A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  By mid-September, the Federalist press began capitalizing on the episode by presenting it as a natural consequence of republicanism run riot. “The sound of French Liberty and Equality in the ears of these Blacks led them to this desperate measure,” one widely reprinted article charged. “Behold America the French doctrine of Insurrection!” another exclaimed. Some articles criticized Republican printers for filling the heads of slaves with notions of freedom. “The slave holders in our county no longer permit the Aurora and other Jacobin papers to come into their homes as they are convinced the late insurrection is to be attributable entirely to this source,” a correspondent supposedly from Virginia wrote in a letter appearing in Federalist papers across the country.

  Many articles blamed Jefferson’s egalitarian rhetoric for the slaves’ actions. “Truly Mr. J.,” read a typical charge, “should the business end in massacre, you and your disciples are the men who are the cause of it, and for every outrage and murder the Negroes may commit, you stand accountable.” After leveling similar accusations against Virginia Republicans generally, a Pennsylvania newspaper urged state voters “to tread down Jacobin philosophy and fractious reformation; to support by constant precept and example the dominion of religion, order, and law; and to cling solely to the Federal[ist] government as the only rock of their stability.” Radical Federalist printer William Cobbett commented, “The late revolt…amongst the Negroes of Virginia…will make Jefferson and his party very cautious how they do any act which may stir the sleeping embers of that alarming fire which, were it once rekindled, would probably make all the southern states what Hispaniola now is.”

  The Federalist press also indicted slaveholding Virginia Republicans for hypocrisy in their handling of the affair and suggested that the conspirators died for Jefferson’s sins. “He who effects to be a Democrat and is at the same time an owner of slaves, is a devil incarnate,” declared one Federalist writer. “Democracy therefore in Virginia is like virtue in hell.” One Federalist newspaper depicted the conspiracy as “shallow” and easily suppressed, which carried the implication that Virginia Republicans overreacted in their response to it. Several articles reminded readers of Jefferson’s earlier praise for “the boisterous sea of liberty” and, in light of the threatened slave revolt, contrasted that image with the Federalist promise of ordered freedom. “If anything will correct and bring to repentance old hardened sinners in Jacobinism, it must be an insurrection of their slaves,” the Boston Gazette observed. “One old experienced statesman like John Adams, who honestly tells men how wicked they are and that nothing will keep them in good order but the powerful restraints of a strong government, is worth all the speculative philosophers from Thomas Jefferson down.”

  Potentially the most explosive evidence to emerge from the conspiracy trials in Virginia involved the testimony of multiple witnesses that two white Frenchmen had helped Gabriel. In their confessions, some of the conspirators named at least one of these alleged collaborators and suggested that both played major roles in the effort. Federalist newspapers latched on to this testimony and published it along with accusations that the revolutionary rhetoric of domestic Republicans inspired the slaves to revolt. Anything linking French Jacobins to domestic instability helped to justify the Federalists’ Alien Act and counter Republican criticisms of it.

  Republicans tried to deflect these charges by denying them. The Aurora dismissed published reports that radical Republicans had instigated the Virginia slave conspiracy as “wholly false” and suggested that Federalist policies—such as conducting trade talks with Toussaint Louverture, the Black ruler of Saint-Domingue—contributed more to the unrest than anything Republicans said or did. “While our administration was encouraging…revolt and trading with Toussaint in the West Indies, what could be expected from the unfortunate Blacks and slaves in our states from the example?” the newspaper asked.

  Notwithstanding undisputed trial testimony to the contrary, Republicans maintained that Gabriel and his fellow slaves acted without outside assistance. According to the Aurora, “There was not so much as the slightest foundation for suspecting any Republican American or any Frenchman” played a role in the affair. Republican newspapers around the country reprinted this denial and made it their own. When pressed on the issue shortly before the fall election, Monroe asserted, “According to our present information, the conspiracy was quite a domestic one, conceived and carried to the stage at which it was discovered by some bold adventurers among the slaves.” As if for emphasis, he added, “If white men were engaged in it, it is a fact of which we have no proof.” Based on his study of the episode, however, historian Douglas Egerton concluded that Monroe probably had received at least some evidence of white participation, but suppressed or destroyed it. Virginia officials neither pursued the accusations of involvement by Frenchmen nor indicted any white people in the case.

  By all accounts, Federalists believed what their papers said about Republican complicity in the conspiracy. They made similar comments in private. “I doubt not that the eternal clamor about liberty in Virginia…has matured the event which has happened,” a leading Federalist diplomat wrote about the affair in a letter to the President’s son, John Quincy Adams. “In Virginia, they are beginning to feel the happy effects of liberty and equality,” another prominent Federalist added. “The reports from that quarter say it was planned by Frenchmen, and that all the whites, save the French, were to have been sacrificed.”

