essence of our constitution,” one Republican candidate declared. “Yet,…there are men among us who, to answer party purposes, are meditating a plan to deprive us of it.”

  Federalists persisted in supporting the election-law change despite the criticism because they saw it as essential for winning the presidential contest. The three or four electoral votes that Jefferson might win through district elections in Maryland would likely seal his victory, they reasoned. “I am aware of strong objections to the measure,” Hamilton wrote to a worried Maryland Federalist in early August, “but if it be true, as I suppose, that our opponents aim at revolution and employ all means to secure success, the contest must be unequal if we not only refrain from unconstitutional and criminal measures, but even from such as may offend against the routine of strict decorum.” Once again, as he had in New York, Hamilton urged using all necessary means to save the republic from the Jacobins.

  During the campaign in Maryland, Federalist candidates struggled to put a democratic face on their undemocratic proposal. Virginia’s move to a statewide election for its presidential electors would likely cost Adams at least six electoral votes and deprive him of the victory, they claimed. Legislative appointment of Maryland’s ten electors would “counteract the policy of Virginia,” one candidate explained in late July, “and give the state of Maryland its full weight and influence in the election of the president.” In a joint statement issued in August, three other Federalists pleaded, “Equity among the citizens ought to be restored, and this can only be done by fighting Virginia with her own weapons.” It hardly helped that Federalists vowed to restore the old method of district voting after the election. Every argument simply made matters worse.

  The proposal proved disastrous for Federalists. In July, they confidently predicted that their candidates would retain control of the state legislature and use their majority to change the election law. By summer’s end, they feared that Republicans would take control of at least one legislative chamber and block the change. “From present appearances,” a state party leader concluded in September, “the choice of electors will be left to the people.” Republicans viewed the situation similarly. In August, for example, Madison called “it more than probable” that Federalists would carry the legislative elections and immediately appoint Maryland’s electors. A month later, he predicted a “Republican issue to the main question” of how the state chose electors. Maryland voters wanted to pick their electors and they would not willingly elect a legislature that would deprive them of that right, he concluded.

  “It may be truly said that on the state of Maryland depends, in a great measure, the fate of America,” an Annapolis Federalist, Charles Alexander Warfield, asserted in a September campaign address. By this time, partisans on both sides had convinced themselves that the outcome of the 1800 presidential election, which now hinged on electoral votes from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, could alter the course of American history. The French Revolution and America’s reaction to it had made the choices appear stark to many: liberty or order. Extraordinarily able candidates and campaigners—Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Sedgwick, McKean, Jay, Monroe, three Pinckneys, and a Burr, to name just a few—most of them already renowned for their roles in the American Revolution or founding the republic, played central parts again—in some cases for the last time. Partisan printers and pamphleteers had the means to reach Americans everywhere and the incentive to stir their passions. It made for a battle of titans.

  The partisan rhetoric became severe. Republicans warned of monarchy if their opponents retained power. Federalists spoke of an atheistic, leveling revolution should the “Jacobins” take over. Many believed these words and feared the worst. Warfield closed his address with prayer: “May the Ruler of the Universe endow us all with wisdom to discern and with fortitude to act right on this truly momentous occasion!” He referred, of course, to the Maryland legislative elections, which he rightly viewed as Adams’s last, best opportunity to secure reelection. If Federalists prevailed in those e
lections and went on to appoint ten of their own as electors, Adams would almost surely win another term in office. It seemed so simple. Even at this late date, no one could have foreseen the twists and turns that lay ahead before America finally chose its next President.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  INSURRECTION

  GABRIEL was a large man with big plans. Like so many other Virginians in 1800, he dreamed of freedom. Born in 1776, Gabriel became a blacksmith and apparently worked at various sites in and around the state capital of Richmond. He stood well over six feet tall, had a powerful build, and commanded respect from his peers. Those peers, however, were African-American slaves, and Gabriel wanted more for them—and for himself—than bondage. As a semi-itinerant craftsman, he inevitably associated with free Blacks and white artisans. Most of his earnings however, went to his owner, Thomas Prosser, who engaged in the then-common practice of letting some of his skilled slaves work independently. The taste of personal liberty enjoyed by Gabriel may have increased his hunger for complete emancipation; it certainly allowed him to experience the election-year tumult in Virginia and to hear radical Republican calls for liberty.

