African Americans voted in a variety of ways in 1848, depending on local circumstances. In some places, black voters determined the outcome of the election. According to Frederick Douglass, African Americans in Massachusetts generally voted for the Free Soil ticket, but they were a small minority of the vote; however, in New Bedford up to seven hundred African Americans supported the party and held the balance of power. By contrast, black voters in neighboring Rhode Island largely lent their support to the Whig Party (also called the “Law and Order Party” in the state). The Rhode Island Whigs had recently helped to defeat a “Free Suffrage” Democratic Party initiative in the state to restrict the franchise to white men. In the run-up to the election, the Whigs implored black voters to “stand by the men … who have stood by you; support the party which supported you.”78 In December of 1848, one month after the election, Douglass implored black voters in Rhode Island to “lead the Free Soilers” by supporting that party’s candidates in future elections.
Black political action in Massachusetts and Rhode Island complemented the various black petitioning efforts seeking state constitutional revisions of suffrage requirements. African Americans in Columbus and Oberlin, Ohio, who convened in early 1848 saw the fruits of their petitioning labors the following year when the state’s legislature repealed laws that restricted voting based on race.79 Other meetings were held to continue the campaign for black civil and political rights. African Americans under the leadership of Rev. Amos G. Beman and S. M. Africanus met in New Haven, Connecticut, in September of 1849.80 The next year, however, federal action by the two major parties led to a dramatic turn in events. As part of balancing their national political power, the Democrats and Whigs came to yet another compromise over the protection and extension of slavery. Like previous bipartisan compromises, the Compromise of 1850 came at the expense of African Americans. This time, however, the compromise drew fire not only from African Americans, but from Northern and Western white independents who were opposed to the extension of slavery.81
The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state and abolished the slave trade in Washington, DC. However, it did not abolish slavery in the nation’s capital or in the territories gained in the Mexican-American War. Equally problematic was a powerful new fugitive slave law attached to the compromise. A fugitive slave law had been enacted by Congress in 1793, but much of its power had since diminished. “Personal liberty” laws passed in Northern states during the subsequent generation, combined with the 1842 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, in which it was decided that state authorities could not be forced to act in fugitive slave cases, had given some measure of legal protection to fugitives in the North. The new law, however, radically changed things by making all citizens complicit in the retrieval of fugitive slaves, under penalty of law. It prohibited anyone suspected of being a runaway from either having a jury trial or testifying on his or her own behalf. Now not only were U.S. marshals mandated to recapture alleged runaways (that is, any black person suspected as such, and with no more than a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership), they could deputize anyone to help them in the process. Anyone who interfered in that process was subject to six months’ imprisonment and a thousand-dollar fine (the equivalent of twentytwo thousand dollars today). To add to the egregiousness of the law, a financial incentive was even offered to special commissioners who adjudicated in runaway slave cases. They would be paid ten dollars, instead of five, when their ruling was in favor of claimants seeking runaways.82
With the possibility of any black person being called a runaway and enslaved (or reenslaved), thousands of African Americans fled to Canada. S. M. Africanus, who had been politically organizing African Americans in Connecticut, wrote a stinging rebuke to the new law. In “The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” Africanus justified noncompliance with the law since it violated “the spirit and the letter of the Constitution”; he declared it “of no binding force.”83 By 1850, there were 434,495 free African Americans in the nation (more than half of whom were living in the South). Now each of them was subject to being enslaved, with federal backing. In an era of unprecedented population growth in New York, the city’s black population decreased in the wake of the law. The possibilities of being arrested in the North and placed into slavery were very real. In April of 1851, despite the efforts of the Boston Committee of Vigilance to stop U.S. marshals, Thomas Sims, a fugitive from Georgia, was forcibly returned to Savannah, where he was publicly whipped on arrival. In some cases, militant abolitionists succeeded in stopping federal officials from seizing and taking African Americans south. In October of 1851, William “Jerry” Henry, a fugitive slave working in Syracuse, New York, was rescued by a group of black and white abolitionists who broke down a door with a battering ram to free him after his arrest. It was the Liberty Party’s Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen who helped to coordinate Henry’s escape to Canada before having to flee the authorities himself.84
African Americans mobilized meetings and planning sessions in response to the Fugitive Slave Law. On August 21, 1850, over two thousand African Americans and white abolitionists, including at least thirty fugitive slaves, met in Cazenovia, New York, in what they called the Fugitive Slave Convention. Gerrit Smith led the deliberations. Different proposals were put forth, with members of the American Anti-Slavery Society advocating support for the Liberty Party as a way of politically engaging the law. The convention agreed that the major parties were dangerously linked, fortifying slavery by extending its domain. Other meetings followed, at which discussion centered on what to do using electoral pressure. One of these meetings saw the final break between Douglass, who had now embraced independent politics, and Garrison, who remained adamant about using only moral suasion to abolish slavery.
In the spring of 1851, the American Anti-Slavery Society held its eighteenth annual meeting in Syracuse, New York. Rev. Samuel J. May, a local minister, submitted a resolution recommending that a number of antislavery newspapers, including the North Star and the pro-Liberty Party Bugle, be recognized as official organs of the body. Garrison vehemently opposed this proposal, while Douglass responded that they, in fact, had the “duty of political action.” Garrison quietly but sternly replied: “There is roguery somewhere.” Garrison quietly but sternly replied: “There is roguery somewhere.”85 The meeting proved the definitive break between the two men. Within a month Douglass and Liberty Party leader Gerrit Smith merged the North Star and the Liberty Party Paper. Smith had long been committed to independent political action. As he put it, “The country is divided into two great parties, and ninety out of every hundred voters are under the control of the wire-pullers of said parties … few are prepared to act independently.”86 The newly merged paper became known as Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Douglass, however, was only tactically committed to the Liberty Party in New York State, given its relative strength there.
Beginning in the summer of 1851, Douglass straddled both the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party, mixing in both circles as he saw strengths in each—the former taking a militant antislavery stance, the latter offering broader appeal to Northern white voters. Douglass, now the most prominent black political abolitionist, would use his influence to bring African Americans into third-party politics to exert both “moral and political power” against the slave system.87 African Americans remained divided over which party to support, if either,