republican (adj) — sense 1

[Editor David W. Blight said:] Until his death in April 1817 (ten months before Douglass’s birth), Bingham remained a remarkable mixture of at least three elements. He held to a devout Congregationalist faith and Puritan sensibility (believing in human depravity and the sovereignty of God, and dressing in old eighteenth century style, with cocked hat and silver-buckled shoes). He was a staunch Jeffersonian in a state where few existed (he never put any money in a bank, and seems to have embodied Jefferson’s egalitarian faith in the capacities of common folk). Finally, Bingham saw the early American republic as a new political beginning for humankind, and his more than one million schoolbooks sold across the land were designed to produce republican citizens. The Columbian Orator was an elocution manual as well as a reader for school children in the new republic.