Читать книгу In the Balance of Power - Omar H. Ali - Страница 10

two

Abolitionism, the Liberty Party, and Free Soil

For whom shall we vote . . . is the question? All of our people who have the right to vote believe it both a right and a duty to exercise that right. We ought and must vote for the Liberty Ticket.

Colored American, 1840

Black leaders in the late 1830s and early 1840s were deeply divided over which tactics to pursue in abolishing slavery, political engagement being only one possible course of action. While some, such as Henry Highland Garnet, would pursue multiple paths—using moral suasion, building an antislavery party, and calling for armed insurrection—others remained firmly opposed to engaging in any political action. Addressing the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January 1842, Frederick Douglass asked, “Was it political action that removed your prejudices and raised in your mind a holy zeal for human rights?” Douglass would go on to make his case against entering the electoral arena in strict, almost puritanical terms: “The difficulty with the third party is that it disposes men to rely upon political and not moral action.”¹ However, fifteen years later, speaking as a third-party leader at a West Indian Emancipation Day commemoration, he would state: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand.”² Part of the demand he was now also making, and imploring others to make, was a political demand on the two major parties to abolish slavery.

✓ ✓ ✓

African Americans had participated in electoral politics from the earliest days of the Republic. Hundreds of free African Americans in the North had gained the right to vote following the American Revolution; African Americans also voted in North Carolina, in Tennessee when it entered the Union, and possibly in Maryland.³ Black voters in New York initially supported the Federalist Party on a local and statewide basis because some of the party’s leadership supported the gradual abolition of slavery. The rise in the free black population in the nation, however, did not translate into a rise in black voting, as state legislatures increasingly restricted black voting rights in the early nineteenth century.⁴

Perhaps less than ten thousand Northern African Americans voted in any given year in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the fact that African Americans held and exercised the right to vote in New York, Pennsylvania, and the New England states (with the exception of Connecticut) raised the possibility that black voters could, if well coordinated, influence the outcome of close elections in conjunction with white antislavery voters beginning in the 1830s. At the very least, they could press candidates to take a public stance on abolitionism. However, the development of Jacksonian democracy would undermine what black political influence existed in the North. Those who insisted on expanding the franchise for white men wanted to eliminate it for black men.⁵

In 1821, the New York State Assembly repealed its property requirement for white voters but left it in place for African Americans. In order to vote, African Americans would have to present evidence of owning at least $250 in real estate (the equivalent of $5,000 today), plus evidence of three continuous years’ residence in the state, while the residency requirement for white men was only one year. Over the next decade and a half, other states followed suit. Meanwhile, African Americans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin petitioned their state legislatures either for the franchise or for its protection where it existed. In the few states that did not legally exclude African American voters from voting—New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine—black voters met verbal abuse and physical harassment when they went to the polls.⁶

By the end of the 1830s, African Americans could vote only in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and, if they met a property requirement that white voters did not have to meet, New York. With the dissolution of the Federalists in the late 1810s, African Americans shifted their support to the National Republicans, before lending it, in Pennsylvania, New York, and Rhode Island, to the Whig Party in the late 1820s and 1830s. African Americans in Pennsylvania supported not only Whig candidates, but anti-Mason third-party candidates. The Democratic Party in Pennsylvania responded to the threat of black votes helping opponents win elections by limiting the franchise to white men. Black voters in New York largely voted for the Whig Party. In 1838, they would help elect reformer William H. Seward governor. Seward publicly supported the protection of black voting rights, stating, “I shall not deny [black voters] any right on account of the hue they wear, or of the land in which they or their ancestors were born.” By that time, however, the Democratic Party, which had pushed for an expansion of voting rights among white men, had successfully placed legal restrictions on African Americans in New York and elsewhere.⁷

A division among abolitionists in the 1830s over whether or not to engage in political (i.e., “impure”) action—petitioning for the abolition of slavery, asserting black voting rights, and, later, backing proabolitionist candidates—would lead to a rupture in the movement by the end of the decade. The issue of using the electoral arena, combined with a fight over black organizational independence, also contributed to a division among African Americans, manifested in the disruption of the national black conventions from 1836 to 1840. Philadelphia delegates to the national convention in 1835 formed a conservative pro-Garrisonian group known as the American Moral Reform Society, dedicated solely to moral suasion, while New York delegates rallied around the Colored American, whose editors strongly advocated electoral action as one of multiple paths towards abolishing slavery.⁸ Garrison continued to decry involvement in any type of electoral activity, emphatically stating, “No union with slaveholders,” and denounced the U.S. Constitution as “a covenant with the devil and agreement with hell.” African Americans, however, tended to be more practical in their organizing—a function of their less privileged position in society—and led petitioning drives to protect their right to vote.⁹

Among the most organized black petitioning efforts in the mid-1830s to assert black voting rights were those by African Americans in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. On March 11, 1837, the Colored American reported that petitions were being gathered and sent by African Americans in New York City to the state’s legislature demanding a constitutional change to “extend the right of voting to all male citizens in the state, on the same term, without distinction of color.” Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, African Americans gathered in convention under the leadership of Robert Purvis. Four years earlier, Purvis had been one of the few African Americans to sign the American Anti-Slavery Society’s “Declaration of Sentiments.” Along with James Forten, James McCrummell, and Stephen Smith, he led the black abolitionists in Pennsylvania. Purvis turned his attention to the fight over voting rights in the state, where black communities in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were embroiled in a dispute over a state constitutional proposal that would ban black men from voting. Purvis’s “Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania” demanded the full protection of black voting rights. The next year, however, the state constitution was re-written, stating that only “white freemen” would be eligible to vote. African Americans in Ohio, like those in Pennsylvania, would also convene to assert their voting rights, but similarly faced defeat as the tide against Northern free black voters grew stronger.¹⁰

At a time when black and white abolitionists were being attacked for their views while convening in their homes, at their churches, or on the streets, petitioning created new imperatives for petitioners and petition-signers alike. By calling on others to say that they supported the immediate abolition of slavery or asserting the right of African Americans to vote—an activity often done face to face, entailing that one reveal one’s “radical” views to neighbors, friends, and colleagues—petition-gatherers and signers risked being socially ostracized and even made financially destitute. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1838, one year after a massive petitioning drive targeting Congress was launched, the American Anti-Slavery Society reported 415,000 petitions forwarded to Washington, DC. Two years earlier, the House of Representatives had voted to have all antislavery petitions automatically tabled upon receipt. As petitioners pushed forward in their work, they were simultaneously helping to build a base of support and pressuring candidates and elected officials to speak either for or against immediate emancipation. It was in this context that black and white abolitionists entered the electoral arena, at first endorsing antislavery major party candidates for public office and later developing a third party.¹¹

Third parties had gained some minor success in local politics in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The Workingmen’s Party in New York, Pennsylvania, and parts of Vermont had pressed for labor legislation.¹² The party demanded higher wages for urban workers and an end to layoffs, which were a direct consequence of the introduction of new technologies into small-scale factories. They also called for a ten-hour working day and the abolition of debtor’s prison. African Americans in New York’s Fifth and Eighth wards, located on the lower west side of Manhattan, had been involved in those efforts as early as 1828. Over the next two years, the Workingmen’s Party of New York won several offices, including a state assembly seat.¹³ Black leaders in New York City would build on this electoral precedent against the Democratic Party. Between 1830 and 1840, African Americans helped to defeat the Democratic Party machine—Tammany Hall—in the city’s two wards with a large African American population (the Fifth and Eighth), where Democrats had led a concerted effort against the extension of black voting rights. Soon black leaders were organizing African Americans city-wide to vote tactically in relation to abolitionism.¹⁴

Thus, by the late 1830s, African Americans were not only petitioning legislatures for the abolition of slavery and the right to vote, but were now helping to interrogate candidates for publicly elected offices on slavery-related issues. When no candidate expressed antislavery views, abolitionists would protest by “scattering” their ballots among a series of write-in candidates. In 1838, the New York Anti-Slavery Society resolved to deny its members’ votes to those candidates who did not agree to support abolition, and in 1839, the American Anti-Slavery Society, following New York’s lead, began directing its members to vote only for those candidates who endorsed the immediate abolition of slavery.¹⁵ African Americans would soon help form a third party that could compete against the bipartisan establishment with its own slate of candidates, or throw the election to the more sympathetic of the two parties’ candidates locally.

