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two. Abolitionism, the Liberty Party, and Free Soil
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two Abolitionism,theLibertyParty, andFreeSoil 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 ✓ ✓ You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. 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 owning at least $250 in real estate (the equivalent of $5,000 today), plus evidence of three continuous 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 28 in the balance of...