Abstract: This dissertation focuses on the immediate legacy of the rhetorical shift engendered by the discourse of the Rights of Man in the Federal-era United States. The guiding question asks how such discourse impacted abolitionist writings in terms of diverging concepts of republicanism and democracy. Through close literary analysis of speeches, news sources, broadsides and cartoons, I map the overlapping, often conflicting, concepts of race and class, freedom and enslavement in the Federal period, with particular focus on the extension of rights to the lower orders. I find that revolutionary ideals penetrated abolitionist tactics and rhetoric to shape the larger venue of political discourse in profound and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. Namely, as the increasingly militant revolutionary language of freedom lent new rhetorical authority to the abolitionist movement, such language also intersected with American reactions to the violence of Haitian Revolution to reify—even as that language of rights challenged—the inherent racialization of republican and democratic ideals. In my study of the Constitutional debates of 1788, I find that some Northern antislavery advocates adopted a humanizing language of race, in which 'black' substituted for 'slave,' as a way of countering the commodification of black identity that characterized Southern caste-based discourse. In my study of Olaudah Equiano's Narrative, I find that the emergence of the language of 'blackness' in fact enhanced the discourse of human rights, first for black Americans and, then, with paradoxical and counter-intuitive effects, for whites. Such language offered an essential means of inverting alterity to promote the idea of class equality and a fuller moral vision of a democratic republic. My examination of the debates between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republican societies over the ideology of the French Revolution, however, reveals a backlash against the excesses of the French and Haitian Revolutions, peaking in about 1794. In those debates, I find that counter-revolutionary rhetoric appropriated and recoded the language of blackness such that it became linked to the violence and bloodshed of democratic leveling with profound implications for the rhetorical path of antebellum abolition.