✓ ✓ ✓

In the late 1830s, relatively few abolitionists supported the formation of an antislavery party to challenge the Democratic and Whig parties, and the African Americans in favor of such a party, such as Samuel Ringgold Ward and Henry Highland Garnet, were a minority within a minority. However, a new possibility presented itself for independent black political action. On April 1, 1840, abolitionists from across the Northeast and West came together in Albany, New York, to decide on a platform and select national candidates for the fall election for what would be the first antislavery party in the nation’s history, the Liberty Party. The party had been founded the year before by a group of white antislavery advocates from New York who, as Eric Foner writes, “recognized that the tactics of moral suasion and questioning candidates of the major parties had failed to produce tangible results.”¹⁶ Prominent white abolitionists Lewis Tappan and Gerrit Smith would soon lend their support to the third party, while African Americans like Garnett jumped on the opportunity of such an electoral vehicle to advance the abolitionist cause.¹⁷

Although the Liberty Party’s early leaders were largely ministers, not politicians, giving it a distinctly religious and crusading character, its formation was, as Charles Wesley notes, “an organized political effort to overthrow slavery.”¹⁸ It is not clear whether African Americans were at the founding convention; however, the party was clear in its goal, which was decidedly pro-black. It called for immediate abolition of slavery wherever constitutionally possible—that is, “within the limits of national jurisdiction”—and for the repeal of all racially discriminatory legislation. Delegates nominated James G. Birney, a Michigan attorney, as its presidential candidate and Thomas Earle, a journalist from Pennsylvania, as its vice-presidential candidate. Birney, who was originally from Kentucky, had freed all twenty-one of the slaves he had inherited from his father. Initially he supported gradual emancipation and emigration (specifically, colonization in Liberia), but changed his position as he met and became active in abolitionist circles in the North. His contact with the white antislavery orator Theodore D. Weld, who led an important series of student debates at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1834, had a profound influence on him. In 1837, Birney was elected secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, where he became known for his opposition to the use of violence in the abolitionist cause, placing his faith in the U.S. Constitution instead. The new party was readily supported by a group of African Americans in Albany who met in the city’s First Baptist Church. The convention, chaired by the church’s pastor Benjamin Paul, would be the first of a number of local, state, and national meetings in which African Americans would explicitly urge independent black political action.¹⁹

The Liberty Party’s formation would help revive the national black conventions, as many African Americans were intrigued, if not invigorated by, the possibility of third-party politics. The proabolitionist party offered a new alternative (or additional tactic) to the moral suasion of the Garrisonians, to emigration, and to taking up arms. African Americans would debate the pros and cons of independent political action: Was it not immoral to mix with politicians who were avowedly proslavery? If the goal was to abolish slavery and electoral politics was a possible path toward that end, should not independent political action be embraced? Who would bear the financial costs and physical dangers in campaigning in open forums for the third party? Moreover, even if every single eligible black voter in the North voted for the third party, what possible difference would it make since there were so few black voters? Were there enough white voters willing to support an antislavery party? Was it even desirable to work in the same party as white abolitionists, many of whom, after all, excluded black people from their own organizations? If offices could not be won, then what was the purpose of supporting any single party?

Most African Americans, despite the debating at conventions, remained neutral toward the Liberty Party; many, however, opposed it, not wanting to tie their allegiance to any single party, even if the party’s stated purpose was abolition. After all, in the North and West there were individual Whigs and Democrats who supported abolitionism. The moral suasionists had their reasons for opposition, and the desire to emigrate continued, as did calls for armed insurrection. But the balance-of-power voting strategy—that is, supporting individual candidates with antislavery sentiments to swing elections—slowly began to take hold among African Americans, even some Garrisonians. The premier black abolitionist of the 1840s and 1850s, Frederick Douglass, would remain firmly within the Garrison moral suasion camp for several more years before deciding to back the independent political strategy.

Douglass had fled from slavery in Maryland in 1838 and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He met Garrison at an abolitionist meeting and was quickly recruited as an antislavery lecturer, like a number of fugitives from the South. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, first published in 1845, became the most popular of all fugitive slave narratives in the nineteenth century. By the early 1840s, Douglass had become a popular speaker on the abolitionist lecturing circuit. While he vigorously opposed entering the electoral arena at this time, other leading lights in the black community actively pursued independent politics.²⁰

Among the handful of black abolitionists who quickly allied themselves with the Liberty Party was Samuel Ringgold Ward. Born in Maryland, Ward escaped to New Jersey with his slave parents in 1820. In 1826, they moved to New York, where the young Ward was educated by Quakers. He would complete his education and go on to teach in local black schools. He became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 while serving as a Congregationalist minister.²¹ According to Douglass’s later account, Ward had no peer when it came to “depth of thought, fluency in speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness, and general intelligence.” In his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, published in 1855, Ward recounts how in 1840 he “became for the first time a member of [the Liberty] party.” He goes on to say that “with it I cast my first vote; to it I devoted my political activity.”²²

Like Douglass and Ward, Henry Highland Garnet (whose grandfather was said to have been an African military leader who was captured and sold into slavery) was a fugitive from Maryland. As a child, he escaped to Pennsylvania with his family, and they moved to New York City in the mid-1820s. Garnet studied at the Oneida Theological Institute in upstate New York and joined the American Anti-Slavery Society after graduating. He participated in abolitionist meetings and began to develop a reputation as a fiery speaker. Upon the formation of the Liberty Party, he proudly declared himself “a Liberty Party man.”²³ He was not alone in his support for the third party: New York’s leading black newspaper would throw its support behind the Liberty Party as well. In 1840, the Colored American asked, “For whom shall we vote . . . is the question?” And then urged “the Liberty Ticket, with James G. Birney at the head.”²⁴

The Liberty Party challenged the proslavery Democratic and Whig parties in the national election of 1840. President Martin Van Buren, the Democratic nominee from New York, was seeking reelection. In the 1820s, he was responsible for helping to make the Democratic Party the first national modern party organization, featuring nationally delegated conventions to nominate candidates and a patronage system that enabled elected officials to appoint their supporters to administrative offices. In the run-up to the presidential election, Van Buren was heavily blamed for the nation’s economic depression (beginning with the Panic of 1837) by the Whig’s nominee William Henry Harrison, a former U.S. senator from Ohio. Harrison would go on to win the election with 52.9 percent of the total vote, 6.1 percent more than Van Buren received, and 234 of 294 electoral college votes. The Liberty Party’s Birney received 7,069 votes nationally (0.3 percent of the vote and no electoral college votes).²⁵ At least 2,798 of these votes came from New York State, where 50,031 African Americans lived, or 2.1 percent of the population of the state. In New York City, where 16,358 African Americans lived, or 5.2 percent of the population of the city, black voters in the Fifth and Eighth wards supported the third party against Tammany Hall.²⁶ While less than a single percent of the total national vote was cast for the Liberty Party’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates, it was enough to begin building an electoral base from which further campaigns could be launched.²⁷ Within six months, the party’s central nominating committee, which included black leaders Theodore S. Wright, who led the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, and Charles B. Ray, editor of the Colored American, met in New York, looking toward the next election.²⁸

