In the fall of 1852, Douglass campaigned for the Liberty Party in New York State and for the Free Soil Party in other parts of the Northeast and in the West. The election that year affirmed Douglass’s decision to support the Free Soil Party nationally as part of building bridges with the wider independent political movement. While the Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce, received 1,607,510 votes (50.8 percent of the vote) and the Whigs’ Winfield Scott received 1,386,580 (43.9 percent), the Liberty Party received only 72. The Free Soil Party, on the other hand, received 156,667 votes (4.9 percent). However, that number was only half of what the party had received four years earlier.89 Several third-party leaders openly expressed their frustration and disappointment with the election results.
After the 1852 election, Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen and Henry Highland Garnet decided to leave third-party politics, no longer confident in its longterm potential. At the Colored National Convention in Rochester, July 6–8, 1853, Loguen made his position clear. Having organized black support for the Liberty Party for over a decade, and having been part of the recent fights over the Fugitive Slave Law, he urged African Americans to “strike the blow for themselves, and not wait for the hairsplitting of politicians and speakers.” Reminding delegates of his own history, the Reverend continued, “I made an abolitionist of my master by whipping him.”90 Meanwhile, Garnet, the most prominent black leader of the Liberty Party in its earliest years, had gone to Jamaica to pursue missionary work and develop black emigration schemes to Mexico, Liberia, and other parts of the Caribbean. Another Liberty Party veteran, Charles Remond, while still committed to developing the third-party strategy, was highly critical of the Free Soil Party for framing slavery as a sectional and not a national problem. Douglass, newer to politics, was more open to building coalitions with white independents. He rededicated himself to the third-party political course with the energies he had given to his work as an abolitionist speaker. Some began to view him as a possible candidate for public office: from June through August of 1854, Douglass, who the New York Tribune suggested would run for Congress, faced a barrage of criticism in the press. For his political activism he was called everything from a “fanatic” to a “nigger statesmen of the North.”91
Responses to the power of the two major parties and to the racism they represented took other forms. Martin R. Delany, who had helped Douglass establish and edit the North Star and who was among the first African Americans to support the Free Soil Party, reflected the growing political alienation of many African Americans. His personal experience with discrimination while trying to pursue his medical studies affected him deeply. Only weeks after entering Harvard Medical School in 1850 (already having practiced basic medicine and armed with letters of support from seventeen physicians), he was dismissed when white students protested his presence. That experience, combined with the Fugitive Slave Law and other injustices he had seen around him, made Delany deeply cynical about the hope of African Americans attaining any kind of justice in a white-dominated nation. In August of 1854, he led a four-day National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, which had 145 participants, including 29 women. Delany delivered a manifesto at the convention, entitled “Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,” in which he declared that “we demand every political right, privilege, and position to which the whites are eligible in the United States, and we will either attain to these, or accept nothing.”92 The convention and the manifesto would form the foundation of black nationalism, whose most recognized proponent in the next century was the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey.
The person who came to epitomize the plight of African Americans in the United States was a fugitive named Anthony Burns. Burns became the symbol of the injustice and breach of civil liberties that was the Fugitive Slave Law. In May of 1854, he was captured in Boston by “slave-catchers” and ordered back to Virginia by Judge Edward G. Loring, who had just ordered another fugitive, Thomas Sims, back into slavery a month earlier. News traveled quickly, and soon hundreds of abolitionists poured onto the streets of Boston in support of Burns. One group attempted to free the captive by storming the city’s courthouse, where he was being held. Several abolitionists were injured, and a U.S. marshal was killed. President Franklin Pierce grew so alarmed by the situation that he decided to call in the U.S. Marines. Abolitionists were unable to stop Burns, unlike Jerry Henry, from being taken back into slavery. Through donations raised at a black church, African Americans gathered the thirteen-hundred-dollar ransom that was being demanded by a cotton planter and horse dealer from North Carolina who had purchased Burns from his previous owner, and within a year Burns was back in Massachusetts. But the fear of federal policies continued.93
The year 1854 also saw a major change in federal policy regarding the nation’s western territories. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and opened new lands for settlement. Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas designed the act, eager to see a railroad line built from Chicago to destinations as far as California. The Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by establishing that settlers of the new territories could decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery. Abolitionists vehemently attacked “popular sovereignty” as applied to territories that had already been federally protected from the encroachment of slavery. They saw the Act as yet another compromise between the major parties, another concession to Southern slaveholding interests. Antislavery organizations, such as the New England Emigrant Aid Company, organized thousands of abolitionists to settle in the new territories; opposing them, thousands of proslavery “border ruffians,” primarily from Missouri, poured into the territories. Over the next three years, bloody battles were fought between pro- and antislavery forces. It was here that John Brown, representing the most radical wing of abolitionism—armed insurrection—first participated in guerilla warfare. Five years earlier, Brown had reprinted and distributed copies of David Walker’s Appeal and Henry Highland Garnet’s speech justifying violence to abolish slavery. Unlike Garrison, Brown was not opposed to politics; he merely considered it ineffectual. Meanwhile, Douglass remained adamant, unwilling to concede the electoral arena to the two major parties and their slaveholding interests.94
On June 26, 1855, black and white delegates met in Syracuse, New York, for a three-day Convention of Radical Political Abolitionists. Douglass played a prominent role at the convention, along with Rev. Jermain Loguen, Gerrit Smith, and Lewis Tappan. Debate took place over whether the planks of immediatism and black civil and political rights should be sacrificed for it to be possible to work with other third-party forces. Most opposed any compromise with political forces who were not immediatists themselves, ironically displaying a kind of dogmatism characteristic of the moral suasionists, who had opposed electoral politics altogether. Over the next year, Douglass continued to carve out his place as an independent political leader, attacking the policies of the two major parties and stumping on behalf of the Liberty Party. In recognition of his stature and efforts, Douglass was nominated at the Liberty Party’s convention in Ithaca on September 12, 1855, to run for secretary of state of New York. It was the first time an African American had been