under massive abolitionist petitioning pressure, the New York Liberty Party swung the presidential election in the state—but toward the annexationist Polk. While most African Americans ended up voting for the Whig Clay—viewed as the less egregious of the two major party candidates—black independents joined their white counterparts in supporting the abolitionist Birney, knowing full well that his chances of winning were next to none. In the wake of the election, the term “spoiler” may have been used for the first time in relation to a third party (the word is used by supporters of a major party to describe independent candidates who have little or no chance of winning but are capable of “depriving” a major party victory by “taking away” votes, as if the votes belonged to the party to begin with).59 The increase in Liberty Party support in 1844 reflected growing Northern antislavery opinion in the mid-1840s, fueled by public controversy over the gag rule, the annexation of Texas as a slaveholding state, and the fate of the new territories resulting from the Mexican-American War. In this context, political opposition to proslavery forces gained increasing respect in the North. Abolitionism was no longer a fringe movement led by religious zealots and fugitive slaves, but entered the mainstream of political discourse.60
In the South, where African Americans had no political recourse, black men and women applied their own forms of pressure on the slave system. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama, African Americans asserted their autonomy when they could—destroying tools, coordinating work slowdowns, running away, setting fires, feigning illness, poisoning their masters, and taking up arms.61 It was also in this period that scientific racism began to develop “diagnoses” explaining black resistance to slavery. According to Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Louisiana physician and professor of medicine, African Americans who ran away from plantations suffered from “drapetomania,” while those who showed a lack of motivation for forced labor were infected by “dysaethesia aethiopica,” a condition whose symptoms were particular to the “Negro race.”62 “Rascality” may have more accurately described the actions of New York City’s election registrars and tax officials than African Americans, to whom the term was applied as a symptom of disease: While barely one thousand African Americans had voted in New York in the 1845 election, two thousand were nevertheless being taxed as voters by registrars and tax-collectors.63
In the wake of the 1846 New York State constitutional convention, which declined to change the onerous property and residency requirements for black voters, Gerrit Smith, the leader of the Liberty Party, wrote an open letter to voters of the state. He maintained that the New York State Constitution, as it stood, was denying political representation to the upwards of fifty thousand African Americans living in the state. Local and national black conventions were held, at which delegates expressed their ongoing opposition to the voting requirements targeting African Americans. From October 6–9, 1847, delegates for the National Convention of Colored People and their Friends met in Troy, New York. They resolved to push for the “procurement of political rights” and against “any plan of emancipation involving a resort to bloodshed.” Another black convention held in Boston the following year voted similarly to pursue “moral and political action.” In the midst of these meetings, resistance to legal and institutional control over African Americans took personal forms.64
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Embodying the larger fight for self-determination among those in the Northern free black community was Frederick Douglass’s struggle to develop his own voice and organizational base. From the time he met William Lloyd Garrison in 1841, Douglass assumed a moral suasionist position, opposing the mixing of abolitionism with the base politicking of electoral contests and parties. However, he had begun to reconsider his position as he entered one after another debate with his black peers, from Henry Highland Garnet to Theodore S. Wright (each active in antislavery societies advocating moral suasion and independent politics via the Liberty Party). Dialogue, along with further reading in law, political philosophy, and American government, increasingly led Douglass to view the U.S. Constitution as an antislavery document, not a “covenant with the devil,” as Garrison called it. Douglass would later say that “to refrain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery.”65 His “new reading” of the Constitution—which had been articulated by both Maria Stewart and later argued by Gerrit Smith—would eventually bring Douglass into direct conflict with his former mentor.66
In 1847, Douglass announced to Garrison his intention to start his own newspaper. Garrison was strongly opposed, stating that Douglass would not be able to maintain his lecturing schedule and run a paper (despite Garrison having done so himself for over a decade and a half). Douglass nevertheless organized the financial and logistical support to do so. On December 3, 1847, Douglass established the North Star in Rochester, New York, and it quickly became the most influential black newspaper of the day. Douglass not only denounced slavery in his editorial pages, but used the paper to advocate women’s political rights. In July of 1848, he traveled to Seneca Falls, New York, to attend the first in a series of annual women’s rights conventions. The convention had been organized by abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, prompted by Mott’s having been denied a seat several years earlier at an international antislavery meeting in London because she was female. With over 240 people in attendance (40 of whom were men), Douglass took the podium and helped to sway the convention to support a resolution calling for women’s suffrage, the most controversial of a number of women’s rights issues that were being discussed at the convention, including equal access to education, divorce rights, and equal rights to employment. The North Star’s masthead would exemplify Douglass’s radical view: “Right is of no Sex, Truth is of no Color.” Subscriptions to the paper were “two dollars per annum, always in advance.” Douglass, it seemed, was both visionary and practical.67
The positive reception given to the North Star by African Americans brought Douglass into even closer contact with black communities in the North and gave him the space to develop his political voice.68 Not surprisingly, Douglass’s relationship with Garrison was strained. Underlying the growing distance between the two was not only Douglass’s new perspective on the Constitution, but his growing political independence. The former fugitive from Maryland was becoming the most prominent black abolitionist in the nation, and increasingly convinced that moral suasion was insufficient as a tactic. Over the succeeding years he came to embrace the position that if the Constitution indeed mandated that the federal government abolish slavery, electoral political action aimed toward this end was not only necessary but an obligation.69
Other changes were afoot in the antislavery movement as the persistence of its organizers was beginning to have an impact on federal legislators. Two and a half years after the gag rule on antislavery petitions in Congress was lifted, the Wilmot Proviso, outlawing slavery in territories acquired through the Mexican-American War, was attached to several bills in the House of Representatives. The proviso, which originated with Ohio Democratic Representative Jacob Brinkerhoff but was named after Pennsylvania Democratic Representative David Wilmot, who had better standing in Congress, passed the House in 1847 but was tabled in the Senate. The introduction of and debate surrounding the proviso may have contributed to the Liberty Party’s decline that year, as many saw the major parties beginning to absorb elements of the abolitionist movement’s demands. However, the proviso also raised questions among those committed to the total and immediate abolition of slavery. As it turns out, the bill received few votes in 1848, the same year in which the Liberty Party divided into several factions. One faction nominated John P. Hale, a former Democratic congressman from Dover, New Hampshire, for president, while two other groups formally split from the party and created the Industrial Congress and the Liberty League. The League affirmed Gerrit Smith’s leadership role among political abolitionists by making him the head of their organization. Smith was then nominated for president by the League under the newly formed National Liberty Party, whose platform remained focused on immediate abolition.70 However, many within the old Liberty ranks were reconsidering the political benefits of an independent party centered on abolishing slavery and advancing civil and political rights for African Americans. Perhaps it was time to go broader now that the party had helped to make the restriction of slavery a national political issue.