  By early fall, Jefferson and Monroe viewed virtually everything—even a desperate slave conspiracy and its violent suppression—in political terms. On September 20, Jefferson gave a cautious reply to Monroe’s question about when to stop the hangings. Jefferson always hedged on the issue of slavery: so much so, that one of his best biographers, Joseph Ellis, called him the American sphinx. He owned slaves all his adult life and treated them like property. In his draft for the Declaration of Independence, however, Jefferson listed the institution of slavery as one of the usurpations by the British monarch that justified the American Revolution. A decade later, in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote of his hope, “under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation [of the slaves] with the consent of the masters.” By 1800, whispered rumors circulated that the widowed master of Monticello had sexual relations with his female slaves. Slavery, and the treatment of convicted slave conspirators during a political season, presented Jefferson with hard issues.

  “Where to stay the hand of the executioner is an important question,” Jefferson wrote to Monroe. Virginians would differ in their answers, Jefferson observed, but the political ramifications reached beyond Virginia. “The other states and the world at large will forever condemn us if we indulge in a principle of revenge or go one step beyond absolute necessity,” he wrote. “They cannot lose sight of the rights of the two parties and the object of the unsuccessful one. Our situation is indeed a difficult one.”

  Jefferson suggested exporting the convicted slaves out of the country rather than hanging them. “I hazard these thoughts for your consideration only,” the cautious candidate added, “as I should be unwilling to be quoted in the case.” After Jefferson’s letter reached Monroe, most convicted conspirators received outright pardons on the court’s recommendation of mercy or were “reprieved for transportation” to Spanish Louisiana. The political storm passed with minimal impact on the election.

  Before the end of the affair, however, Virginians with power demanded at least one more execution. The $300 bounty offered for Gabriel’s capture had worked. On September 23 in Norfolk, a slave with no part in the conspiracy betrayed Gabriel’s hiding place to the local sheriff, who arrested him and sent him to the state capital for trial. Gabriel reached Richmond in irons on September 27. His brief public trial was held nine days later. Gabriel was the sixth man tried on that day, and the only one sentenced to die without a recommendation of mercy. The trial drew a large crowd.

  Gabriel sat silently as three of his former followers place
d him at the center of the conspiracy. They gained their lives for their testimony; he lost his. Gabriel spoke only after the court sentenced him to die on the next day. He asked for a delay of three days so that he could hang with six of his coconspirators previously scheduled for execution on October 10. The court granted his last request. In all, Virginia hanged twenty-six slaves for their role in the conspiracy, with Gabriel being the last of them to die in Richmond.

  Despite their partisan wrangling over the causes and handling of the Virginia slave conspiracy, during the campaign of 1800, neither Federalists nor Republicans spoke substantively to the underlying issue of slavery. Even though most northern states had abolished slavery by 1800, it remained deeply entrenched in the South. Neither party could hope to win the presidency if it took a strong stand on slavery, so they both equivocated on what was already emerging as the most divisive topic in American politics.

  Both parties were deeply split by the issue. Slavery disgusted Adams—he once called it “an evil of colossal magnitude”—yet, he included three slave owners in his five-member cabinet, and his hope for reelection rode on winning electoral votes from three slave states: Maryland, Delaware, and South Carolina. Many Northern High Federalists opposed slavery on moral or religious grounds, yet their faction’s favored candidate for President, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, possessed vast slave plantations and, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, led the successful effort to ensure that the Constitution protected the right of states to maintain slavery. If the Constitution “should fail to insure some security to the southern states against an emancipation of slaves,” Pinckney told his fellow delegates, he “would be bound by this duty to his state to vote against [it].”

  The Republican Party encompassed a similar diversity of views on slavery, from the ardent support for it expressed by many party leaders in the Deep South through Jefferson’s tortured acquiescence of the practice to the fevered abolitionism of such prominent Northern Republicans as Albert Gallatin. “Slavery is inconsistent with every principle of humanity, justice, and right,” Gallatin had written in a 1793 legislative report, yet he served as Jefferson’s point man in Congress during the 1800 election.

  In 1800, none of the national candidates questioned the right of states to authorize slavery or proposed that the government do anything to discourage slavery or restrict the slave trade. At most, partisan pundits postured on the edges of these explosive issues. In articles and pamphlets addressed to voters in their region, for example, Northern Republicans frequently reminded voters of Jefferson’s expressed hope for gradual emancipation. “The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust,” Jefferson had written in Notes on the State of Virginia—part of a passage critical of slavery that Adams once described as “worth diamonds.” Southern Federalists used the same passage, which warned of dire consequences if slavery did not end, to turn white voters in the South against Jefferson. In a published campaign address, a Rhode Island Federalist ridiculed the calls for liberty and equality coming from Virginia Republicans. Should New Englanders “take lessons upon those subjects from the state of Virginia…where slavery constitutes a part of the policy of the government?” he asked.

