abolitionist Maria Stewart published her first essay, and the first political manifesto written by an African American woman, entitled “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build.” Stewart articulated the synthesis of secular and religious inspirations driving black abolitionism. She argued that the Bible and the Declaration of Independence provide all people—men, women, rich, poor, black, and white—with the universal birthright of freedom.52 In doing so, she and her abolitionist contemporaries were creating a new definition and understanding of what it meant to be an American. As Eric Foner observes, “The abolitionists . . . invented a new and different Constitution, a different reading of the Constitution, very much informed by the Declaration of Independence and its affirmation of human equality; and posited it as an alternative to the dominant vision of America as a white society, which was so prominent in [the early nineteenth-century].”53
The new generation of black abolitionists would make slavery an issue of polarizing public debate.54 Petitions varied in their demands. Many called on Congress to abolish slavery in the nation’s capital, where it had clear jurisdiction to do so.55 But whether through petitions, publications and pamphleteering, public speaking, or boycotting of slave-produced goods, antebellum abolitionists stressed the immorality and injustice of slavery. For reformers who came after them, these abolitionists would also serve as role models by advancing their radically democratic vision of society through innovative forms of propaganda: mass mailings of antislavery writings and the popular distribution of prints and other visual images on household wares; the publication of biographies and autobiographies of fugitives and former slaves; the sending out of scores of speakers on regional lecture circuits (as well as overseas); and the development of well-coordinated and broad petitioning campaigns directed toward government officials.56 African Americans, organized into vigilance committees (whose members also harbored fugitive slaves as part of the Underground Railroad), would join the mass-petitioning campaigns of the mid-1830s. Over the course of several years, black and white abolitionists sent tens of thousands of petitions to Congress to remove slavery in all federal holdings, including the District of Columbia.
African American women played a critical role in the antislavery petitioning drives. Some of these women, such as Sarah Remond, Margaretta Forten, Clarissa Beman, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, not only emerged as leaders in the abolitionist movement, but subsequently became leaders in the early women’s rights movement. In 1837, women constituted almost half of the signers of a petition in the District of Columbia to abolish slavery in the capital. In Maine and Massachusetts, nearly two-thirds of the twenty-three thousand signers of a petition were women. Many of the black women who signed and led local petitioning efforts had also helped to pioneer the “free produce” movement. Organizations such as the Colored Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania offered foodstuffs produced by free labor as part of the boycotts against slave-produced goods.57 Black women like Remond, Forten, Beman, and Douglass assumed leadership roles in local organizations that coordinated petitioning drives, from the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society to the Colored Female Anti-Slavery Society of Middleton.58 Women’s participation in these organizations was sometimes life-threatening. In 1835, a white male mob stormed a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, where Garrison was preparing to speak. The mob strung a rope around Garrison’s neck and dragged him through the streets of Boston. He survived the attack, saved only by his arrest for “inciting a riot.”
Between 1833 and 1838, over three dozen riots erupted in Northern cities. All focused on symbols of black independence: African American churches, abolitionist organizations, businesses, and individual leaders. Such independence, and therefore the potential for ongoing defiance, combined with an increasingly militant call by black Northerners, led to a series of reactions from various white social and political establishments in the North and West. Black and white abolitionists, from leaders like Garrison to ordinary members of antislavery organizations, were assaulted; meanwhile, antislavery mail was confiscated by the government. In 1837, with David Walker’s death still vivid in the minds of abolitionists, Elijah P. Lovejoy, the white editor of the Alton Observer in Illinois, was murdered. This time the assassination took place in open confrontation. After having had his printing press destroyed on two other occasions, Lovejoy courageously, if not stubbornly, continued to write and print abolitionist tracts. On November 7, 1837, the editor and his assistants were trapped in a warehouse where their printing press was being stored. As he tried to put out a fire set by the mob surrounding the building, he was shot dead. The following year, Pennsylvania Hall, a building in which black and white abolitionists in Philadelphia regularly met, was attacked by another mob and burned to the ground while the city’s mayor stood idly by.
The year before Lovejoy was killed, elected officials with far greater authority than Boston’s mayor took less criminal, yet equally extraconstitutional, measures to quash abolitionist dissent. In 1836, bipartisan representatives (now Democrats and Whigs) responded to the influx of abolitionist petitions from across the North into Congress by passing a gag rule to table any petitions discussing abolition. Former president John Quincy Adams, then elected to the House of Representatives, defended the right of the antislavery petitioners on the grounds of free speech. Other congressmen later joined in, including Ohio Whig Representative Joshua R. Giddings, but it was Adams who gave voice to the abolitionists within Congress, although, ironically, he did not consider himself an abolitionist. Only after eight years of antislavery pressure within and outside Congress was the gag rule finally lifted.
As the antislavery movement grew in the 1830s, some African Americans began to raise the question of developing an electoral strategy. Those in favor of entering the political arena with candidates of their own argued that while proslavery forces wielded great political power, abolitionists had only moral power on their side. If slavery were to be abolished, they reasoned, the proslavery forces would have to be met on their own ground. Independent political action in the electoral arena was therefore necessary. It would include denying votes to candidates who did not support the abolition of slavery, backing individual candidates who supported abolition, and, if necessary, forming an antislavery political party to compete against the bipartisan establishment.59
The New York–based Colored American, the leading black abolitionist paper of the day, reaffirmed the importance and need for independent black political organization and action.60 However, Garrison and many of his followers had from the outset of the antislavery movement argued that separate organizations perpetuated racial prejudice and discrimination. A growing consensus among black leaders by the mid-1830s nevertheless stressed the need for their autonomy—in other words, independence. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a former slave who became a popular abolitionist speaker, asserted that the multiple wrongs inflicted on African Americans by the dominant white society made independent black organizations—be they churches, conventions, committees, or antislavery societies—critical in the cause.61 Garrisonians—a minority among the array of active abolitionists in the 1830s, but the most dominant and vocal minority—insisted that separate black organizations fostered racism and that slavery could only be abolished through moral suasion. To the Garrisonians, supporting candidates for public office took away from the purity of purpose in the holy cause, because politicians worked through compromise. But as violence grew against antislavery activists, many within the movement grew skeptical of pursuing a path in which proslavery forces were to be convinced to abolish slavery through moral appeals alone. Many of those men and women who had been gathering and sending petitions to Congress were on a different course, propelled by conditions and choice toward independent electoral action, coalition-building, and the formation of the first antislavery party.
two
Abolitionism, the Liberty Party, and Free Soil
For whom shall we vote . . . is the question? All of our people who have the right to vote believe it both a right and a duty to exercise that right. We ought and must vote for the Liberty Ticket.
Colored American,