  One contemporary newspaper account described Gabriel as “a fellow of courage and intellect above his rank in life.” He could read and write. He also had a temper. Caught in 1799 stealing a pig from a white overseer, Absalom Johnson, Gabriel bit off the pig owner’s ear in the ensuing scuffle and was branded on the left hand for his crime. At some point shortly after this incident, Gabriel decided that he had had enough of slavery and scraping for food. He began plotting a massive insurrection designed to win freedom for himself and other slaves in southeastern Virginia. Events in revolutionary France and the wealthy French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola Island—where slaves had taken over in 1793, and proclaimed their freedom—may have inspired him.

  During the spring and summer of 1800, Gabriel conspired with other slaves in the region—probably too many—and became their general. Others served as captains and sergeants. Two radical white French immigrants and some free African-Americans allegedly also participated in the plotting. Gabriel forged swords from sickles for his men and made five hundred bullets for their few guns. He claimed that thousands of slaves would rise on his call and hoped that free Blacks and poor whites would rally to his banner. Inverting Patrick Henry’s famous cry, Gabriel crafted a flag that read “Death or Liberty.” According to courtroom testimony from participants, Gabriel at times demanded death for all the whites in the area except “Quakers, Methodists, and French people”—three groups widely perceived to oppose slavery. He spoke at other times of dining and drinking “with the merchants of the city” once they agreed to end slavery. In either event, Gabriel anticipated a bloody fight for freedom. “It is unquestionably the most serious and formidable conspiracy we have ever known of this kind,” Governor James Monroe reported to Jefferson in September, after the plot became public.

  The uprising might have succeeded up to a point had nature not intervened. The plan was as follows: During the evening of Saturday, August 30, the slaves around Prosser’s plantation, six miles north of Richmond, would rise up; kill Gabriel’s chief tormentors, Prosser and Johnson; and secure guns from a nearby tavern. Other slaves would join them for a midnight march on Richmond. Once in the city, some participants would set the warehouse district on fire to divert attention while others captured the state capitol, armory, treasury, and governor’s mansion. They would use the state’s guns as their weapons and distribute its treasure among their troops. Gabriel planned to take the governor hostage and bargain for emancipation. By some accounts, Gabriel harbored hopes that Monroe—who, as American ambassador in Paris, had once embraced the revolutionary regime in France—might prove cooperative. From this point on, Gabriel’s plans become too vague to reconstruct. They went awry from the outset anyway.

  “Upon that very evening” of August 30, Republican printer James Thomson Callender reported from his Richmond prison cell in a letter to Jefferson, “there came on the most terrible thunder storm, accompanied with an enormous rain, that I ever witnessed in this state.” The road between Prosser’s plantation and Richmond became impassable. Only a few local slaves turned out. “They were deprived of the juncture and assistance of their good friends in this city, who could not go out to join them,” Callender noted. Gabriel postponed the uprising for a day and sent his followers home.

  Rumors of a slave conspiracy had circulated in Virginia throughout the summer, but as governor, Monroe had dismissed and suppressed them. Republican leaders from Jefferson on down sought to discourage and deny threats of revolutionary activity at home during the campaign so as not to feed Federalist fearmongering on the issue of domestic security. They spoke and acted like moderate Federalists and appealed to their more radical supporters only for votes in contested elections. Threats of a slave revolt posed particular problems for Republicans. Southern Federalists had long warned that Republican calls for liberty and equality could stir up the slaves. In 1799, following the XYZ Affair, South Carolina Federalist Congressman Robert Goodloe Harper published an open letter to his constituents warning that France “was preparing to invade the southern states from St. Domingo with an army of [freed] blacks, which was to be landed with a large supply of officers, arms and ammunition, to excite an insurrection among the Negroes by means of missionaries previously sent, and first to subjugate the country by their assistance, and then plunder and lay it waste.”

