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