Following the 1840 election, black abolitionists who had not supported the Liberty Party began to move toward it. Salmon P. Chase, esteemed in the black community for his defense of fugitive slaves, joined the party in 1841 and soon assumed a leading role.²⁹ Between 1840 and 1843, a number of statewide black conventions would meet at which candidates were individually endorsed to run on the Liberty ticket. Economic arguments were added to the moral and political arguments against slavery: Chase developed the concept of the “Slave Power,” the idea that slave owners were conspiring to seize control of the federal government and stop the progress of liberty. Meanwhile, fellow white abolitionist Joshua Leavitt, who had helped found the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, argued in a speech, “The Political Power of Slavery and the financial Power of Slavery,” that Northern commercial interests would perish if slaveholding interests were left unchecked. Leavitt’s address was carried in all the major black and white abolitionist newspapers of the day and widely distributed at state and national conventions, including at the 1841 national Liberty Party convention. Delegates at the convention backed Leavitt’s economic arguments and passed resolutions to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and any new territories, as well as to oppose the federal fugitive slave law and the “three-fifths” clause in the Constitution. The resolutions were supplemented by calls for the extension of black voting rights and greater African American participation in the electoral process. Black support for the third party grew decisively. The next year, delegates of the Colored State Convention met in Rochester, New York, where they passed their own resolution to support the Liberty Party; and in Massachusetts, Garnet delivered one of the major addresses at the Liberty Party’s statewide meeting. According to Benjamin Quarles, Garnet’s speech was enthusiastically received at Faneuil Hall in Boston, where the “mixed” audience, it was reported, “constantly interrupted him with laughter, applause, and encouraging cries of ‘hear, hear.’”³⁰

African Americans would begin actively campaigning for the third party in the fall of 1843.³¹ From August 15 to 19, the National Convention of Colored Citizens met in Buffalo, New York, where Garnet rallied support for the Liberty Party.³² Rev. Amos G. Beman served as president; Frederick Douglass, A. M. Summer, James Sharp, F. Pierce, and W. W. Mathews served as vice presidents; and Charles B. Ray, James Duffin, and A. Francis served as secretaries.³³ Garnet, along with Charles B. Ray, William C. Munroe, and Theodore S. Wright, led the debate against the moral suasionists. While Douglass and Massachusetts delegate Charles Lenox Remond opposed any alliance between the convention and the Liberty Party, they were outvoted by nearly fifty others who supported formal endorsement. The political abolitionists carried the convention. There were only seven dissenting votes against endorsing the Liberty Party, which was holding its national convention at the end of the month.³⁴

Black leaders had generated grassroots support among African Americans by the time delegates met for the Liberty Party’s national nominating convention in Buffalo on August 30, 1843. In addition to the national black convention held in New York City two weeks earlier, the Liberator reported that black New Yorkers met in Rochester, where they also passed a resolution in support of the Liberty Party.³⁵ Black and white delegates arrived from all of the free states, except New Hampshire, to attend the Liberty Party convention. Wesley describes the national meeting as “the most significant convention in the history of the Negro’s political life in the United States prior to the Civil War . . . the first time in American history that Negro citizens were actively in the leadership of a political convention.”³⁶

The national Liberty Party’s black delegates were led by Garnet, Ray, and Ward, who were either appointed to various party committees or given prominent roles in the convention. Garnet was appointed to the committee that would nominate officers and delivered the news of the national black convention’s support for the Liberty Party; Ray, who served as one of the convention’s secretaries, was appointed to the committee to make a roll of the convention; while Ward had opened up the convention with a prayer, which he followed with a formal address to the body.³⁷ Birney was again nominated as the party’s standard bearer, but this time Thomas Morris received the vice-presidential nod. Morris had built his credentials as an abolitionist sympathizer while serving as a Democrat in Ohio in both the House and the U.S. Senate from the 1810s through the mid-1830s. In addition to the nominations of Birney and Morris, two key resolutions—the 35th and the 36th—were passed at the convention. Designed to reach out to black voters, resolution 35 demanded an end to any form of discrimination based on race, that is, “to remove all . . . remnants and effects of the slave system.” Meanwhile, resolution 36 welcomed “colored fellow citizens” into the party in order to “secure the rights of mankind.”³⁸ Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen, a black abolitionist from Syracuse, began stumping for the Liberty Party following its national convention. In time, he was joined by other black leaders.³⁹

✓ ✓ ✓

Despite the Liberty Party’s organizing drive in the early 1840s, most African Americans continued to remain distant toward, if not skeptical about, electoral politics. After all, the vast majority of black people were legally blocked from voting. However, as Hanes Walton Jr. notes, many tried to be “in both camps, supporting both the moral suasionists and the political abolitionists.”⁴⁰ Some were disdainful of moral suasion being presented as the only valid tactic in the abolitionist struggle, and supported multiple means toward emancipation, including violence against slavemasters and their collaborators. For the three-and-a-half million slaves in the nation, there were few quick choices other than to run away or physically revolt if they wanted to be free, even as many attempted, over the period of years, sometimes decades, to buy their own or loved one’s freedom.⁴¹ The situation in the United States was in some ways analogous to that of slaves in other parts of the hemisphere. In New Grenada, 82 percent of recorded acts of black defiance against slavery during the colonial period of what would become the republic of Colombia involved runaways, either as individuals or in the formation of maroon settlements.⁴² Far fewer engaged in armed revolt, whether in South or North America, which tended to be suicidal given the kinds of controls slavemasters had over their slave populations. Heavily armed white militias regularly patrolled the rural South, and punishment was liberally applied to those even slightly suspected of planning a revolt. But revolting had other costs. It invariably meant having harm come to family members and friends for being connected to the instigator. The fear of such retaliation was a major deterrent to armed rebellion even among the most independent-minded and militant slaves.

Rarely did slavemasters manumit their slaves as moral suasionists urged; Liberty Party candidate Birney was a notable exception, having freed the twenty-one slaves he inherited. Even moral suasionist Douglass had exercised violence, challenging the slave-breaker Edward Covey in Maryland as part of his ordeal out of slavery.⁴³ The willingness to use violence as a legitimate, albeit dangerous, tactic against slavery reflected the real-life and death experiences of those who had been enslaved and expressed the growing frustration with and general failure of moral suasion. Taking up arms was a radical position for which the fugitive Henry Highland Garnet is perhaps best remembered. However, his more significant contribution to the abolitionist struggle was probably the leadership role he played in the development of the early third-party movement.

During the National Negro Convention of 1843, Garnet justified armed insurrection as part of the barrage of tactics being used to combat slavery. Because violence was fundamental to maintaining the slave system, he argued, using it to overthrow slavery was justifiable. The nation had been founded through force of arms: patriots fought for their independence while African Americans fought for their own. Violence to overthrow slavery had its own logic, appeal, and precedent, and Garnet would come within a single vote of winning the 1843 national black convention’s endorsement to use violence in the abolitionist cause. Garnet’s provocative convention speech, “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” would have a lasting impact. Six years later, it was reprinted in a pamphlet alongside David Walker’s Appeal, said to have been financed by a then-obscure farmer named John Brown, when arguments for the violent overthrow of slavery became more widely accepted in Northern abolitionist circles.⁴⁴ In his reprinted speech, Garnet’s words nearly stood off the paper: “Let your motto be resistance! resistance! RESISTANCE!” He invoked Nat Turner’s revolt and two recent slave mutinies that had brought international attention to the abolitionist cause in the United States: the first aboard La Amistad and the second aboard the U.S.S. Creole.⁴⁵

On the morning of June 28, 1839, fifty-three Africans who had been abducted from West Africa revolted under the leadership of the Mende Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué) aboard La Amistad, a schooner leaving Havana. Rising from underneath the decks, some with machete-like sugarcane knives in hand, the Africans attacked the crewmen, all but two of whom were killed or jumped overboard. The crewmen were ordered to steer the schooner toward the rising sun—that is, back to West Africa. Each night, however, the crewmen reversed the ship’s direction. Zigzagging off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, La Amistad eventually landed in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, where the black rebels were captured and charged with piracy and murder. Liberty Party cofounder Lewis Tappan promptly formed a defense committee and, with the help of John Quincy Adams, who was then leading the fight in Congress for the repeal of the gag rule, was able to take the case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. On March 9, 1841, the court ruled the West Africans free.