  After the aborted rising on August 30, when it became clear that an insurrection might happen, Monroe responded swiftly, as if to reassure citizens that they could trust Republicans to maintain order. With critical state elections scheduled for October in the slave states of Maryland and South Carolina, Monroe would not run the risk of a violent insurrection by Blacks in Republican-ruled Virginia. “The scenes which are acted in St. Domingo,” Monroe later wrote to his state military commander, “must produce an effect on all people of color in this and the states south of us, more especially our slaves, and it is our duty to be on guard to prevent any mischief resulting from it.”

  After Gabriel dismissed those few conspirators who managed to assemble at the appointed time despite the rain, one of them—perhaps unnerved by the delay—told his owner about the planned insurrection and its leader’s name. That owner raised the alarm. Other owners soon heard about it from their slaves as well. Within hours, members of the county militia began hunting down the conspirators and Gabriel fled for the coast.

  Word of these developments reached the governor in Richmond on August 31. He promptly moved the public arms to a secure location. As the full extent of the conspiracy became clear, Monroe called out various local units of the state militia and Richmond took on a military face. Soldiers began systematically rounding up slaves and arresting those thought to have joined the conspiracy. “There has been great alarm here of late at the prospect of an insurrection of the Negroes in this city and its neighborhood,” the governor wrote to Jefferson on September 9. “About thirty are in prison who are to be tried on Thursday, and others are daily discovered and apprehended in the vicinity of the city…. It is the opinion of the magistrates who examined those committed that the whole, very few excepted, will be condemned.” Monroe promised a $300 reward to anyone who captured Gabriel, plus a full pardon if an accomplice did the deed.

  Under Virginia law, accused slaves appeared before a special court composed of five judges, all of whom had to agree on any punishment. Except for the governor’s power to pardon, the court’s decision was final. In cases of conspiracy, rebellion, or insurrection, the court could impose the death penalty and order an immediate public hanging. On the initial day of court proceedings, which occurred less than two weeks after the first arrests, the court sentenced all six defendants to die at dawn or noon of the next day. Nine more men were hanged the following week. At these executions, troops surrounded the scaffold to keep the hostile crowd from assaulting the convicted slaves be
fore the executioners could kill them. “The whole state has been in consternation,” a High Federalist commented smugly. “Courts are sitting, trials are taking place, and the gallows are in full operation.”

  By mid-September, Monroe began to question the wisdom of further reprisals and perhaps to fear a political backlash from too many hangings. “While it was possible to keep [the threat of an insurrection] secret, which it was till we saw the extent of it, we did so,” he explained in a letter to Jefferson on September 15. “But when it became indispensably necessary to resort to strong measures with a view to protect the town, the public arms, the treasury, and the jail, which were all threatened, the opposite course was in part taken. We then made a display of our force.” By the time Monroe wrote these words, the state had already executed ten conspirators. He predicted that up to forty more would hang unless he intervened with pardons. “When to arrest the hand of the executioner is a question of great importance,” Monroe wrote to Jefferson. “I shall be happy to have your opinion on these points.”

  For Jefferson and Monroe, how to handle the conspirators was more than simply a moral or an ethical question. From a political standpoint, Virginia Republicans needed to display sufficient toughness to assure frightened citizens (particularly in key southern states) that a Jefferson administration would keep the peace and suppress leveling insurrections. At the same time, however, showing excessive harshness could alienate voters opposed to slavery or sympathetic to those caught up in the aborted insurrection. Pennsylvania posed a particular problem in this respect. A hotbed of radical republicanism and a center for America’s growing abolition movement, it would hold its state legislative election in four weeks—with fifteen electoral votes hanging in the balance. Rumors had already placed one of Gabriel’s alleged French coconspirators in Philadelphia.