The congressional Gag Rules of the 1830s and 1840s, which limited debate on slavery, were called "Jacobin" because they stifled democratic dissent.

As Cleves notes, anti-Jacobin language also "suffused humanitarian discourse for decades." It became a tool of abolitionists. As early as 1796, French violence was being connected to slaveholder violence. In 1815, abolitionist Jarvis Brewster wrote that slavery was "a system of tyranny and persecution more horrible perhaps" than Robespierre's Terror. Abolitionists attacked by a mob in Boston in 1835 said that the "Jacobins of the present day" were the rich whose power was built on the trade in humans. Free-born Black abolitionist William Cooper Nell likened the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) and the Dred Scott decision (1857) to the Reign of Terror.

Of all Cleves's examples, the Irish-born Antiguan plantation owner-turned-Philadelphia abolitionist Thomas Branagan may represent this multiplicity best. Rejecting slavery after a religious conversion in the 1790s, he combined his opposition to revolutionary violence in France with his fierce antislavery views. It was a reactionary stance transformed into humanitarianism.