  A late-September exchange between Philadelphia’s two leading partisan newspapers showed just how far rhetoric departed from reality. “The insurrection of the Negroes in the southern states, which appears to be organized on the true French plan, must be decisive with every reflecting man in those states of the election of Mr. Adams and Gen. Pinckney,” an essay in the Federalist Gazette of the United States asserted. Scared for their safety, white Southern voters would now turn to Federalists for security, the essayist suggested. “We augur better things from this unhappy but, thank God, partial revolt,” the Republican Aurora replied a day later. “We augur from it…the election of [Thomas Jefferson], whose whole life has been marked by measures calculated to procure the emancipation of the Blacks.” Whether true or not, that was what Pennsylvania Republicans wanted to hear about their candidate. Although such dueling comments probably did not change many minds, they likely spoke to each party’s local political base.

  Gabriel was hanged smack in the middle of the first round of voting in the fall state elections that would decide the presidency. Those elections spread over two months. In 1800, state legislatures selected the presidential electors in eleven of the sixteen states. By autumn, voters in seven of these eleven states—New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Georgia, and Tennessee—had already chosen their legislatures for 1800. Of these, Federalists controlled the four New England state legislatures while Republicans held a majority of the seats in each of the other three. Except for New York, where Burr had orchestrated a narrow Republican victory in the spring, these were all states where one party dominated and presidential politics had played little part in the elections.

  The four remaining states where legislatures chose the electors held their elections for local, state, and congressional offices in October—Delaware on the sixth; Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and South Carolina on the fourteenth. These elections would decide how those states voted for President. Presidential politics dominated the campaign discourse in all four places. The five states where voters directly picked electors balloted in November, beginning with Virginia and North Carolina on the third, moving on to Maryland and Kentucky the following week, and concluding with Rhode Island on the nineteenth.

  A steady trickle of election returns, and their meaning for the presidential contest, kept the nation on edge for months. Adding to the complexity, Maryland Federalists continued to promise a switch from district elections to legislative appointment if their party won the state elections on October 6. Further, lawmakers in Pennsylvania remained deadlocked on the manner of choosing electors. The October elections in that state could resolve this impasse by giving complete control to the Republicans. They already controlled the State Assembly by a wide margin and they dreamed of wresting control of the State Senate as well. Only one-fourth of the Senate’s seats were up for grabs, however, with Republicans holding most of those positions—making a Republican takeover virtually impossible.

  Both sides hoped that the October legislative elections would settle the presidential race in their favor. Federalists expected to win the New Jersey and Delaware elections. If they also maintained control of the legislatures in Maryland and South Carolina, and held on to the Pennsylvania Senate as anticipated, then they could count on Adams and Pinckney securing votes from at least a narrow majority of the electors regardless of what happened in the November elections. If some of their elector candidates then won in North Carolina’s district elections during November, as they hoped, that would simply pad their victory. In contrast, if Republicans gained the upper hand in Pennsylvania and South Carolina while winning enough seats in the Maryland legislature to block any bill changing the method of choosing electors, then Jefferson and Burr would surely have a majority of their partisans in the Electoral College—with only the size of that majority in doubt. If these three critical states split, however, the presidential contest could go right down to the wire.

  Voters went to the polls in Maryland on the same day as Gabriel went on trial in neighboring Virginia. The slave conspiracy and resulting trials attracted widespread attention in Maryland, which (like Virginia) had a plantation economy based on slave labor. As it turned out, however, only one issue mattered in the state elections: the Federalist proposal to have the legislature appoint presidential electors rather than have them selected in district elections.

  Prior to the election, the Federalists controlled both houses of the Maryland legislature and held all statewide offices. The governor could have called a special session of the outgoing legislature to change the method for choosing electors. Instead, he allowed voters to have a say in the matter by leaving it to the incoming legislature. “His refusal to call the old Assembly alone saved Jefferson’s election here,” crowed Maryland R
epublican John Francis Mercer, a senior Anti-Federalist who had served in the Continental Congress, Constitutional Convention, and Congress. “It was the popular cry that overwhelmed them,” a Federal Gazette writer concluded of his party’s candidates. Republicans captured a majority of seats in the lower house of the Maryland legislature, which guaranteed that voters would choose the state’s electors in district elections. Those contests would proceed as scheduled in November.

  Earlier in the year, Federalists in New Hampshire and Massachusetts had instigated a switch from popular elections to legislative appointment for electors without causing a backlash. Republican lawmakers had successfully substituted statewide for district elections in Virginia. Legislators in these states freely conceded that they acted for short-term partisan gain. Only in Maryland, however, did anyone give voters a choice, and their reaction caught the Federalists off guard. Having moved to Washington with the nation’s government in June, Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott watched the battle over the issue unfold up close. In a private letter to Fisher Ames, Wolcott tried to account for the appeal of voting directly for presidential electors, but succeeded mainly in revealing his High Federalist sensibilities. “The right of suffrage is here considered invaluable,” he wrote, “because, in addition to its usual attributes, it levels the distinctions of society, gratifies vulgar curiosity, indulges the plebeian taste for slander, and furnishes the means of riotous indulgence without expense.” Without a means to gauge public opinion formally, Wolcott could only guess why the voters objected to the legislative appointment of electors—and attributed base motives to them.