In the Early Republic, media had a function as well as conveyed particular messages. An antidote to secrecy, print—and the print exposé— played an important role in shaping public opinion in the Early Republic. At a time of diplomatic and domestic crisis, the exposé constituted a site of what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has called “rights, protest, and unmasking.”[3] Newspaper editors such as Bache saw the purpose of their medium as “diffus[ing] light within the sphere of its influence – dispel the shades of ignorance, and gloom of error, and thus tend to strengthen the fair fabric of freedom on its surest foundation, publicity and information.” Republican anti-treaty discourse often took the form of unmasking and protesting violations of the people’s rights. Outraged treaty opponents complained of a lack of transparency: they howled that Jay had left the United States “supine,” fearing that Britain deemed Americans too weak and ignorant to defend their rights. That the Senate debate over the treaty took place behind closed doors meant that the Washington Administration intended that the treaty’s contents—however suspicious—would be rammed down unsuspecting Americans’ throats. Moreover, the role of Washington’s popularity in getting the treaty signed raised concerns that the President was a monarch in disguise, and Americans were thus meant to labor under the Constitution “like slaves.”
Rhetorically, print discourse used metaphorical “slavery” either explicitly, or alluded to it through adjacent words like “despotism” and “tyranny.” Tyranny and despotism in Americans’ moral and political imagination killed republics everywhere, leading to “slavery”—and they long got the message that this was the fate that awaited all who failed to govern themselves. Before, during, and after the Revolution, the use of “slavery” as a metaphor had ties of association with chattel slavery. Colonists and then Americans complained about being “driven like negroes” whenever they felt “tyrannized,” which had prompted Samuel Johnson’s famous quip in Taxation No Tyranny (1775) about “[hearing] the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.” Far from trivial, mention of the word, even if slight, signaled a text’s emotional highpoint, even if seemingly absurd or hypocritical to modern ears. The enslaved, both in the Empire and in the new republic, stood outside of civil society. They were also unable to exercise political autonomy, were subject to arbitrary power, and thus enslaved individuals—and nations—were the opposite of independent.