Eight months later, another slave mutiny captured the attention of abolitionists, adding fuel to the antislavery movement and even prompting support inside Congress. On the night of November 7, 1841, a group of 39 slaves revolted aboard the brig the U.S.S. Creole, which was transporting 135 enslaved black men, women, and children from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to be sold in New Orleans. Led by Madison Washington, described as “that bright star of freedom” by Garnet, the slaves seized the brig’s captain and crew.⁴⁶ Over the next several days, the black mutineers forced the Creole to sail into Nassau harbor in the Bahamas, where British authorities offered them their freedom. The actions of the British touched off a diplomatic dispute with the United States. Ohio Congressman Joshua Giddings, who had joined Adams in the fight to repeal the gag rule, introduced a series of resolutions in support of the mutineers. He asserted that Virginia law did not apply to slaves outside of the state’s waters; the U.S. government should therefore withdraw any further assistance to the vessel’s slave owners. The bipartisan-ruled House promptly censured Giddings for defending the mutineers. Giddings responded by resigning from office, but was soon reelected with abolitionist support. For their lost “property,” the Creole slave owners were later “reimbursed” over $100,000 (the equivalent of $2.4 million today) by the Anglo-American Claims Commission. The actions of the “nineteen [mutineers who] struck for liberty or death,” as Garnet put it, not only pushed Douglass to begin reconsidering his strict moral suasionist position, but propelled, among others, Giddings toward eventually breaking with the two major parties.⁴⁷

Garrisonians would continue condemning political activity as an implied endorsement of the legality of slavery, but their position was increasingly losing credibility among Northern abolitionists.⁴⁸ African Americans, in particular, linked their economic plight to their exclusion from the electoral process, adding to arguments for political participation. At one antislavery convention in New York, Samuel E. Cornish, a black newspaper editor who had led the state’s petitioning campaign for black suffrage several years earlier, asserted that disfranchisement was the principal cause of black New Yorkers’ impoverishment; the solution was greater political participation as voters, not less.⁴⁹ He spoke for most black New Yorkers when he said that if two candidates ran for the same State Assembly seat, with one favoring and the other opposing black suffrage, African Americans would most certainly support the prosuffrage candidate.⁵⁰ Garnet agreed, and went one step further, calling on African Americans not only to participate in electoral politics wherever they could, but to support the Liberty Party’s candidates who were both prosuffrage and antislavery.

During the fall of 1843 Garnet went on the New York State lecture circuit to build Liberty Party support among black and white abolitionists. His reputation as a Liberty Party man was added to his reputation as a powerful orator in the antislavery cause, and he was soon being invited out of state to inspire others to join the third-party movement. At the Liberty Party’s Massachusetts state convention in February of 1844, Garnet gave what one contemporary described as a “powerful speech, in defense of his colored countrymen in bondage.” He “predicted that if the hope which the Liberty Party held out for speedy and peaceful emancipation of the slaves in this country was taken away, a bloody revolution would inevitably follow.”⁵¹ Not all black leaders were convinced of the Liberty Party’s importance in the antislavery crusade, as a protest from a group of New York City delegates made plain. During the Annual Convention of Colored Citizens of the State of New York, held in Schenectady, September 18–20, 1844, downstate delegates tried to overturn the endorsement of the Liberty Party made by that body at its meeting in Rochester two years earlier. New York City delegates argued that having the national black convention ally with only one party limited their political choices and “denied the patriotic colored citizens of New York the right of thinking as they please.”⁵² The resolution was voted down and the endorsement stood.

New York City’s Theodore S. Wright, who had helped to lead the endorsement of the Liberty Party in opposition to the moral suasionists at the 1842 Rochester convention, delineated his support for the third party in 1844. Not able to attend the Schenectady convention, he sent a letter in which he warned that African Americans should be careful not to overidentify with the Liberty Party, or any other party, for that matter. As he put it, his “confidence [lay] in the principals upon which the Liberty Party is based,” not the party itself. Following the Schenectady convention, New York City delegates held a meeting, where they passed a resolution in opposition to fixing their allegiances with any one party. Such differences among the largely eviscerated Northern black electorate reflected wider tactical differences among abolitionists, and not just between those for or against entering electoral politics. A dividing line also existed between black and white leaders within the Liberty Party itself.

Black Liberty Party leaders supported the inclusion of all African Americans in shaping the party’s policies and determining its candidates. White leaders, on the other hand, tended to delimit black participation inside the party, allowing only African Americans who were legally permitted to vote by the state to vote on party matters. In this way, the word “citizens” in the Liberty Party’s Resolution 36, which read, “We cordially welcome our colored fellow citizens,” could be interpreted either broadly and inclusively to mean all African Americans (including fugitive slaves and those not eligible to vote by the state) or in the narrowest, most exclusionary sense of the word “citizens,” to mean only legal voters, thus restricting black participation. In Michigan, home to the Liberty Party’s presidential candidate, Birney, two African Americans were excluded from participating in the party’s state convention in 1844 because they were not legal voters.⁵³ But the question of black participation within the party was only one challenge black leaders faced in the organizing process. The election of 1844 would test the level of support generated by African Americans among the few remaining black voters in the nation. More critical still, numerically speaking, the election would test the extent to which black organizers, such as Henry Bibb, a fugitive slave originally from Kentucky who campaigned for the Liberty Party that year, along with their white counterparts, could generate white voters’ support for the third party.⁵⁴

✓ ✓ ✓

During the fall of 1844, 62,300 eligible voters cast their ballot for the Liberty Party—less than 3 percent of the national vote, but nearly ten times the number received four years earlier.⁵⁵ Birney, once again at the top of the Liberty ticket, challenged Democrat James K. Polk and Whig Henry Clay. Both major party candidates supported slavery, but Polk favored the annexation of Texas, and therefore the expansion of slave territory. Most African American voters supported Clay, who opposed annexation. He had been instrumental in brokering the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought Maine into the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state (maintaining an eleven-eleven balance of free and slave representation in the Senate) and, except for Missouri, forbade slavery north of 36°30'. Democrat Polk would win the election by a slim 1.4 percent of the popular vote, receiving 179 of the 275 electoral college votes.⁵⁶

Reaction to the results of the 1844 election varied. Many saw the number of votes cast for the Liberty Party as insignificant and therefore a sign of the party’s failure. Black Liberty voters in New York either abandoned electoral politics or decided they would support major party candidates in the next election who might advance black suffrage rights—a course of action for which New York City black convention delegates had previously argued. As Wesley writes, “Since [black] leaders knew that their vote was small and that the Liberty Party was not yet strong enough to be influential in the decision [to remove discriminatory black suffrage requirements], some of them were not desirous of fixing their allegiance to this one party. They suggested that they would support candidates in other parties pledged to remove the property limitations.”⁵⁷ Others, however, read the election results differently, seeing much significance in the near-tenfold increase in support for the third party. That growth in the base of support for the independent party, which presumably reflected only a fraction of the number of African Americans in the nation who would have voted for the party had they had the opportunity to do so, could be tapped to continue building the independent political movement.⁵⁸

