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.
