On the morning of June 28, 1839, fifty-three Africans who had been abducted from West Africa revolted under the leadership of the Mende Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué) aboard La Amistad, a schooner leaving Havana. Rising from underneath the decks, some with machete-like sugarcane knives in hand, the Africans attacked the crewmen, all but two of whom were killed or jumped overboard. The crewmen were ordered to steer the schooner toward the rising sun—that is, back to West Africa. Each night, however, the crewmen reversed the ship’s direction. Zigzagging off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, La Amistad eventually landed in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, where the black rebels were captured and charged with piracy and murder. Liberty Party cofounder Lewis Tappan promptly formed a defense committee and, with the help of John Quincy Adams, who was then leading the fight in Congress for the repeal of the gag rule, was able to take the case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. On March 9, 1841, the court ruled the West Africans free.
Eight months later, another slave mutiny captured the attention of abolitionists, adding fuel to the antislavery movement and even prompting support inside Congress. On the night of November 7, 1841, a group of 39 slaves revolted aboard the brig the U.S.S. Creole, which was transporting 135 enslaved black men, women, and children from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to be sold in New Orleans. Led by Madison Washington, described as “that bright star of freedom” by Garnet, the slaves seized the brig’s captain and crew.46 Over the next several days, the black mutineers forced the Creole to sail into Nassau harbor in the Bahamas, where British authorities offered them their freedom. The actions of the British touched off a diplomatic dispute with the United States. Ohio Congressman Joshua Giddings, who had joined Adams in the fight to repeal the gag rule, introduced a series of resolutions in support of the mutineers. He asserted that Virginia law did not apply to slaves outside of the state’s waters; the U.S. government should therefore withdraw any further assistance to the vessel’s slave owners. The bipartisan-ruled House promptly censured Giddings for defending the mutineers. Giddings responded by resigning from office, but was soon reelected with abolitionist support. For their lost “property,” the Creole slave owners were later “reimbursed” over $100,000 (the equivalent of $2.4 million today) by the Anglo-American Claims Commission. The actions of the “nineteen [mutineers who] struck for liberty or death,” as Garnet put it, not only pushed Douglass to begin reconsidering his strict moral suasionist position, but propelled, among others, Giddings toward eventually breaking with the two major parties.47
Garrisonians would continue condemning political activity as an implied endorsement of the legality of slavery, but their position was increasingly losing credibility among Northern abolitionists.48 African Americans, in particular, linked their economic plight to their exclusion from the electoral process, adding to arguments for political participation. At one antislavery convention in New York, Samuel E. Cornish, a black newspaper editor who had led the state’s petitioning campaign for black suffrage several years earlier, asserted that disfranchisement was the principal cause of black New Yorkers’ impoverishment; the solution was greater political participation as voters, not less.49 He spoke for most black New Yorkers when he said that if two candidates ran for the same State Assembly seat, with one favoring and the other opposing black suffrage, African Americans would most certainly support the prosuffrage candidate.50 Garnet agreed, and went one step further, calling on African Americans not only to participate in electoral politics wherever they could, but to support the Liberty Party’s candidates who were both prosuffrage and antislavery.
During the fall of 1843 Garnet went on the New York State lecture circuit to build Liberty Party support among black and white abolitionists. His reputation as a Liberty Party man was added to his reputation as a powerful orator in the antislavery cause, and he was soon being invited out of state to inspire others to join the third-party movement. At the Liberty Party’s Massachusetts state convention in February of 1844, Garnet gave what one contemporary described as a “powerful speech, in defense of his colored countrymen in bondage.” He “predicted that if the hope which the Liberty Party held out for speedy and peaceful emancipation of the slaves in this country was taken away, a bloody revolution would inevitably follow.”51 Not all black leaders were convinced of the Liberty Party’s importance in the antislavery crusade, as a protest from a group of New York City delegates made plain. During the Annual Convention of Colored Citizens of the State of New York, held in Schenectady, September 18–20, 1844, downstate delegates tried to overturn the endorsement of the Liberty Party made by that body at its meeting in Rochester two years earlier. New York City delegates argued that having the national black convention ally with only one party limited their political choices and “denied the patriotic colored citizens of New York the right of thinking as they please.”52 The resolution was voted down and the endorsement stood.
New York City’s Theodore S. Wright, who had helped to lead the endorsement of the Liberty Party in opposition to the moral suasionists at the 1842 Rochester convention, delineated his support for the third party in 1844. Not able to attend the Schenectady convention, he sent a letter in which he warned that African Americans should be careful not to overidentify with the Liberty Party, or any other party, for that matter. As he put it, his “confidence [lay] in the principals upon which the Liberty Party is based,” not the party itself. Following the Schenectady convention, New York City delegates held a meeting, where they passed a resolution in opposition to fixing their allegiances with any one party. Such differences among the largely eviscerated Northern black electorate reflected wider tactical differences among abolitionists, and not just between those for or against entering electoral politics. A dividing line also existed between black and white leaders within the Liberty Party itself.
Black Liberty Party leaders supported the inclusion of all African 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
During the fall of 1844, 62,300 eligible voters cast their ballot for the Liberty Party—less than 3 percent of the