The Liberty Party did play a role in determining the outcome of the 1844 election in at least one state: New York. That year, as the gag rule was finally lifted in Congress under massive abolitionist petitioning pressure, the New York Liberty Party swung the presidential election in the state—but toward the annexationist Polk. While most African Americans ended up voting for the Whig Clay—viewed as the less egregious of the two major party candidates—black independents joined their white counterparts in supporting the abolitionist Birney, knowing full well that his chances of winning were next to none. In the wake of the election, the term “spoiler” may have been used for the first time in relation to a third party (the word is used by supporters of a major party to describe independent candidates who have little or no chance of winning but are capable of “depriving” a major party victory by “taking away” votes, as if the votes belonged to the party to begin with).⁵⁹ The increase in Liberty Party support in 1844 reflected growing Northern antislavery opinion in the mid-1840s, fueled by public controversy over the gag rule, the annexation of Texas as a slaveholding state, and the fate of the new territories resulting from the Mexican-American War. In this context, political opposition to proslavery forces gained increasing respect in the North. Abolitionism was no longer a fringe movement led by religious zealots and fugitive slaves, but entered the mainstream of political discourse.⁶⁰

In the South, where African Americans had no political recourse, black men and women applied their own forms of pressure on the slave system. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama, African Americans asserted their autonomy when they could—destroying tools, coordinating work slowdowns, running away, setting fires, feigning illness, poisoning their masters, and taking up arms.⁶¹ It was also in this period that scientific racism began to develop “diagnoses” explaining black resistance to slavery. According to Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Louisiana physician and professor of medicine, African Americans who ran away from plantations suffered from “drapetomania,” while those who showed a lack of motivation for forced labor were infected by “dysaethesia aethiopica,” a condition whose symptoms were particular to the “Negro race.”⁶² “Rascality” may have more accurately described the actions of New York City’s election registrars and tax officials than African Americans, to whom the term was applied as a symptom of disease: While barely one thousand African Americans had voted in New York in the 1845 election, two thousand were nevertheless being taxed as voters by registrars and tax-collectors.⁶³

In the wake of the 1846 New York State constitutional convention, which declined to change the onerous property and residency requirements for black voters, Gerrit Smith, the leader of the Liberty Party, wrote an open letter to voters of the state. He maintained that the New York State Constitution, as it stood, was denying political representation to the upwards of fifty thousand African Americans living in the state. Local and national black conventions were held, at which delegates expressed their ongoing opposition to the voting requirements targeting African Americans. From October 6–9, 1847, delegates for the National Convention of Colored People and their Friends met in Troy, New York. They resolved to push for the “procurement of political rights” and against “any plan of emancipation involving a resort to bloodshed.” Another black convention held in Boston the following year voted similarly to pursue “moral and political action.” In the midst of these meetings, resistance to legal and institutional control over African Americans took personal forms.⁶⁴

✓ ✓ ✓

Embodying the larger fight for self-determination among those in the Northern free black community was Frederick Douglass’s struggle to develop his own voice and organizational base. From the time he met William Lloyd Garrison in 1841, Douglass assumed a moral suasionist position, opposing the mixing of abolitionism with the base politicking of electoral contests and parties. However, he had begun to reconsider his position as he entered one after another debate with his black peers, from Henry Highland Garnet to Theodore S. Wright (each active in antislavery societies advocating moral suasion and independent politics via the Liberty Party). Dialogue, along with further reading in law, political philosophy, and American government, increasingly led Douglass to view the U.S. Constitution as an antislavery document, not a “covenant with the devil,” as Garrison called it. Douglass would later say that “to refrain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery.”⁶⁵ His “new reading” of the Constitution—which had been articulated by both Maria Stewart and later argued by Gerrit Smith—would eventually bring Douglass into direct conflict with his former mentor.⁶⁶

In 1847, Douglass announced to Garrison his intention to start his own newspaper. Garrison was strongly opposed, stating that Douglass would not be able to maintain his lecturing schedule and run a paper (despite Garrison having done so himself for over a decade and a half). Douglass nevertheless organized the financial and logistical support to do so. On December 3, 1847, Douglass established the North Star in Rochester, New York, and it quickly became the most influential black newspaper of the day. Douglass not only denounced slavery in his editorial pages, but used the paper to advocate women’s political rights. In July of 1848, he traveled to Seneca Falls, New York, to attend the first in a series of annual women’s rights conventions. The convention had been organized by abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, prompted by Mott’s having been denied a seat several years earlier at an international antislavery meeting in London because she was female. With over 240 people in attendance (40 of whom were men), Douglass took the podium and helped to sway the convention to support a resolution calling for women’s suffrage, the most controversial of a number of women’s rights issues that were being discussed at the convention, including equal access to education, divorce rights, and equal rights to employment. The North Star’s masthead would exemplify Douglass’s radical view: “Right is of no Sex, Truth is of no Color.” Subscriptions to the paper were “two dollars per annum, always in advance.” Douglass, it seemed, was both visionary and practical.⁶⁷

The positive reception given to the North Star by African Americans brought Douglass into even closer contact with black communities in the North and gave him the space to develop his political voice.⁶⁸ Not surprisingly, Douglass’s relationship with Garrison was strained. Underlying the growing distance between the two was not only Douglass’s new perspective on the Constitution, but his growing political independence. The former fugitive from Maryland was becoming the most prominent black abolitionist in the nation, and increasingly convinced that moral suasion was insufficient as a tactic. Over the succeeding years he came to embrace the position that if the Constitution indeed mandated that the federal government abolish slavery, electoral political action aimed toward this end was not only necessary but an obligation.⁶⁹

Other changes were afoot in the antislavery movement as the persistence of its organizers was beginning to have an impact on federal legislators. Two and a half years after the gag rule on antislavery petitions in Congress was lifted, the Wilmot Proviso, outlawing slavery in territories acquired through the Mexican-American War, was attached to several bills in the House of Representatives. The proviso, which originated with Ohio Democratic Representative Jacob Brinkerhoff but was named after Pennsylvania Democratic Representative David Wilmot, who had better standing in Congress, passed the House in 1847 but was tabled in the Senate. The introduction of and debate surrounding the proviso may have contributed to the Liberty Party’s decline that year, as many saw the major parties beginning to absorb elements of the abolitionist movement’s demands. However, the proviso also raised questions among those committed to the total and immediate abolition of slavery. As it turns out, the bill received few votes in 1848, the same year in which the Liberty Party divided into several factions. One faction nominated John P. Hale, a former Democratic congressman from Dover, New Hampshire, for president, while two other groups formally split from the party and created the Industrial Congress and the Liberty League. The League affirmed Gerrit Smith’s leadership role among political abolitionists by making him the head of their organization. Smith was then nominated for president by the League under the newly formed National Liberty Party, whose platform remained focused on immediate abolition.⁷⁰ However, many within the old Liberty ranks were reconsidering the political benefits of an independent party centered on abolishing slavery and advancing civil and political rights for African Americans. Perhaps it was time to go broader now that the party had helped to make the restriction of slavery a national political issue.

