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This chapter highlights Liberty Party electoral strategies. Emphasizing Liberty condemnations of both the Whigs and Democrats as complicit in sustaining the Slave Power, this chapter explicates rhetorical strategies Liberty men deployed in campaigns across the North. This chapter also shows how Liberty Party activists like Joshua Leavitt exploited majority-rule elections in New England to wield disruptive balances of power and force numerous runoff elections that drew added attention to Liberty attacks on the proslavery orientations of both major parties. The chapter also examines the Liberty Party’s fierce opposition to Whig slaveholding standard bearer Henry Clay, including in the pivotal presidential election of 1844. In its concluding pages, the chapter explains how Liberty partisans understood the election of New Hampshire’s John P. Hale to the U.S. Senate as foreshadowing new opportunities to broaden the anti-Slave Power impulse in the face of rising proslavery expansionism.

This chapter argues that the cooperative, open environment of the Old Northwest allowed women abolitionists to thrive in church-oriented and political anti-slavery. It explores how Unitarian, Presbyterian, and Congregational women articulated their anti-slavery sentiment within their churches, sometimes trying to build opposition to slavery where none had previously existed. Other women felt betrayed by their ministers' failure to preach the abolitionist message and abandoned them to form new churches. With the rise of anti-slavery splinter churches that supported the Liberty Party, women found spiritual avenues for engaging in partisanship. This increased civic involvement challenged common assumptions about the meaning of public and private.

This chapter demonstrates how Liberty Party coalitionists like Gamaliel Bailey, Salmon Chase, and Henry B. Stanton paved the way for a broadened anti-Slave Power coalition before and during the election of 1848 presidential campaign. Carefully cultivating contacts with antislavery Conscience Whigs like Joshua Giddings and Charles Sumner, as well as with New York’s Democratic Barnburners, a cadre of savvy Liberty managers prepared the ground for an eventual coalition following the anticipated proslavery results of the major-party nominating conventions. When antislavery Democrats and Whigs were finally ripe for the plucking, Liberty coalitionists had already put plans in motion for the founding of the Free Soil Party, which adopted Chase’s platform resolutions emphasizing opposition to the Slave Power. The chapter concludes by showing how the Free Soil Party’s presidential defeat was nonetheless accompanied by the election of a substantial Free Soil congressional bloc, including the selection of Salmon Chase to serve as a Free Soil United States senator.

This chapter examines William Lloyd Garrison's strategies and tactics in politics in Massachusetts throughout the early and mid-1840s. It looks at how Garrison and his allies pitted their non-voting, perfectionist approaches to political issues of black equality against those of their hated abolitionist opponent, the Liberty Party. During the elections, the Liberal Party fielded its own candidates, resorted to electioneering, and formed coalitions with other influential political parties. The Liberty Party, the nation's first political party dedicated to emancipation, had a major role in the making of civil rights initiatives tackled by the Massachusetts General Court during the legislative session of 1843. When it came to issues vital to the interests of Massachusetts's African Americans, such as repealing laws that criminalized miscegenation and allowed racial segregation, members of the Liberty Party proved to be more effective advocates of abolitionism. The Liberty Party won the support of female abolitionists, who believed that the party offered opportunities to participate in genuine electoral politics that Garrison and his group could not.

This chapter highlights political abolitionists’ strategies for building collaborative relationships with prominent antislavery politicians, especially a handful of potential Whig allies in the U.S. House of Representatives. Political abolitionists recognized that antislavery representatives like ex-President John Quincy Adams, Seth Gates, Joshua Giddings, and William Slade, could broadcast antislavery arguments to a national audience. Working together to produce floor controversies, especially over the gag rule, that could dramatize the problem of slaveholders’ political power, abolitionist lobbyists found antislavery Whigs could be powerful partners. For political abolitionists, though, navigating relationships with Whig politicians who were constantly juggling ideological conviction and partisan obligations became even more challenging after the founding of the Liberty Party. These tensions appear most pronouncedly in the lobbying work of abolitionist newspaperman Joshua Leavitt, who moved into a congressional boarding house that came to be known as “Abolition House” to facilitate political abolitionist efforts to lobby and cooperate with antislavery congressmen to further diffuse an anti-Slave Power message.

This Chapter deals with the wider question of political influence and how anti-slavery activists engaged with politics. In the past, this topic has been dominated by studies of anti-slavery petitions. While recognising the importance of petitioning, this chapter looks at complementary forms of political protest, chief among them the pledging of prospective parliamentary candidates, or what in the USA was called ‘the interrogatory system’. Pledging proved singularly effective in flushing out reluctant candidates but by its very nature it was seen as symptomatic of a new kind of politics that was at once brash, noisy and confrontational. The chapter looks at how these tactics were widely adopted in the USA, where direct political action eventually led to the organization of the Liberty Party, a new departure that took it as axiomatic that the existing two-party system (Whigs/Democrats) was not working. The chapter argues that the Liberty Party had a significant impact on divorcing the federal government from the idea of slavery.

The interstate slave trade was a prominent issue in antislavery politics throughout most of the 1840s, but it was the election of 1848 that brought about a profound change. In April 1840, the Liberty Party held its founding convention in Albany, New York, and nominated James G. Birney, a slaveowner turned abolitionist, as its candidate for the presidency. Between 1841 and 1846, various Liberty groups issued resolutions or addresses calling for a ban on the interstate slave trade. This chapter examines the role of the slave trade question in antislavery politics between 1840 and 1848, and the reasons why that role diminished rather than expanded later on. It argues that the threat to the interstate slave trade, despite being feeble by the late 1850s, nevertheless made white southerners deeply fearful of the emergent political party, which would eventually emerge victorious under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln.

