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