Some political abolitionists began looking toward building coalitions with disaffected members of the major parties with whom common ground could be shared in a united front to restrict the expansion of slavery in the nation. During the 1840s, the Liberty Party’s platforms, largely written by Salmon P. Chase, articulated a unique antislavery appeal that included the idea that slavery was “degrading” and “dishonoring” workers (Chase also attacked slavery for impoverishing the South and denying workers the right to an education). A point of convergence would emerge in the late 1840s between those seeking to stop the encroachment of slavery in the western territories as part of the abolitionist struggle and those seeking the same for reasons that would not “degrade” the labor of free men with slave-labor competition. The issue of “free soil” would dominate independent politics over the next decade. It took initial organizational form during the summer of 1848, when disaffected elements of the two major parties, in combination with elements of the Liberty Party and previously nonpolitical abolitionists, gathered in upstate New York and founded the Free Soil Party.⁷¹

✓ ✓ ✓

A group within the Liberty Party led by Chase, Gamaliel Bailey, and Henry B. Stanton pushed for electoral coalition with Democrats and Whigs opposed to the westward expansion of slavery. In a series of intraparty fights, the procoalition forces outmaneuvered other factions within the Liberty Party and effectively merged the larger part of the party with antiextensionist Whigs and “Barnburner” Democrats (the antiextensionist wing of the New York State party, led by former president Martin Van Buren). Black and white delegates met in Buffalo, New York, on August 9, 1848, where they established the Free Soil Party and its principle of antiextension. They nominated Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, for vice president. The party’s platform stated that (1) slavery could not be permitted outside of the currently established states; (2) slavery should be excluded from the District of Columbia; and (3) fugitive slaves were entitled to trial by jury in whichever state they were caught. Although the new party dropped the Liberty Party’s support for the immediate abolition of slavery, for many it also offered the chance to expand antislavery influence in the electoral arena.⁷²

African Americans were divided over whether to support the Free Soil Party. Black delegates and other “colored gentlemen” attended the party’s first national convention, held in Buffalo. Among the delegates were Frederick Douglass, who received three roaring cheers when his presence was acknowledged from the podium, along with Liberty veterans Charles L. Remond, Henry Highland Garnet, and Samuel Ringgold Ward. While Douglass, Garnet, and Ward each addressed the convention, none received committee positions. African Americans interested in continuing to develop an independent electoral course in the abolitionist cause would debate in both the black press and at statewide conventions what to do in the 1848 election. The question was which party to support: the National Liberty Party or the Free Soil Party. The National Liberty Party, which was like the old Liberty Party only with a newer and larger network, advocated the immediate abolition of slavery, as well as the full protection of black civil and political rights. Meanwhile, the Free Soil Party did not advocate abolition but would place a limit on its extension.

While Douglass endorsed the National Liberty Party, Samuel Ringgold Ward saw important coalition-building possibilities in supporting the Free Soil Party. At the end of the Free Soil national convention, Ward handed Douglass his “Address to the Four Thousand Colored Voters of the State of New York,” in which Ward urged black voters to support the Free Soil ticket as part of a larger strategy for black political empowerment. Douglass’s response was as logical as it was unequivocal in his support for the National Liberty Party: “Vote against the extension of slavery, by voting against its existence.”⁷³ Six weeks later, Douglass, along with Henry Bibb (who had also attended the Free Soil Party convention) and several other African Americans, issued “An Address to the Colored People” in the North Star, urging black voters not to support the Free Soil Party, because it was not antislavery, only antiextension. The debate continued.

In September of 1848, a Colored Convention was held in Cleveland, Ohio, where Douglass persuaded delegates to vote down a resolution endorsing the Free Soil Party. But neither would delegates support Douglass’s recommendation for the National Liberty Party. Martin R. Delany, who proposed the Free Soil resolution, had helped Douglass launch the North Star the year before. In later years Delany became the leading proponent of a new strain in black politics: black nationalism. What ultimately did pass at the convention in Cleveland was a resolution favoring the principles of the Free Soil Party, but not the party itself (a move reminiscent of Theodore Wright’s endorsement four years earlier of the principles of the Liberty Party, but not the party). To some delegates, there was a “higher standard” of equal rights to which they adhered—in other words, the black convention remained unsure of which way to go. Instead of taking a firm position on which party to support in the 1848 election, the convention probably created more confusion among black voters looking for political direction that year. Over the next months, African Americans continued to debate the benefits of the Free Soil Party among themselves. As Wesley notes, multiple references to the party appeared in black newspapers, as did notices of its upcoming meetings.⁷⁴

The 1848 election proved confusing. While the “free” in the Free Soil Party’s slogan, “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” strongly appealed to African Americans, the freedom that the party advocated was meant mostly, if not exclusively, for white men. African Americans had to decide if they would be willing to support a party the majority of whose members were not pro-black, but pro-white, and some of whom were even anti-black. White workers in the North were alarmed by the idea of competition with free black labor, fearing that if slavery were abolished, it would result in a flood of emancipated slaves into the North. Pointing to the depressed conditions of Southern white workers, they concluded that black workers, being more desperate and therefore more willing to work for lower wages, would depress the wages of Northern white workers. On the other hand, they were also afraid that they would be unable to compete with slave labor if slavery were extended to the new territories. There was also the question of social status. Northern white workers abhorred the idea of working alongside slaves; it would “degrade” them, and not just financially.⁷⁵

Despite the lack of cohesion among black political abolitionists in 1848, the Free Soil Party attracted significantly more voters, both black and white, than the Liberty Party had in either 1840 or 1844. Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, famous for leading troops to victory in the Mexican-American War, won the presidential election with 47.3 percent of the vote (1,360,099 votes); the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, received 42.5 percent (1,220,544 votes); and the Free Soil candidate, Martin Van Buren, received 10.1 percent (291,283 votes).⁷⁶ The Liberty Party candidate, John P. Hale, withdrew from the race and threw his support behind Van Buren and the Free Soil Party. Support for the antiextentionist third party came from all of the free states, and even parts of the upper South (304 votes came from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina). The party won two Senate and fourteen House seats. Meanwhile, the National Liberty Party received only 2,830 votes, less than one one-hundredth of what the Free Soil party received. The Free Soil Party had established itself as a competitive political force.⁷⁷

African Americans voted in a variety of ways in 1848, depending on local circumstances. In some places, black voters determined the outcome of the election. According to Frederick Douglass, African Americans in Massachusetts generally voted for the Free Soil ticket, but they were a small minority of the vote; however, in New Bedford up to seven hundred African Americans supported the party and held the balance of power. By contrast, black voters in neighboring Rhode Island largely lent their support to the Whig Party (also called the “Law and Order Party” in the state). The Rhode Island Whigs had recently helped to defeat a “Free Suffrage” Democratic Party initiative in the state to restrict the franchise to white men. In the run-up to the election, the Whigs implored black voters to “stand by the men . . . who have stood by you; support the party which supported you.”⁷⁸ In December of 1848, one month after the election, Douglass implored black voters in Rhode Island to “lead the Free Soilers” by supporting that party’s candidates in future elections.

Black political action in Massachusetts and Rhode Island complemented the various black petitioning efforts seeking state constitutional revisions of suffrage requirements. African Americans in Columbus and Oberlin, Ohio, who convened in early 1848 saw the fruits of their petitioning labors the following year when the state’s legislature repealed laws that restricted voting based on race.⁷⁹ Other meetings were held to continue the campaign for black civil and political rights. African Americans under the leadership of Rev. Amos G. Beman and S. M. Africanus met in New Haven, Connecticut, in September of 1849.⁸⁰ The next year, however, federal action by the two major parties led to a dramatic turn in events. As part of balancing their national political power, the Democrats and Whigs came to yet another compromise over the protection and extension of slavery. Like previous bipartisan compromises, the Compromise of 1850 came at the expense of African Americans. This time, however, the compromise drew fire not only from African Americans, but from Northern and Western white independents who were opposed to the extension of slavery.⁸¹

