Channels, Fall 2019

Page 44 Guidone • Liberty Further Extended opposition to slaveholders on both political and moral terms. 48 Many Federalist attacks on Republicans began during the 1800s over the three-fifths compromise, a political bargain between Federalists and their southern opponents during the Constitutional debates. Haynes already articulated the political and moral reasons why slavery is wrong. When discussing taxes by population, Northerners proposed that Congress tax black slaves at a 4:3 ratio, and white southerners who owned numerous slaves suggested a 4:1 ratio. James Madison famously proposed his own ratio, a 3/5ths compromise that carried and increased political representation, giving each state three people for every five slaves. Still many Vermonters saw slavery as one of many political issues rather than a moral evil that placed whites over blacks in America. Haynes never wavered from his public stance on slavery and succeeded in ministry partnerships with clergy who were evolving on the matter. Haynes believed the best approach to ending slavery was through reasonable argument and debate, believing that many Northerners were in the process of evolving on the issue. Unfortunately, Haynes never saw the Southern plantation system, an institution for white men in southern states to exclude ownership opportunities for everyone but themselves. 49 Haynes subtly had Vermonters and Africans in mind when he spoke to the Freemen. “If I am not mistaken,” he insisted, “we live in a day when our liberties are invaded, and the rights of men challenged beyond what we ever experienced and that under the soothing titles of Republicanism, democracy, &c. These are precious names if well understood.” 50 Along with other northern Federalists Haynes realized the southern Republicans used slave populations to gain more power in 48 Haynes and Newman, Black Preacher to White America, 82. “The propriety of this idea will appear strikingly evident by Pointing you. to the poor Africans, among us. What has reduced them to their present, pitiful, abject state? Is it any distinction that the God of nature hath made in their formation? Nay-but being subjected to slavery, by the cruel hands of oppressors, they have been taught to view themselves as a rank of beings far below others, which has suppressed, in a degree, every principle of manhood, and so they become despised, ignorant, and licentious. This shews the effects of despotism, and should fill us with the utmost detestation against every attack on the rights of men; while we cherish and diffuse, with a laudable ambition, that heaven-born liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. Should we compare those countries, where tyrants are gorged with human blood, to the far more peaceful regions of North America, the contrast would appear striking.” In this speech on Washington’s birthday, Haynes equates American slavery with French despotism. 49 Hammond, John Craig and Matthew Mason. Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. 2011. 13. The main argument of the book explains how the Federalists in the north were very antislavery, but in a political sense rather than a moral sense. They did not like how the southern Republicans used slave populations to gain more power in congress, via the three-fifths compromise. Mason coedited Contesting Slavery with John Craig Hammond, which includes short essays on slavery in relation to national politics and the economy in the early 18 th century. Mason and Hammond contextualize Haynes’ moral and political objection to slavery as a Vermonter and provide a framework to think about the various factors that decreased opportunities for Haynes to lead a full abolitionist movement in Vermont. “From the revolution forward, only when slavery became personal in some way did those who harbored an ideological antipathy to slavery act in any organized way against it. Ideas hostile to slavery were thus a precondition for antislavery deeds, but they generally proved insufficient to move people from belief to action. Only when these ideas intersected with political, social, economic, and or cultural factors did antislavery realize its possibilities. When those factors worked against antislavery action, on the other hand, the limits of antislavery ideas were on full display.” Contesting Slavery , 13. Vermonters held little political motivation to end slavery (It was outlawed in the 1777 charter). Vermonters objected to slavery as a social evil, but throughout Haynes’ ministry, no consensus or coalition formed under the Congregationalist church. Vermonter’s cultural view of slavery began to change after the War of 1812, when Haynes attacked Madison for his compliance with the Southern slave system. Simultaneously abolitionist societies grew in Northern cities such as Boston. 50 Haynes and Newman, Black Preacher to White America, 74.