Americans in shaping the party’s policies and determining its candidates. White leaders, on the other hand, tended to delimit black participation inside the party, allowing only African Americans who were legally permitted to vote by the state to vote on party matters. In this way, the word “citizens” in the Liberty Party’s Resolution 36, which read, “We cordially welcome our colored fellow citizens,” could be interpreted either broadly and inclusively to mean all African Americans (including fugitive slaves and those not eligible to vote by the state) or in the narrowest, most exclusionary sense of the word “citizens,” to mean only legal voters, thus restricting black participation. In Michigan, home to the Liberty Party’s presidential candidate, Birney, two African Americans were excluded from participating in the party’s state convention in 1844 because they were not legal voters.53 But the question of black participation within the party was only one challenge black leaders faced in the organizing process. The election of 1844 would test the level of support generated by African Americans among the few remaining black voters in the nation. More critical still, numerically speaking, the election would test the extent to which black organizers, such as Henry Bibb, a fugitive slave originally from Kentucky who campaigned for the Liberty Party that year, along with their white counterparts, could generate white voters’ support for the third party.54
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During the fall of 1844, 62,300 eligible voters cast their ballot for the Liberty Party—less than 3 percent of the national vote, but nearly ten times the number received four years earlier.55 Birney, once again at the top of the Liberty ticket, challenged Democrat James K. Polk and Whig Henry Clay. Both major party candidates supported slavery, but Polk favored the annexation of Texas, and therefore the expansion of slave territory. Most African American voters supported Clay, who opposed annexation. He had been instrumental in brokering the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought Maine into the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state (maintaining an eleven-eleven balance of free and slave representation in the Senate) and, except for Missouri, forbade slavery north of 36°30'. Democrat Polk would win the election by a slim 1.4 percent of the popular vote, receiving 179 of the 275 electoral college votes.56
Reaction to the results of the 1844 election varied. Many saw the number of votes cast for the Liberty Party as insignificant and therefore a sign of the party’s failure. Black Liberty voters in New York either abandoned electoral politics or decided they would support major party candidates in the next election who might advance black suffrage rights—a course of action for which New York City black convention delegates had previously argued. As Wesley writes, “Since [black] leaders knew that their vote was small and that the Liberty Party was not yet strong enough to be influential in the decision [to remove discriminatory black suffrage requirements], some of them were not desirous of fixing their allegiance to this one party. They suggested that they would support candidates in other parties pledged to remove the property limitations.”57 Others, however, read the election results differently, seeing much significance in the near-tenfold increase in support for the third party. That growth in the base of support for the independent party, which presumably reflected only a fraction of the number of African Americans in the nation who would have voted for the party had they had the opportunity to do so, could be tapped to continue building the independent political movement.58
The Liberty Party did play a role in determining the outcome of the 1844 election in at least one state: New York. That year, as the gag rule was finally lifted in Congress under massive abolitionist petitioning pressure, the New York Liberty Party swung the presidential election in the state—but toward the annexationist Polk. While most African Americans ended up voting for the Whig Clay—viewed as the less egregious of the two major party candidates—black independents joined their white counterparts in supporting the abolitionist Birney, knowing full well that his chances of winning were next to none. In the wake of the election, the term “spoiler” may have been used for the first time in relation to a third party (the word is used by supporters of a major party to describe independent candidates who have little or no chance of winning but are capable of “depriving” a major party victory by “taking away” votes, as if the votes belonged to the party to begin with).59 The increase in Liberty Party support in 1844 reflected growing Northern antislavery opinion in the mid-1840s, fueled by public controversy over the gag rule, the annexation of Texas as a slaveholding state, and the fate of the new territories resulting from the Mexican-American War. In this context, political opposition to proslavery forces gained increasing respect in the North. Abolitionism was no longer a fringe movement led by religious zealots and fugitive slaves, but entered the mainstream of political discourse.60
In the South, where African Americans had no political recourse, black men and women applied their own forms of pressure on the slave system. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama, African Americans asserted their autonomy when they could—destroying tools, coordinating work slowdowns, running away, setting fires, feigning illness, poisoning their masters, and taking up arms.61 It was also in this period that scientific racism began to develop “diagnoses” explaining black resistance to slavery. According to Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Louisiana physician and professor of medicine, African Americans who ran away from plantations suffered from “drapetomania,” while those who showed a lack of motivation for forced labor were infected by “dysaethesia aethiopica,” a condition whose symptoms were particular to the “Negro race.”62 “Rascality” may have more accurately described the actions of New York City’s election registrars and tax officials than African Americans, to whom the term was applied as a symptom of disease: While barely one thousand African Americans had voted in New York in the 1845 election, two thousand were nevertheless being taxed as voters by registrars and tax-collectors.63
In the wake of the 1846 New York State constitutional convention, which declined to change the onerous property and residency requirements for black voters, Gerrit Smith, the leader of the Liberty Party, wrote an open letter to voters of the state. He maintained that the New York State Constitution, as it stood, was denying political representation to the upwards of fifty thousand African Americans living in the state. Local and national black conventions were held, at which delegates expressed their ongoing opposition to the voting requirements targeting African Americans. From October 6–9, 1847, delegates for the National Convention of Colored People and their Friends met in Troy, New York. They resolved to push for the “procurement of political rights” and against “any plan of emancipation involving a resort to bloodshed.” Another black convention held in Boston the following year voted similarly to pursue “moral and political action.” In the midst of these meetings, resistance to legal and institutional control over African Americans took personal forms.64
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Embodying the larger fight for self-determination among those in the Northern free black community was Frederick Douglass’s struggle to develop his own voice and organizational base. From the time he met William Lloyd Garrison in 1841, Douglass assumed a moral suasionist position, opposing the mixing of abolitionism with the base politicking of electoral contests and parties. However, he had begun to reconsider his position as he entered one after another debate with his black peers, from Henry Highland Garnet to Theodore S. Wright (each active in antislavery societies advocating moral suasion and independent politics via the Liberty Party). Dialogue, along with further reading in law, political philosophy, and American government, increasingly led Douglass to view the U.S. Constitution as an antislavery document, not a “covenant with the devil,” as Garrison called it. Douglass would later say that “to refrain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery.”65 His “new reading” of the Constitution—which had been articulated by both Maria Stewart and later argued by Gerrit Smith—would eventually bring Douglass into direct conflict with his former mentor.66
In 1847, Douglass announced to Garrison his intention to start his own newspaper. Garrison was strongly opposed, stating that Douglass would
