Resolved, as the deliberate sense of this Convention, that any attempt on the part of the abolitionists of the United States to nominate candidates for the offices of President and Vice-President of this republic, or to organize a distinct political party, would be liable to put in imminent peril the integrity and success of the anti-slavery enterprise.
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and proceedings were ‘not in strict accordance with the genius and scope of the anti-slavery enterprise.’
Mr. Garrison declined to take an active part in the business of such a convention,1 which in the end proved rather a tame affair, sitting three days to produce three2 resolutions, to wit: that the members pledged themselves [almost unanimously] to vote for no man who would not avow his immediatism, and hence neither for Henry Clay nor for Martin Van Buren; that every abolitionist who had a right to vote was entreated to do so; that abolitionists were recommended to adopt such a course in respect to independent Presidential nominations as seemed best for the cause in each section.
A fourth resolution was passed by a manoeuvre half an hour before adjournment.
The business committee (on which Mr. Garrison had refused to serve with Stanton, Scott and Whittier) submitted a proposition looking to the nomination of a President and Vice-President for abolition suffrages.
In full convention this met with no favor, but at the last moment it was recalled from the table, several warm speeches made in its behalf, and no time allowed for reply.
Mr. Garrison suffered a second indignity at the hands of the president when the latter refused to put the following resolution, offered as an amendment to the committee's:
1 Ellis Gray Loring led the effective opposition to the third-party sentiment. (See George Bradburn's lively account in Lib. 9.138.) Orange Scott made furious thrusts, ‘accompanied by a peculiarly appropriate expression of face,’ at Mr. Garrison, who bore it like a Christian. This clergyman doubted if God would pardon a man's soul for omitting to vote for the slave. But political abolitionism meant something more than voting for the slave—it meant voting for the candidate of the party—under pain of clerical anathema. (See Myron Holley's resolution at West Bloomfield, N. Y., and Joseph C. Hathaway's comment in Lib. 10: 38.)
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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