Editing Federalist Party (section)

===Slavery===
While some Federalists advocated strategic support for the [[Haitian Revolution]], the Federalist press strongly condemned [[Gabriel's Rebellion]] during the acrimonious presidential campaign of 1800 and claimed that "Jefferson would liberate all Negroes if elected."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Egerton |first1=Douglas R. |title=Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 |date=1993 |publisher=University of North Carolina |location=Chapel Hill |page=38 |url=https://archive.org/details/gabrielsrebellio0000eger/page/38/mode/2up}}</ref> Prominent southern Federalists, including [[John Marshall]], [[Thomas Pinckney]], [[Charles Cotesworth Pinckney]], and [[Edward Rutledge]], were slaveholders. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney successfully defended slavery at the [[Constitutional Convention (United States)|Constitutional Convention]] and led the Federalist Party in the elections of 1804 and 1808. New York prior to 1799 and New Jersey prior to 1804 were slave states as well, and several leading northern Federalists from these states owned slaves, including [[John Jay]] and [[Philip Schuyler]]. Federalists supported the [[Fugitive Slave Act of 1793]]'s nearly unanimous passage through Congress, and the Federalist-aligned administration of George Washington signed the bill into law.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Finkelman |first1=Paul |title=The Kidnapping of John Davis and the Adoption of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 |journal=The Journal of Southern History |date=August 1990 |volume=56 |issue=3 |pages=417–19 |doi=10.2307/2210284 |jstor=2210284 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2210284}}</ref>

After 1800, as their political base contracted to New England, Federalists were increasingly opposed to slavery, both on principle and because the [[Three-fifths Compromise]] gave a political advantage to their opponents, who gained increased representation because of the weight given to disenfranchised enslaved people. [[Rufus King]] was a prominent opponent of slavery and became the final Federalist presidential candidate in 1816.<ref>A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas p. 35</ref>

Recent scholarship has laid increasing emphasis on later Federalist opposition to slavery<ref>Finkelman, Paul, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Federalism (1998). FEDERALISTS RECONSIDERED, Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg, eds., pp. 135-156, University Press of Virginia, 1998, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1533514</ref> 
Day<ref>Day, John Kyle. "The Federalist Press and Slavery in the Age of Jefferson". The Historian, vol. 65, no. 6, 2003, pp. 1303–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24452617. Accessed 1 January 2023</ref> states

:The Federalist Party is currently undergoing a renaissance among historians of the early Republic. This development is based largely on their occasional criticism of slavery. As the Democratic Republicans' stock has fallen in response to rising concerns over their leader Thomas Jefferson's racial views and deep entanglement with slavery, the Federalists who denounced Jefferson, the Republicans, and democracy itself have begun to look much better in comparison. While it has long been known that certain Federalist leaders—notably Alexander Hamilton and John Jay—opposed slavery and that attacks on slaveholding Virginia nabobs were part of the Federalist rhetorical arsenal after 1800, recent historians have found new significance in these facts.

However, Day argues that concerns about the political weight of the slaveholding states were more significant than moral opposition to slavery.