✓ ✓ ✓

The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state and abolished the slave trade in Washington, DC. However, it did not abolish slavery in the nation’s capital or in the territories gained in the Mexican-American War. Equally problematic was a powerful new fugitive slave law attached to the compromise. A fugitive slave law had been enacted by Congress in 1793, but much of its power had since diminished. “Personal liberty” laws passed in Northern states during the subsequent generation, combined with the 1842 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, in which it was decided that state authorities could not be forced to act in fugitive slave cases, had given some measure of legal protection to fugitives in the North. The new law, however, radically changed things by making all citizens complicit in the retrieval of fugitive slaves, under penalty of law. It prohibited anyone suspected of being a runaway from either having a jury trial or testifying on his or her own behalf. Now not only were U.S. marshals mandated to recapture alleged runaways (that is, any black person suspected as such, and with no more than a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership), they could deputize anyone to help them in the process. Anyone who interfered in that process was subject to six months’ imprisonment and a thousand-dollar fine (the equivalent of twenty-two thousand dollars today). To add to the egregiousness of the law, a financial incentive was even offered to special commissioners who adjudicated in runaway slave cases. They would be paid ten dollars, instead of five, when their ruling was in favor of claimants seeking runaways.⁸²

With the possibility of any black person being called a runaway and enslaved (or reenslaved), thousands of African Americans fled to Canada. S. M. Africanus, who had been politically organizing African Americans in Connecticut, wrote a stinging rebuke to the new law. In “The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” Africanus justified noncompliance with the law since it violated “the spirit and the letter of the Constitution”; he declared it “of no binding force.”⁸³ By 1850, there were 434,495 free African Americans in the nation (more than half of whom were living in the South). Now each of them was subject to being enslaved, with federal backing. In an era of unprecedented population growth in New York, the city’s black population decreased in the wake of the law. The possibilities of being arrested in the North and placed into slavery were very real. In April of 1851, despite the efforts of the Boston Committee of Vigilance to stop U.S. marshals, Thomas Sims, a fugitive from Georgia, was forcibly returned to Savannah, where he was publicly whipped on arrival. In some cases, militant abolitionists succeeded in stopping federal officials from seizing and taking African Americans south. In October of 1851, William “Jerry” Henry, a fugitive slave working in Syracuse, New York, was rescued by a group of black and white abolitionists who broke down a door with a battering ram to free him after his arrest. It was the Liberty Party’s Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen who helped to coordinate Henry’s escape to Canada before having to flee the authorities himself.⁸⁴

African Americans mobilized meetings and planning sessions in response to the Fugitive Slave Law. On August 21, 1850, over two thousand African Americans and white abolitionists, including at least thirty fugitive slaves, met in Cazenovia, New York, in what they called the Fugitive Slave Convention. Gerrit Smith led the deliberations. Different proposals were put forth, with members of the American Anti-Slavery Society advocating support for the Liberty Party as a way of politically engaging the law. The convention agreed that the major parties were dangerously linked, fortifying slavery by extending its domain. Other meetings followed, at which discussion centered on what to do using electoral pressure. One of these meetings saw the final break between Douglass, who had now embraced independent politics, and Garrison, who remained adamant about using only moral suasion to abolish slavery.

In the spring of 1851, the American Anti-Slavery Society held its eighteenth annual meeting in Syracuse, New York. Rev. Samuel J. May, a local minister, submitted a resolution recommending that a number of antislavery newspapers, including the North Star and the pro-Liberty Party Bugle, be recognized as official organs of the body. Garrison vehemently opposed this proposal, while Douglass responded that they, in fact, had the “duty of political action.” Garrison quietly but sternly replied: “There is roguery somewhere.” Garrison quietly but sternly replied: “There is roguery somewhere.”⁸⁵ The meeting proved the definitive break between the two men. Within a month Douglass and Liberty Party leader Gerrit Smith merged the North Star and the Liberty Party Paper. Smith had long been committed to independent political action. As he put it, “The country is divided into two great parties, and ninety out of every hundred voters are under the control of the wire-pullers of said parties . . . few are prepared to act independently.”⁸⁶ The newly merged paper became known as Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Douglass, however, was only tactically committed to the Liberty Party in New York State, given its relative strength there.

Beginning in the summer of 1851, Douglass straddled both the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party, mixing in both circles as he saw strengths in each—the former taking a militant antislavery stance, the latter offering broader appeal to Northern white voters. Douglass, now the most prominent black political abolitionist, would use his influence to bring African Americans into third-party politics to exert both “moral and political power” against the slave system.⁸⁷ African Americans remained divided over which party to support, if either, in the coming election. Organizers of the Free Soil Party attempted to gain black support. On February 11, 1852, delegates at the Free Soil Party convention in Columbus, Ohio, passed a resolution in support of extending black voting rights. However, Free Soilers would need to take further action to bring apprehensive black voters into their ranks. Douglass proved key in the matter. On August 11, the Free Soil Party held its nominating convention in Pittsburgh, where Douglass was elected secretary by acclamation. Despite being elected to such a visible leadership position, he insisted that he had not come to the convention “as much of a Free Soiler as others,” having published in his newspaper several months earlier an editorial headlined “Stand by the Liberty Party.” A month after the Free Soil convention, Douglass attended the nominating convention of the Liberty Party (or “Free Democratic Party”) in Buffalo, New York. As Charles Wesley notes, “Douglass seemed to be moving in both party ranks. Since the Liberty Party was strong in New York State, he continued in its ranks, while following the Free Soil Party on a national basis.”⁸⁸ African Americans following Douglass’s lead may also have seen the Liberty and Free Soil parties as complementary political vehicles. Black voters in Boston, for instance, cheered both parties’ candidates, John P. Hale of the Free Soil Party and Gerrit Smith of the Liberty Party.

In the fall of 1852, Douglass campaigned for the Liberty Party in New York State and for the Free Soil Party in other parts of the Northeast and in the West. The election that year affirmed Douglass’s decision to support the Free Soil Party nationally as part of building bridges with the wider independent political movement. While the Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce, received 1,607,510 votes (50.8 percent of the vote) and the Whigs’ Winfield Scott received 1,386,580 (43.9 percent), the Liberty Party received only 72. The Free Soil Party, on the other hand, received 156,667 votes (4.9 percent). However, that number was only half of what the party had received four years earlier.⁸⁹ Several third-party leaders openly expressed their frustration and disappointment with the election results.

✓ ✓ ✓

After the 1852 election, Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen and Henry Highland Garnet decided to leave third-party politics, no longer confident in its longterm potential. At the Colored National Convention in Rochester, July 6–8, 1853, Loguen made his position clear. Having organized black support for the Liberty Party for over a decade, and having been part of the recent fights over the Fugitive Slave Law, he urged African Americans to “strike the blow for themselves, and not wait for the hairsplitting of politicians and speakers.” Reminding delegates of his own history, the Reverend continued, “I made an abolitionist of my master by whipping him.”⁹⁰ Meanwhile, Garnet, the most prominent black leader of the Liberty Party in its earliest years, had gone to Jamaica to pursue missionary work and develop black emigration schemes to Mexico, Liberia, and other parts of the Caribbean. Another Liberty Party veteran, Charles Remond, while still committed to developing the third-party strategy, was highly critical of the Free Soil Party for framing slavery as a sectional and not a national problem. Douglass, newer to politics, was more open to building coalitions with white independents. He rededicated himself to the third-party political course with the energies he had given to his work as an abolitionist speaker. Some began to view him as a possible candidate for public office: from June through August of 1854, Douglass, who the New York Tribune suggested would run for Congress, faced a barrage of criticism in the press. For his political activism he was called everything from a “fanatic” to a “nigger statesmen of the North.”⁹¹

Responses to the power of the two major parties and to the racism they represented took other forms. Martin R. Delany, who had helped Douglass establish and edit the North Star and who was among the first African Americans to support the Free Soil Party, reflected the growing political alienation of many African Americans. His personal experience with discrimination while trying to pursue his medical studies affected him deeply. Only weeks after entering Harvard Medical School in 1850 (already having practiced basic medicine and armed with letters of support from seventeen physicians), he was dismissed when white students protested his presence. That experience, combined with the Fugitive Slave Law and other injustices he had seen around him, made Delany deeply cynical about the hope of African Americans attaining any kind of justice in a white-dominated nation. In August of 1854, he led a four-day National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, which had 145 participants, including 29 women. Delany delivered a manifesto at the convention, entitled “Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,” in which he declared that “we demand every political right, privilege, and position to which the whites are eligible in the United States, and we will either attain to these, or accept nothing.”⁹² The convention and the manifesto would form the foundation of black nationalism, whose most recognized proponent in the next century was the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey.

