Liberty Party

He was trying to build a big tent, and the genius was that he did it in such a way that Maybe not in the first presidential election in 1856, but the second one in 1860, where Lincoln was the presidential candidate, they won.

Lincoln decides to not join the Free Soil Movement, right? So this is in 1848, and it's kind of the first attempt— uh, you know, with all due respect to the Liberty party, but it's the, it's the first attempt at a sectional kind of a sectional party.

And it is a coalition of, like you said, it was the, uh, half of the Northern Democrats.

And maybe the motivation was they were mad at the other half of Northern Democrats.

Right.

But it was this idea of like, uh, certain wigs, conscience wigs, and, um, uh, You know, Liberty Party, anti-slavery people.

And the deal was, the compromise was, we don't want slavery to extend into the territories gained after the Mexican War.

Which is exactly Lincoln's position.

Anti-annexation voters saw him as unprincipled.

He lost New York by just five thousand votes, thanks to the Liberty Party splitting the anti-slavery vote.

That cost him the election.

Polk won one hundred and seventy electoral votes to one hundred and five.

His fireplace, which the rain had converted into a mud-puddle, was soon blazing again, and we sat down on the log benches around it to dry us.

On the well-flattened and somewhat faded beds of arborvitae leaves, which stretched on either hand under the eaves behind us, lay an old leaf of the Bible, some genealogical chapter out of the Old Testament, and, half buried by the leaves, we found Emerson's address on West India emancipation, which had been left here formerly by one of our company and had made two converts to the Liberty Party.

Here, as I was told, also an odd number of the Westminster Review for 1834 and a pamphlet entitled History of the Erection of the Monument on the Grave of Myron Holly.

This was the readable or reading matter in a lumberer's camp in the Maine woods, thirty miles from a road, which would be given up to the bears in a fortnight.

And it's not here in the correspondence between George and Richard.

But, uh, while I was reading this and reading it from the point of view of George and Richard, at this point, were the men who would become the abolitionists [chuckles] reading it in, in, uh, Philadelphia or Boston? Uh, was the Libert- the Liberty Party, was it reading Nat Turner's revolt? How wide was the reporting at the time, Professor?

Well, the Liberty Party doesn't exist till the 1840s, but there are abolitionists, people like William Lloyd Garrison, who is publishing The Liberator newspaper in Boston, and he latches ahold of the story and he says, "Look, you, you, you slave masters, you ought to see the light, and you ought to free your slaves because there's gonna be more of this happening." Now, the slave masters, however, say, "You know why this happened? It's because issues of The Liberator were smuggled down here, and you're really to blame for this." So the real solution, according to the slave masters, is let's suppress the abolitionists in the North.

If they would shut up, then the control of the enslavers in the South would be more thorough.

So it, it intensifies this debate between, uh, people who are pro-slavery in the United States and people who are anti-slavery.

Salmon P.

Chase was a... uh, Liberty party candidate.

This was a single issue anti-slavery party in Ohio.

Later he becomes a free soiler.

In particular, in the election of 1844, this is defining for him.

He supports Clay, but Clay loses because, in Lincoln's opinion, the Liberty Party, the abolitionists in New York, drained away enough votes to deprive the Whig ticket of the key electoral victory they needed to secure a majority.

And so he spends most of the rest of his career trying to forge a coalition, what they called fusion, between the Whigs and the anti-slavery forces.

They do this behind the scenes in the early 1850s in Illinois, and Lincoln's a part of it.

And a rival organization is founded called the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.

And then there's a third faction that's independent of either of those called the Liberty Party that also is established in the spring of that year.

And so you have the anti-slavery movement going through this turmoil where disunity is becoming the norm.

Whenever a group of abolitionists are gathering in Groton, Massachusetts in August of 1840, one of the key things they're trying to do is find a way to reunite all the abolitionists around a common cause.

But yeah, this was something that just the more radical, abrasive abolitionists were willing to do just because they were going to do anything and everything they could to raise awareness and try to end slavery.

So that's a bit about Beach.

Now, how did these helpers try to change laws by sending letters to Congress and starting a new political group called the Liberty Party?

Yeah, great question.