A Brother in Arms:
Benjamin Tappan and the
Antislavery Democracy

Daniel Feller

In 1847 Benjamin Tappan, an Ohio politician and former United States senator, tried to persuade his younger brother Lewis Tappan to give up abolitionism and join the Democratic party. Fifteen years Lewis's senior, Benjamin had been his childhood companion and tutor, and the bond between them held even as their adult careers and convictions took divergent paths. Benjamin had become a lawyer, politician, scientist, and religious skeptic; Lewis an evangelical Christian merchant, philanthropist, and abolitionist. Yet despite what Benjamin called "our totally different modes of thinking," they remained not only loving brothers but best friends. For forty years they had discussed their differences with a candor born of deep affection. Now Benjamin took up a question that had long divided them—how best to eliminate the national scourge of slavery.1	1
"You will find," he warned, "if you live 40 years longer than I have, that there can be but two parties in this country, the 'Aristocratic' & the 'Democratic.'" All factions and divisions must merge into them in the end. "The history of all republicks ancient & modern proves very clearly to my mind the constant existence & antagonism of these two parties, one conservative the other progressive." His own party, the Democrats, were the true antislavery party, for "the Democratic principle is one of progressive improvement in the condition of the human race," while "slavery is conservative & opposed to progress." "You belong to the progressives," Benjamin Tappan told his brother, for "the natural equallity of man is a leading article in your creed. I belong to the same party but while we both belong to this great party of progress you labour mostly for the blacks, I for the whites."2	2
Tappan's linking of the Democratic party with equality, antislavery, and progress recalls the dictum of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in his monumental and still essential The Age of Jackson, that "the group which took the lead on the political stage in combating the slave power were the radical Democrats in the straight Jacksonian tradition." For Schlesinger, as for Benjamin Tappan, that seemed only natural, for the Jacksonian tradition rather than the Whig "supplied the most solid foundations for political antislavery." Schlesinger traced a direct line from Jacksonian Democracy to antislavery Republicanism: "whatever remained of the live Jacksonian tradition had in the main, by 1858, entered the Republican party."3	3
Over the years Schlesinger's formulation has received some rough handling. Critics have unearthed many straight Jacksonian traditions pointing in various directions. It is true that northern Democrats who later became Free-Soilers and Republicans (as did Benjamin Tappan) claimed to be the true heirs of Andrew Jackson and the faithful upholders of real Democratic principles—a claim that Schlesinger accepted. But Democrats who stuck with the national party, such as Lewis Cass and James Buchanan, made exactly the same claim. So too did fire-eating southern secessionists, and one or another historian has sustained them all. Many scholars not only qualify Schlesinger's dictum but reverse it, portraying Jacksonian Democracy as prosouthern and proslavery (or at least anti-antislavery) at its core from beginning to end.4	. . .