years’ residence in the state, while the residency requirement for white men was only one year. Over the next decade and a half, other states followed suit. Meanwhile, African Americans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin petitioned their state legislatures either for the franchise or for its protection where it existed. In the few states that did not legally exclude African American voters from voting—New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine—black voters met verbal abuse and physical harassment when they went to the polls.6
By the end of the 1830s, African Americans could vote only in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and, if they met a property requirement that white voters did not have to meet, New York. With the dissolution of the Federalists in the late 1810s, African Americans shifted their support to the National Republicans, before lending it, in Pennsylvania, New York, and Rhode Island, to the Whig Party in the late 1820s and 1830s. African Americans in Pennsylvania supported not only Whig candidates, but anti-Mason third-party candidates. The Democratic Party in Pennsylvania responded to the threat of black votes helping opponents win elections by limiting the franchise to white men. Black voters in New York largely voted for the Whig Party. In 1838, they would help elect reformer William H. Seward governor. Seward publicly supported the protection of black voting rights, stating, “I shall not deny [black voters] any right on account of the hue they wear, or of the land in which they or their ancestors were born.” By that time, however, the Democratic Party, which had pushed for an expansion of voting rights among white men, had successfully placed legal restrictions on African Americans in New York and elsewhere.7
A division among abolitionists in the 1830s over whether or not to engage in political (i.e., “impure”) action—petitioning for the abolition of slavery, asserting black voting rights, and, later, backing proabolitionist candidates—would lead to a rupture in the movement by the end of the decade. The issue of using the electoral arena, combined with a fight over black organizational independence, also contributed to a division among African Americans, manifested in the disruption of the national black conventions from 1836 to 1840. Philadelphia delegates to the national convention in 1835 formed a conservative pro-Garrisonian group known as the American Moral Reform Society, dedicated solely to moral suasion, while New York delegates rallied around the Colored American, whose editors strongly advocated electoral action as one of multiple paths towards abolishing slavery.8 Garrison continued to decry involvement in any type of electoral activity, emphatically stating, “No union with slaveholders,” and denounced the U.S. Constitution as “a covenant with the devil and agreement with hell.” African Americans, however, tended to be more practical in their organizing—a function of their less privileged position in society—and led petitioning drives to protect their right to vote.9
Among the most organized black petitioning efforts in the mid-1830s to assert black voting rights were those by African Americans in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. On March 11, 1837, the Colored American reported that petitions were being gathered and sent by African Americans in New York City to the state’s legislature demanding a constitutional change to “extend the right of voting to all male citizens in the state, on the same term, without distinction of color.” Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, African Americans gathered in convention under the leadership of Robert Purvis. Four years earlier, Purvis had been one of the few African Americans to sign the American Anti-Slavery Society’s “Declaration of Sentiments.” Along with James Forten, James McCrummell, and Stephen Smith, he led the black abolitionists in Pennsylvania. Purvis turned his attention to the fight over voting rights in the state, where black communities in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were embroiled in a dispute over a state constitutional proposal that would ban black men from voting. Purvis’s “Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania” demanded the full protection of black voting rights. The next year, however, the state constitution was re-written, stating that only “white freemen” would be eligible to vote. African Americans in Ohio, like those in Pennsylvania, would also convene to assert their voting rights, but similarly faced defeat as the tide against Northern free black voters grew stronger.10
At a time when black and white abolitionists were being attacked for their views while convening in their homes, at their churches, or on the streets, petitioning created new imperatives for petitioners and petition-signers alike. By calling on others to say that they supported the immediate abolition of slavery or asserting the right of African Americans to vote—an activity often done face to face, entailing that one reveal one’s “radical” views to neighbors, friends, and colleagues—petition-gatherers and signers risked being socially ostracized and even made financially destitute. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1838, one year after a massive petitioning drive targeting Congress was launched, the American Anti-Slavery Society reported 415,000 petitions forwarded to Washington, DC. Two years earlier, the House of Representatives had voted to have all antislavery petitions automatically tabled upon receipt. As petitioners pushed forward in their work, they were simultaneously helping to build a base of support and pressuring candidates and elected officials to speak either for or against immediate emancipation. It was in this context that black and white abolitionists entered the electoral arena, at first endorsing antislavery major party candidates for public office and later developing a third party.11
Third parties had gained some minor success in local politics in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The Workingmen’s Party in New York, Pennsylvania, and parts of Vermont had pressed for labor legislation.12 The party demanded higher wages for urban workers and an end to layoffs, which were a direct consequence of the introduction of new technologies into small-scale factories. They also called for a ten-hour working day and the abolition of debtor’s prison. African Americans in New York’s Fifth and Eighth wards, located on the lower west side of Manhattan, had been involved in those efforts as early as 1828. Over the next two years, the Workingmen’s Party of New York won several offices, including a state assembly seat.13 Black leaders in New York City would build on this electoral precedent against the Democratic Party. Between 1830 and 1840, African Americans helped to defeat the Democratic Party machine—Tammany Hall—in the city’s two wards with a large African American population (the Fifth and Eighth), where Democrats had led a concerted effort against the extension of black voting rights. Soon black leaders were organizing African Americans city-wide to vote tactically in relation to abolitionism.14
Thus, by the late 1830s, African Americans were not only petitioning legislatures for the abolition of slavery and the right to vote, but were now helping to interrogate candidates for publicly elected offices on slavery-related issues. When no candidate expressed antislavery views, abolitionists would protest by “scattering” their ballots among a series of write-in candidates. In 1838, the New York Anti-Slavery Society resolved to deny its members’ votes to those candidates who did not agree to support abolition, and in 1839, the American Anti-Slavery Society, following New York’s lead, began directing its members to vote only for those candidates who endorsed the immediate abolition of slavery.15 African Americans would soon help form a third party that could compete against the bipartisan establishment with its own slate of candidates, or throw the election to the more sympathetic of the two parties’ candidates locally.
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In the late 1830s, relatively few abolitionists supported the formation of an antislavery party to challenge the Democratic and Whig parties, and the African Americans in favor of such a party, such as Samuel Ringgold Ward and Henry Highland Garnet, were a minority within a minority. However, a new possibility presented itself for independent black political action. On April 1, 1840, abolitionists from across the Northeast and West came together in Albany, New York, to decide on a platform and select national candidates for the fall election for what would be the first antislavery party in the nation’s history, the Liberty Party. The party had been founded the year before by a group of white antislavery advocates from New York who, as Eric Foner writes, “recognized that the tactics of moral suasion and questioning candidates of the major parties had failed to produce tangible results.”16 Prominent white abolitionists Lewis Tappan and Gerrit Smith would soon lend their support to the third party, while African Americans like Garnett jumped on the opportunity of such an electoral vehicle to advance the abolitionist cause.17