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 twentytwo 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