The person who came to epitomize the plight of African Americans in the United States was a fugitive named Anthony Burns. Burns became the symbol of the injustice and breach of civil liberties that was the Fugitive Slave Law. In May of 1854, he was captured in Boston by “slave-catchers” and ordered back to Virginia by Judge Edward G. Loring, who had just ordered another fugitive, Thomas Sims, back into slavery a month earlier. News traveled quickly, and soon hundreds of abolitionists poured onto the streets of Boston in support of Burns. One group attempted to free the captive by storming the city’s courthouse, where he was being held. Several abolitionists were injured, and a U.S. marshal was killed. President Franklin Pierce grew so alarmed by the situation that he decided to call in the U.S. Marines. Abolitionists were unable to stop Burns, unlike Jerry Henry, from being taken back into slavery. Through donations raised at a black church, African Americans gathered the thirteen-hundred-dollar ransom that was being demanded by a cotton planter and horse dealer from North Carolina who had purchased Burns from his previous owner, and within a year Burns was back in Massachusetts. But the fear of federal policies continued.⁹³

The year 1854 also saw a major change in federal policy regarding the nation’s western territories. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and opened new lands for settlement. Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas designed the act, eager to see a railroad line built from Chicago to destinations as far as California. The Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by establishing that settlers of the new territories could decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery. Abolitionists vehemently attacked “popular sovereignty” as applied to territories that had already been federally protected from the encroachment of slavery. They saw the Act as yet another compromise between the major parties, another concession to Southern slaveholding interests. Antislavery organizations, such as the New England Emigrant Aid Company, organized thousands of abolitionists to settle in the new territories; opposing them, thousands of proslavery “border ruffians,” primarily from Missouri, poured into the territories. Over the next three years, bloody battles were fought between pro- and antislavery forces. It was here that John Brown, representing the most radical wing of abolitionism—armed insurrection—first participated in guerilla warfare. Five years earlier, Brown had reprinted and distributed copies of David Walker’s Appeal and Henry Highland Garnet’s speech justifying violence to abolish slavery. Unlike Garrison, Brown was not opposed to politics; he merely considered it ineffectual. Meanwhile, Douglass remained adamant, unwilling to concede the electoral arena to the two major parties and their slaveholding interests.⁹⁴

On June 26, 1855, black and white delegates met in Syracuse, New York, for a three-day Convention of Radical Political Abolitionists. Douglass played a prominent role at the convention, along with Rev. Jermain Loguen, Gerrit Smith, and Lewis Tappan. Debate took place over whether the planks of immediatism and black civil and political rights should be sacrificed for it to be possible to work with other third-party forces. Most opposed any compromise with political forces who were not immediatists themselves, ironically displaying a kind of dogmatism characteristic of the moral suasionists, who had opposed electoral politics altogether. Over the next year, Douglass continued to carve out his place as an independent political leader, attacking the policies of the two major parties and stumping on behalf of the Liberty Party. In recognition of his stature and efforts, Douglass was nominated at the Liberty Party’s convention in Ithaca on September 12, 1855, to run for secretary of state of New York. It was the first time an African American had been nominated to such a high office. The following year, elements of the Convention of Radical Political Abolitionists formed a new third party, which they called the Political Abolition Party. The party nominated Smith for president and initially nominated Douglass for the vice-presidential slot, but ultimately decided on Samuel McFarland, a virtually unknown white abolitionist from Pennsylvania.

The nominations and meetings of the radical political abolitionists in upstate New York took place alongside meetings in the Midwest in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, out of which yet another third party was formed. Outraged by the continued concessions being made to proslavery forces by the major parties, antislavery Whigs and Democrats bolted from their parties and, together with elements of the Know Nothing Party, Free Soilers, and the old Liberty Party, formed the Republican Party on March 20, 1854, in Rippon, Wisconsin Territory.⁹⁵ The Know Nothing Party (whose members were instructed to say “I know nothing” when asked about their activities) had been formed as the Native American Party in the mid-1840s in reaction to the high number of Irish immigrants arriving in New York. From August to October of 1854, Douglass, who was active in both Liberty and Free Soil circles, carried announcements in his newspaper of upcoming meetings of the Republican Party. In four years, the coming together of the political abolitionists and the anti-extensionists in the form of the Republicans would create the most powerful threat yet to the two major parties.

✓ ✓ ✓

Reflecting back on how he saw the development of the independent political movement prior to the formation of the Republican Party, Frederick Douglass wrote:

In 1848 it was my privilege to attend, and in some measure to participate in the famous Free-Soil Convention held in Buffalo, New York. It was a vast and variegated assemblage, composed of persons from all sections of the North, and may be said to have formed a new departure in the history of forces organized to resist the growing and aggressive demands of slavery and the slave power. Until this Buffalo convention anti-slavery agencies had been mainly directed to the work of changing public sentiment by exposing through the press and on the platform the nature of the slave system. Anti-slavery thus far had only been sheet lightning; the Buffalo convention sought to make it a thunderbolt. It is true the Liberty party, a political organization, had been in existence since 1840, when it cast seven thousand votes for James G. Birney, a former slaveholder, but who in obedience to an enlightened conscience, had nobly emancipated his slaves, and was now devoting his time and talents to the overthrow of slavery. It is true that this little party of brave men had increased their numbers at one time to sixty thousand voters. It, however, had now apparently reached its culminating point, and was no longer able to attract to itself and combine all the available elements at the North, capable of being marshaled against the growing and aggressive measures and aims of the slave power. There were many in the old Whig party known as Conscience-Whigs, and in the Democratic party known as Barnburners and Free Democrats, who were anti-slavery in sentiment and utterly opposed to the extension of the slave system to territory hitherto uncursed by its presence, but who nevertheless were not willing to join the Liberty party. It was held to be deficient in numbers and wanting in prestige. Its fate was the fate of all pioneers. The work it had been required to perform had exposed it to assaults from all sides, and it wore on its front the ugly marks of conflict. It was unpopular for its very fidelity to the cause of liberty and justice. No wonder that some of its members, such as Gerrit Smith, William Goodell, Beriah Green, and Julius Lemoyne refused to quit the old for the new. They felt that the Free-Soil party was a step backward, a lowering of the standard, that the people should come to them, not they to the people. . . . Events, however, overruled this reasoning. The conviction became general that the time had come for a new organization, which should embrace all who were in any manner opposed to slavery and the slave power, and this Buffalo Free-Soil convention was the result of that conviction. It is easy to say that this or that measure would have been wiser and better than the one adopted. But any measure is vindicated by its necessity and its results. It was impossible for the mountain to go to Mahomet, or for the Free-Soil element to go to the old Liberty party, so the latter went to the former.⁹⁶

In coming months and years, rank-and-file black abolitionists would take the lead in making the antiextentionist Republican Party a “Negro party.” They did so by helping to organize rallies for it, cheering on its candidates, and voting for Republicans wherever they could. Douglass, still committed to political abolition yet aware of its limitations, would eventually follow their lead.