This chapter highlights the extent to which many of the Liberty Party’s antislavery and anti-Slave Power arguments came to infiltrate congressional discourse in debates over the Wilmot Proviso, the policy first proposed in 1846 that the U.S. Congress bar slavery from all western territory acquired through the ongoing Mexican-American War. Over the ensuing congressional sessions, the vast majority of northern Whigs and Democrats went to great lengths to advocate non-extension of slavery and justified this demand with increasingly militant anti-Slave Power rhetoric. In the process, members registered, sometimes implicitly but often openly, the mounting antislavery constituent pressure that many mainstream northern congressmen now faced.

Chapter Two traces the rise of the political antislavery movement. It shows how three pioneering leaders—Joshua Giddings, Salmon P. Chase, and Charles Sumner—continued the struggle to “denationalize” slavery. They would abolish it in the District of Columbia, prevent its spread to new territories, exempt the federal government from responsibility for fugitive slaves, limit the interstate slave trade, and bar new slave states from entering the Union. But the quest for electoral success created pressures to pull back from a broad-focus antislavery agenda. The rise of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s widened the appeal of antislavery politics, but Republicans toned down the antislavery stances taken by the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party in the 1840s and early 1850s.

This introduction establishes the book’s argument about the transformative influence of antislavery third-party politics, as practiced first by the abolitionist Liberty Party and then by the Free Soil Party. The introduction situates the book’s argument and research in the broader context of the historiography of both the abolitionist movement and the politics of sectional conflict. The introduction also provides important background on the history of antislavery politics in the era before the mid-1830s.

This conclusion summarizes key arguments from the main narrative of the book, emphasizing the success political abolitionists achieved in promoting and expanding anti-Slave Power politics across the North. The chapter also narrates how those anti-Slave Power arguments shaped Republican Party politics in the late 1850s and influenced the policies that Republican politicians pursued to advance abolition in the midst of the Civil War. In discussing the antislavery politics and policymaking of the pre-war and wartime Republican Party, this conclusion especially focuses on Republicans in the U.S. Congress, among them former Liberty Party and Free Soil Party activists.

This chapter demonstrates how abolitionist arguments about Southerners’ disproportionate political power developed into a sophisticated analyses condemning the Whig and Democratic Parties as the Slave Power’s key auxiliaries. Abolitionists developed and increasingly emphasized these arguments especially in response to proslavery infringements on civil liberties, like the House gag rule on antislavery petitions and southern postal censorship. The chapter then shows how the Slave Power argument helped impel political abolitionists to organized political action, from the petition controversy to candidate interrogation and ultimately toward third-party politics. The election of 1840 particularly sharpened the abolitionist critique of the Second Party System and inspired the founding of the abolitionist Liberty Party.

Wong entertained the notion that he could find political will to lift restrictions on citizenship for Chinese Americans. However, as both the Republican and Democratic Parties called for the prevention of immigration of low-cost Chinese labour, there was no political party which Wong could actually turn to. Therefore he attempted to establish a new American Liberal Party. He published his fourth and last newspaper as well, and he intended to establish a Confucian temple in Chicago. All of his endeavours might have something to do with his desire to preach Confucianism to American society.

The Jeffersonian Electoral College performed as expected until, after the rise of Andrew Jackson, plurality winner-take-all became the prevailing method among states for appointing electors. Even then, the Jeffersonian Electoral College has usually operated consistently with the compound version of majority rule that the Jeffersonians had in mind. Using a mathematical measure, one can identify which elections clearly comply with the Jeffersonian conception of compound majority rule and which, by contrast, require further analysis to confirm their conformity to majoritarian principles. Undertaking this analysis, only two elections in nineteenth century—1844 and 1884—clearly contravene the Jeffersonian expectation for how the system was supposed to work. Of the two, the so-called accident of 1844 was hugely consequential for the rest of American history: the winner, James Polk, took the nation to war against Mexico in order to expand territory, particularly for slavery, according to his vision of Manifest Destiny.

1. With Congress unable to decide on Texas annexation before its summer recess, the elections of 1844 promised to double as a referendum on Texas. Whigs and Democrats realized they would have to choose carefully their positions and presidential candidates. This was less true of the new group of anti-slavery advocates: the Liberty Party. Democrat James K. Polk barely won the election, pledging to “reannex” Texas (which was accomplished before he took office), purchase California, and abrogate the Oregon treaty with Great Britain. Americans now recognized that any expansion outside of Oregon would come at the expense of Catholic Mexico. By 1845 the literature had shaped American views of their southern neighbor as a decrepit pseudo-republic cursed by despotism and superstition, complementing extant stories involving priests, nuns, and confessionals and fitting older ecclesiastical and theological arguments against the Catholic Church. By the time war erupted, Americans were accustomed to a rhetoric of anti-Catholicism and Anglo-Saxonism that had become inseparable from Manifest Destiny sentiment, while giving them the most effective means of understanding their role in advancing republican principles. This rhetoric soon proved flexible enough both to support military conquest, the denigration of the enemy, and annexation and to oppose them.