Between 1833 and 1838, over three dozen riots erupted in Northern cities. All focused on symbols of black independence: African American churches, abolitionist organizations, businesses, and individual leaders. Such independence, and therefore the potential for ongoing defiance, combined with an increasingly militant call by black Northerners, led to a series of reactions from various white social and political establishments in the North and West. Black and white abolitionists, from leaders like Garrison to ordinary members of antislavery organizations, were assaulted; meanwhile, antislavery mail was confiscated by the government. In 1837, with David Walker’s death still vivid in the minds of abolitionists, Elijah P. Lovejoy, the white editor of the Alton Observer in Illinois, was murdered. This time the assassination took place in open confrontation. After having had his printing press destroyed on two other occasions, Lovejoy courageously, if not stubbornly, continued to write and print abolitionist tracts. On November 7, 1837, the editor and his assistants were trapped in a warehouse where their printing press was being stored. As he tried to put out a fire set by the mob surrounding the building, he was shot dead. The following year, Pennsylvania Hall, a building in which black and white abolitionists in Philadelphia regularly met, was attacked by another mob and burned to the ground while the city’s mayor stood idly by.
The year before Lovejoy was killed, elected officials with far greater authority than Boston’s mayor took less criminal, yet equally extraconstitutional, measures to quash abolitionist dissent. In 1836, bipartisan representatives (now Democrats and Whigs) responded to the influx of abolitionist petitions from across the North into Congress by passing a gag rule to table any petitions discussing abolition. Former president John Quincy Adams, then elected to the House of Representatives, defended the right of the antislavery petitioners on the grounds of free speech. Other congressmen later joined in, including Ohio Whig Representative Joshua R. Giddings, but it was Adams who gave voice to the abolitionists within Congress, although, ironically, he did not consider himself an abolitionist. Only after eight years of antislavery pressure within and outside Congress was the gag rule finally lifted.
As the antislavery movement grew in the 1830s, some African Americans began to raise the question of developing an electoral strategy. Those in favor of entering the political arena with candidates of their own argued that while proslavery forces wielded great political power, abolitionists had only moral power on their side. If slavery were to be abolished, they reasoned, the proslavery forces would have to be met on their own ground. Independent political action in the electoral arena was therefore necessary. It would include denying votes to candidates who did not support the abolition of slavery, backing individual candidates who supported abolition, and, if necessary, forming an antislavery political party to compete against the bipartisan establishment.59
The New York–based Colored American, the leading black abolitionist paper of the day, reaffirmed the importance and need for independent black political organization and action.60 However, Garrison and many of his followers had from the outset of the antislavery movement argued that separate organizations perpetuated racial prejudice and discrimination. A growing consensus among black leaders by the mid-1830s nevertheless stressed the need for their autonomy—in other words, independence. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a former slave who became a popular abolitionist speaker, asserted that the multiple wrongs inflicted on African Americans by the dominant white society made independent black organizations—be they churches, conventions, committees, or antislavery societies—critical in the cause.61 Garrisonians—a minority among the array of active abolitionists in the 1830s, but the most dominant and vocal minority—insisted that separate black organizations fostered racism and that slavery could only be abolished through moral suasion. To the Garrisonians, supporting candidates for public office took away from the purity of purpose in the holy cause, because politicians worked through compromise. But as violence grew against antislavery activists, many within the movement grew skeptical of pursuing a path in which proslavery forces were to be convinced to abolish slavery through moral appeals alone. Many of those men and women who had been gathering and sending petitions to Congress were on a different course, propelled by conditions and choice toward independent electoral action, coalition-building, and the formation of the first antislavery party.
two
Abolitionism, the Liberty Party, and Free Soil
For whom shall we vote . . . is the question? All of our people who have the right to vote believe it both a right and a duty to exercise that right. We ought and must vote for the Liberty Ticket.
Colored American, 1840
Black 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.
✓ ✓ ✓
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