leaders in the late 1830s and early 1840s were deeply divided over which tactics to pursue in abolishing slavery, political engagement being only one possible course of action. While some, such as Henry Highland Garnet, would pursue multiple paths—using moral suasion, building an antislavery party, and calling for armed insurrection—others remained firmly opposed to engaging in any political action. Addressing the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January 1842, Frederick Douglass asked, “Was it political action that removed your prejudices and raised in your mind a holy zeal for human rights?” Douglass would go on to make his case against entering the electoral arena in strict, almost puritanical terms: “The difficulty with the third party is that it disposes men to rely upon political and not moral action.”1 However, fifteen years later, speaking as a third-party leader at a West Indian Emancipation Day commemoration, he would state: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand.”2 Part of the demand he was now also making, and imploring others to make, was a political demand on the two major parties to abolish slavery.
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African Americans had participated in electoral politics from the earliest days of the Republic. Hundreds of free African Americans in the North had gained the right to vote following the American Revolution; African Americans also voted in North Carolina, in Tennessee when it entered the Union, and possibly in Maryland.3 Black voters in New York initially supported the Federalist Party on a local and statewide basis because some of the party’s leadership supported the gradual abolition of slavery. The rise in the free black population in the nation, however, did not translate into a rise in black voting, as state legislatures increasingly restricted black voting rights in the early nineteenth century.4
Perhaps less than ten thousand Northern African Americans voted in any given year in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the fact that African Americans held and exercised the right to vote in New York, Pennsylvania, and the New England states (with the exception of Connecticut) raised the possibility that black voters could, if well coordinated, influence the outcome of close elections in conjunction with white antislavery voters beginning in the 1830s. At the very least, they could press candidates to take a public stance on abolitionism. However, the development of Jacksonian democracy would undermine what black political influence existed in the North. Those who insisted on expanding the franchise for white men wanted to eliminate it for black men.5
In 1821, the New York State Assembly repealed its property requirement for white voters but left it in place for African Americans. In order to vote, African Americans would have to present evidence of owning at least $250 in real estate (the equivalent of $5,000 today), plus evidence of three continuous years’ residence in the state, while the residency requirement for white men was only one year. Over the next decade and a half, other states followed suit. Meanwhile, African Americans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin petitioned their state legislatures either for the franchise or for its protection where it existed. In the few states that did not legally exclude African American voters from voting—New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine—black voters met verbal abuse and physical harassment when they went to the polls.6
By the end of the 1830s, African Americans could vote only in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and, if they met a property requirement that white voters did not have to meet, New York. With the dissolution of the Federalists in the late 1810s, African Americans shifted their support to the National Republicans, before lending it, in Pennsylvania, New York, and Rhode Island, to the Whig Party in the late 1820s and 1830s. African Americans in Pennsylvania supported not only Whig candidates, but anti-Mason third-party candidates. The Democratic Party in Pennsylvania responded to the threat of black votes helping opponents win elections by limiting the franchise to white men. Black voters in New York largely voted for the Whig Party. In 1838, they would help elect reformer William H. Seward governor. Seward publicly supported the protection of black voting rights, stating, “I shall not deny [black voters] any right on account of the hue they wear, or of the land in which they or their ancestors were born.” By that time, however, the Democratic Party, which had pushed for an expansion of voting rights among white men, had successfully placed legal restrictions on African Americans in New York and elsewhere.7
A division among abolitionists in the 1830s over whether or not to engage in political (i.e., “impure”) action—petitioning for the abolition of slavery, asserting black voting rights, and, later, backing proabolitionist candidates—would lead to a rupture in the movement by the end of the decade. The issue of using the electoral arena, combined with a fight over black organizational independence, also contributed to a division among African Americans, manifested in the disruption of the national black conventions from 1836 to 1840. Philadelphia delegates to the national convention in 1835 formed a conservative pro-Garrisonian group known as the American Moral Reform Society, dedicated solely to moral suasion, while New York delegates rallied around the Colored American, whose editors strongly advocated electoral action as one of multiple paths towards abolishing slavery.8 Garrison continued to decry involvement in any type of electoral activity, emphatically stating, “No union with slaveholders,” and denounced the U.S. Constitution as “a covenant with the devil and agreement with hell.” African Americans, however, tended to be more practical in their organizing—a function of their less privileged position in society—and led petitioning drives to protect their right to vote.9
Among the most organized black petitioning efforts in the mid-1830s to assert black voting rights were those by African Americans in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. On March 11, 1837, the Colored American reported that petitions were being gathered and sent by African Americans in New York City to the state’s legislature demanding a constitutional change to “extend the right of voting to all male citizens in the state, on the same term, without distinction of color.” Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, African Americans gathered in convention under the leadership of Robert Purvis. Four years earlier, Purvis had been one of the few African Americans to sign the American Anti-Slavery Society’s “Declaration of Sentiments.” Along with James Forten, James McCrummell, and Stephen Smith, he led the black abolitionists in Pennsylvania. Purvis turned his attention to the fight over voting rights in the state, where black communities in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were embroiled in a dispute over a state constitutional proposal that would ban black men from voting. Purvis’s “Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania” demanded the full protection of black voting rights. The next year, however, the state constitution was re-written, stating that only “white freemen” would be eligible to vote. African Americans in Ohio, like those in Pennsylvania, would also convene to assert their voting rights, but similarly faced defeat as the tide against Northern free black voters grew stronger.10
At a time when black and white abolitionists were being attacked for their views while convening in their homes, at their churches, or on the streets, petitioning created new imperatives for petitioners and petition-signers alike. By calling on others to say that they supported the immediate abolition of slavery or asserting the right of African Americans to vote—an activity often done face to face, entailing that one reveal one’s “radical” views to neighbors, friends, and colleagues—petition-gatherers and signers risked being socially ostracized and even made financially destitute. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1838, one year after a massive petitioning drive targeting Congress was launched, the American Anti-Slavery Society reported 415,000 petitions forwarded to Washington, DC. Two years earlier, the House of Representatives had voted to have all antislavery petitions automatically tabled upon receipt. As petitioners pushed forward in their work, they were simultaneously helping to build a base of support and pressuring candidates and elected officials to speak either for or against immediate emancipation. It was in this context that black and white abolitionists entered the electoral arena, at first endorsing antislavery major party candidates for public office and later developing a third party.11
