i. thatcher on slavery

    Slavery clauses in the proposed Constitution were hotly debated in the Massachusetts ratifying convention, but the subject was never broached in any of Thatcher’s correspondence from the period. Former governor James Bowdoin introduced Brissot de Warville to the state’s delegation in the Confederation Congress in the summer of 1788, but if Thatcher discussed black slavery or the Atlantic slave trade with France’s premier ami des Noirs, no mention of it has been found. And he was conspicuously silent during the first two antislavery debates in the federal Congress, when Rep. Josiah Parker (Va.) moved to lay a duty on imported slaves in mid-1789, and again in February-March 1790 when lobbyists representing Quaker groups in New York and Philadelphia petitioned Congress to go “to the very verge of their powers” for an amelioration of the slave trade and domestic slavery. On 18 March Thatcher privately debated the question with Rep. Ædanus Burke (S.C.) over dinner at the President’s. “I understand the President Smiled at the Conversation,” reported one of the Quaker lobbyists. But Thatcher remained reluctant to speak publicly on the issue. Although his impatience with the petitioners’ intrusion on the legislative agenda is apparent from a letter to David Sewall near the end of the debate more than a week later, he became “a perticuler friend” of the most vocal of the Quaker lobbyists, Warner Mifflin, who was happy to report that their new convert was “friendly to this business.”1

    Thatcher soon had another opportunity to claim some antislavery bonafides when several state societies jointly adopted antislavery petitions to the Second Congress, which were submitted to the House on 8 December 1791 and referred, only to die in committee. Friend Warner Mifflin carried on the crusade single-handedly in an “Expostulation” submitted to the House on 26 November 1792. (In the House Journal it is referred to simply as a “Representation.”) Ames presented it and is the only member mentioned by name as having spoken in its favor. “Several other gentlemen spoke”—but Thatcher was evidently not among them. The House promptly tabled the petition and two days later took the unusual and unanimous step of returning “the paper purporting to be a memorial,” thus setting the stage for the infamous gag rule that would later distinguish the antislavery campaigns of the early nineteenth century.2

    In February 1793, Thatcher was one of only seven to vote in the House against the first Fugitive Slave Act. But Warner Mifflin was still smarting from his friend’s faithlessness during his private petition campaign, and from his plantation in Kent County, Delaware, he wrote to Thatcher that summer:

    I have by no means lost my good opinion of thee, I believe thou wishes well to the cause of righteousness, but yet where was thee when the sothern redicule rose in Congress, that neither thy mouth nor Vote appeared in Testamony against it—I think thou ought to have shew’d something diforent in some part of the business. . . . I did not find my mind free to have much conversation with any of the members last winter on this business tho I wanted more with thee—And shall be pleased with a line being what thou may think proper to communicate on any subject, I shall be pleased to hear from thee, and to have thy sentiments on my expostulation as well to hear how other members view’d it, I was at Philadelphia just after the members left the City and could not find the sentiment of one left behind not even at thy lodgings, I shall fully expect to hear from thee by first oppertunity, and hope to repay at more leisure.3

    Any response from Thatcher has not been found, but Friend Mifflin’s personal expostulation undoubtedly had some influence over his developing antislavery notions. Any lingering ambivalence had dissolved by New Year’s Eve 1794, when Rep. Samuel Dexter (Mass.) moved to amend a Naturalization Bill by requiring any alien applying for citizenship to declare that he renounced all possession of slaves. Thatcher immediately moved to add “and that he never will possess them.” In the event, Thatcher’s motion was never taken up and Dexter’s amendment was defeated by a unified south joined by northern Republicans. Historians ably argue that (predominantly northern) Federalists objected to slavery as inherently violent to slaves, corrupting to their owners, and consequently destabilizing for the state, and that “the Federalist moral-political antislavery argument blended seamlessly into partisanship.” As usual, Thatcher’s moral thrust was aimed beyond the partisan target. Dexter’s amendment made the case for the Federalist agenda quite adequately; Thatcher’s impulsive addendum accomplished a purely rhetorical goal.4

    On 30 January 1797 Thatcher spoke unavailingly on behalf of four blacks in North Carolina who petitioned Congress that they had been illegally re-enslaved under an ex post facto law of North Carolina and the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Thatcher would later disclose that the four black petitioners had lobbied him directly. On 30 November of that same year, Philadelphia Quakers petitioned against the evils of slavery generally and the similar re-enslavement of 134 black North Carolinians in particular. Thatcher again advocated for the petitioners, but even more gallantly because singlehandedly: his was the only voice known to have been raised against the select committee’s resolution that the Quaker petitioners “have leave to withdraw” their petition.5

    An even more potent opportunity presented itself just a few months later, when Thatcher moved to prevent the extension of slavery into the newly accessioned Mississippi Territory. At the time, “he was treated by many Representatives much as if he had oafishly violated the rules of a game everyone was supposed to know how to play.” Boston’s Rep. Harrison Gray Otis was one of those who played by the rules. He was not pro-slavery personally, but “his conscience was not greatly troubled by the existence of wrongs for which he did not feel responsible.” Even Otis’s hagiographic biographer (and descendant) Samuel Eliot Morison had to admit that, in this instance, Thatcher was “far in advance of his time.” One Boston editorialist—writing shortly after South Carolina’s formal demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter in 1861—praised Thatcher’s motion as the first attempt under the federal Constitution to prohibit slavery in the territories. Of Otis, by contrast, he wrote “at no period of his long and lucrative career was it ever thought necessary to restrain his ardor in behalf of any benevolent or philanthropic exercise.”6

    A controversial feature of the 1790 debate had been the Quakers’ right to petition on the subject at all—a right Thatcher was bound to defend on principle. But not until 1797 did he begin to take the lead in affixing the antislavery banner to the freedom of petitioning’s hallowed flagstaff. The strategy would become a lightning rod for southern efforts to suppress antislavery agitation in Congress a generation later.

    Thatcher’s lone-wolf defense of black Americans’ freedom of petition in early 1800 is best remembered for the gestures of gratitude it elicited within a population still on the threshold of finding its own voice. In June 1800, the wealthy free black Philadelphia businessman James Forten (1766-1842) addressed an open letter to Thatcher thanking him “for the philanthropic zeal with which you defend our cause when it was brought before a part of the general government.”

    While some, sir, consider us as much property as an house or ship, and would seem to insinuate, that it is as lawful to hew down the one as it is to dismantle the other—you, sir, more humane, consider us as a part of the human race; . . . Seven hundred thousand of the human race were concerned in our petition—their thanks, their gratitude to you they now express—their prayers for you will mount to heaven; . . . we derive some comfort from the thought that we are not quite destitute of friends—that there is one who will use all his endeavours to free the slave from captivity, at least render his state more sufferable, and preserve the Free Blacks in the full enjoyment of their rights.7