the Fugitive Slave Law. In May of 1854, he was captured in Boston by “slave-catchers” and ordered back to Virginia by Judge Edward G. Loring, who had just ordered another fugitive, Thomas Sims, back into slavery a month earlier. News traveled quickly, and soon hundreds of abolitionists poured onto the streets of Boston in support of Burns. One group attempted to free the captive by storming the city’s courthouse, where he was being held. Several abolitionists were injured, and a U.S. marshal was killed. President Franklin Pierce grew so alarmed by the situation that he decided to call in the U.S. Marines. Abolitionists were unable to stop Burns, unlike Jerry Henry, from being taken back into slavery. Through donations raised at a black church, African Americans gathered the thirteen-hundred-dollar ransom that was being demanded by a cotton planter and horse dealer from North Carolina who had purchased Burns from his previous owner, and within a year Burns was back in Massachusetts. But the fear of federal policies continued.93
The year 1854 also saw a major change in federal policy regarding the nation’s western territories. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and opened new lands for settlement. Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas designed the act, eager to see a railroad line built from Chicago to destinations as far as California. The Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by establishing that settlers of the new territories could decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery. Abolitionists vehemently attacked “popular sovereignty” as applied to territories that had already been federally protected from the encroachment of slavery. They saw the Act as yet another compromise between the major parties, another concession to Southern slaveholding interests. Antislavery organizations, such as the New England Emigrant Aid Company, organized thousands of abolitionists to settle in the new territories; opposing them, thousands of proslavery “border ruffians,” primarily from Missouri, poured into the territories. Over the next three years, bloody battles were fought between pro- and antislavery forces. It was here that John Brown, representing the most radical wing of abolitionism—armed insurrection—first participated in guerilla warfare. Five years earlier, Brown had reprinted and distributed copies of David Walker’s Appeal and Henry Highland Garnet’s speech justifying violence to abolish slavery. Unlike Garrison, Brown was not opposed to politics; he merely considered it ineffectual. Meanwhile, Douglass remained adamant, unwilling to concede the electoral arena to the two major parties and their slaveholding interests.94
On June 26, 1855, black and white delegates met in Syracuse, New York, for a three-day Convention of Radical Political Abolitionists. Douglass played a prominent role at the convention, along with Rev. Jermain Loguen, Gerrit Smith, and Lewis Tappan. Debate took place over whether the planks of immediatism and black civil and political rights should be sacrificed for it to be possible to work with other third-party forces. Most opposed any compromise with political forces who were not immediatists themselves, ironically displaying a kind of dogmatism characteristic of the moral suasionists, who had opposed electoral politics altogether. Over the next year, Douglass continued to carve out his place as an independent political leader, attacking the policies of the two major parties and stumping on behalf of the Liberty Party. In recognition of his stature and efforts, Douglass was nominated at the Liberty Party’s convention in Ithaca on September 12, 1855, to run for secretary of state of New York. It was the first time an African American had been nominated to such a high office. The following year, elements of the Convention of Radical Political Abolitionists formed a new third party, which they called the Political Abolition Party. The party nominated Smith for president and initially nominated Douglass for the vice-presidential slot, but ultimately decided on Samuel McFarland, a virtually unknown white abolitionist from Pennsylvania.
The nominations and meetings of the radical political abolitionists in upstate New York took place alongside meetings in the Midwest in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, out of which yet another third party was formed. Outraged by the continued concessions being made to proslavery forces by the major parties, antislavery Whigs and Democrats bolted from their parties and, together with elements of the Know Nothing Party, Free Soilers, and the old Liberty Party, formed the Republican Party on March 20, 1854, in Rippon, Wisconsin Territory.95 The Know Nothing Party (whose members were instructed to say “I know nothing” when asked about their activities) had been formed as the Native American Party in the mid-1840s in reaction to the high number of Irish immigrants arriving in New York. From August to October of 1854, Douglass, who was active in both Liberty and Free Soil circles, carried announcements in his newspaper of upcoming meetings of the Republican Party. In four years, the coming together of the political abolitionists and the anti-extensionists in the form of the Republicans would create the most powerful threat yet to the two major parties.
Reflecting back on how he saw the development of the independent political movement prior to the formation of the Republican Party, Frederick Douglass wrote:
In 1848 it was my privilege to attend, and in some measure to participate in the famous Free-Soil Convention held in Buffalo, New York. It was a vast and variegated assemblage, composed of persons from all sections of the North, and may be said to have formed a new departure in the history of forces organized to resist the growing and aggressive demands of slavery and the slave power. Until this Buffalo convention anti-slavery agencies had been mainly directed to the work of changing public sentiment by exposing through the press and on the platform the nature of the slave system. Anti-slavery thus far had only been sheet lightning; the Buffalo convention sought to make it a thunderbolt. It is true the Liberty party, a political organization, had been in existence since 1840, when it cast seven thousand votes for James G. Birney, a former slaveholder, but who in obedience to an enlightened conscience, had nobly emancipated his slaves, and was now devoting his time and talents to the overthrow of slavery. It is true that this little party of brave men had increased their numbers at one time to sixty thousand voters. It, however, had now apparently reached its culminating point, and was no longer able to attract to itself and combine all the available elements at the North, capable of being marshaled against the growing and aggressive measures and aims of the slave power. There were many in the old Whig party known as Conscience-Whigs, and in the Democratic party known as Barnburners and Free Democrats, who were anti-slavery in sentiment and utterly opposed to the extension of the slave system to territory hitherto uncursed by its presence, but who nevertheless were not willing to join the Liberty party. It was held to be deficient in numbers and wanting in prestige. Its fate was the fate of all pioneers. The work it had been required to perform had exposed it to assaults from all sides, and it wore on its front the ugly marks of conflict. It was unpopular for its very fidelity to the cause of liberty and justice. No wonder that some of its members, such as Gerrit Smith, William Goodell, Beriah Green, and Julius Lemoyne refused to quit the old for the new. They felt that the Free-Soil party was a step backward, a lowering of the standard, that the people should come to them, not they to the people. … Events, however, overruled this reasoning. The conviction became general that the time had come for a new organization, which should embrace all who were in any manner opposed to slavery and the slave power, and this Buffalo Free-Soil convention was the result of that conviction. It is easy to say that this or that measure would have been wiser and better than the one adopted. But any measure is vindicated by its necessity and its results. It was impossible for the mountain to go to Mahomet, or for the Free-Soil element to go to the old Liberty party, so the latter went to the former.96
In coming months and years, rank-and-file black abolitionists would take the lead in making the antiextentionist Republican Party a “Negro party.” They did so by helping to organize rallies for it, cheering on its candidates, and voting for Republicans wherever they could. Douglass, still committed to political abolition yet aware of its limitations, would eventually follow their lead.
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Republicans, Reconstruction, and Fusion |
