In the Balance of Power. Omar H. Ali
At least 2,798 of these votes came from New York State, where 50,031 African Americans lived, or 2.1 percent of the population of the state. In New York City, where 16,358 African Americans lived, or 5.2 percent of the population of the city, black voters in the Fifth and Eighth wards supported the third party against Tammany Hall.26 While less than a single percent of the total national vote was cast for the Liberty Party’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates, it was enough to begin building an electoral base from which further campaigns could be launched.27 Within six months, the party’s central nominating committee, which included black leaders Theodore S. Wright, who led the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, and Charles B. Ray, editor of the Colored American, met in New York, looking toward the next election.28
Following the 1840 election, black abolitionists who had not supported the Liberty Party began to move toward it. Salmon P. Chase, esteemed in the black community for his defense of fugitive slaves, joined the party in 1841 and soon assumed a leading role.29 Between 1840 and 1843, a number of statewide black conventions would meet at which candidates were individually endorsed to run on the Liberty ticket. Economic arguments were added to the moral and political arguments against slavery: Chase developed the concept of the “Slave Power,” the idea that slave owners were conspiring to seize control of the federal government and stop the progress of liberty. Meanwhile, fellow white abolitionist Joshua Leavitt, who had helped found the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, argued in a speech, “The Political Power of Slavery and the financial Power of Slavery,” that Northern commercial interests would perish if slaveholding interests were left unchecked. Leavitt’s address was carried in all the major black and white abolitionist newspapers of the day and widely distributed at state and national conventions, including at the 1841 national Liberty Party convention. Delegates at the convention backed Leavitt’s economic arguments and passed resolutions to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and any new territories, as well as to oppose the federal fugitive slave law and the “three-fifths” clause in the Constitution. The resolutions were supplemented by calls for the extension of black voting rights and greater African American participation in the electoral process. Black support for the third party grew decisively. The next year, delegates of the Colored State Convention met in Rochester, New York, where they passed their own resolution to support the Liberty Party; and in Massachusetts, Garnet delivered one of the major addresses at the Liberty Party’s statewide meeting. According to Benjamin Quarles, Garnet’s speech was enthusiastically received at Faneuil Hall in Boston, where the “mixed” audience, it was reported, “constantly interrupted him with laughter, applause, and encouraging cries of ‘hear, hear.’”30
African Americans would begin actively campaigning for the third party in the fall of 1843.31 From August 15 to 19, the National Convention of Colored Citizens met in Buffalo, New York, where Garnet rallied support for the Liberty Party.32 Rev. Amos G. Beman served as president; Frederick Douglass, A. M. Summer, James Sharp, F. Pierce, and W. W. Mathews served as vice presidents; and Charles B. Ray, James Duffin, and A. Francis served as secretaries.33 Garnet, along with Charles B. Ray, William C. Munroe, and Theodore S. Wright, led the debate against the moral suasionists. While Douglass and Massachusetts delegate Charles Lenox Remond opposed any alliance between the convention and the Liberty Party, they were outvoted by nearly fifty others who supported formal endorsement. The political abolitionists carried the convention. There were only seven dissenting votes against endorsing the Liberty Party, which was holding its national convention at the end of the month.34
Black leaders had generated grassroots support among African Americans by the time delegates met for the Liberty Party’s national nominating convention in Buffalo on August 30, 1843. In addition to the national black convention held in New York City two weeks earlier, the Liberator reported that black New Yorkers met in Rochester, where they also passed a resolution in support of the Liberty Party.35 Black and white delegates arrived from all of the free states, except New Hampshire, to attend the Liberty Party convention. Wesley describes the national meeting as “the most significant convention in the history of the Negro’s political life in the United States prior to the Civil War … the first time in American history that Negro citizens were actively in the leadership of a political convention.”36
The national Liberty Party’s black delegates were led by Garnet, Ray, and Ward, who were either appointed to various party committees or given prominent roles in the convention. Garnet was appointed to the committee that would nominate officers and delivered the news of the national black convention’s support for the Liberty Party; Ray, who served as one of the convention’s secretaries, was appointed to the committee to make a roll of the convention; while Ward had opened up the convention with a prayer, which he followed with a formal address to the body.37 Birney was again nominated as the party’s standard bearer, but this time Thomas Morris received the vice-presidential nod. Morris had built his credentials as an abolitionist sympathizer while serving as a Democrat in Ohio in both the House and the U.S. Senate from the 1810s through the mid-1830s. In addition to the nominations of Birney and Morris, two key resolutions—the 35th and the 36th—were passed at the convention. Designed to reach out to black voters, resolution 35 demanded an end to any form of discrimination based on race, that is, “to remove all … remnants and effects of the slave system.” Meanwhile, resolution 36 welcomed “colored fellow citizens” into the party in order to “secure the rights of mankind.”38 Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen, a black abolitionist from Syracuse, began stumping for the Liberty Party following its national convention. In time, he was joined by other black leaders.39
Despite the Liberty Party’s organizing drive in the early 1840s, most African Americans continued to remain distant toward, if not skeptical about, electoral politics. After all, the vast majority of black people were legally blocked from voting. However, as Hanes Walton Jr. notes, many tried to be “in both camps, supporting both the moral suasionists and the political abolitionists.”40 Some were disdainful of moral suasion being presented as the only valid tactic in the abolitionist struggle, and supported multiple means toward emancipation, including violence against slavemasters and their collaborators. For the three-and-a-half million slaves in the nation, there were few quick choices other than to run away or physically revolt if they wanted to be free, even as many attempted, over the period of years, sometimes decades, to buy their own or loved one’s freedom.41 The situation in the United States was in some ways analogous to that of slaves in other parts of the hemisphere. In New Grenada, 82 percent of recorded acts of black defiance against slavery during the colonial period of what would become the republic of Colombia involved runaways, either as individuals or in the formation of maroon settlements.42 Far fewer engaged in armed revolt, whether in South or North America, which tended to be suicidal given the kinds of controls slavemasters had over their slave populations. Heavily armed white militias regularly patrolled the rural South, and punishment was liberally applied to those even slightly suspected of planning a revolt. But revolting had other costs. It invariably meant having harm come to family members and friends for being connected to the instigator. The fear of such retaliation was a major deterrent to armed rebellion even among the most independent-minded and militant slaves.
Rarely did slavemasters manumit their slaves as moral suasionists urged; Liberty Party candidate Birney was a notable exception, having freed the twenty-one slaves he inherited. Even moral suasionist Douglass had exercised violence, challenging the slave-breaker Edward Covey in Maryland as part of his ordeal out of slavery.43 The willingness to use violence as a legitimate, albeit dangerous, tactic against slavery reflected the real-life and death experiences of those who had been enslaved and expressed the growing frustration with and general failure of moral suasion. Taking up arms was a radical position for which the fugitive Henry Highland Garnet is perhaps best remembered. However, his more significant contribution to the abolitionist struggle was probably the leadership role he played in the development of the early third-party movement.
During the National Negro Convention of 1843, Garnet justified armed insurrection as part of the barrage of tactics being used to combat slavery. Because violence was fundamental to maintaining the