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 AntiSlavery 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
