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Before the Buffalo Convention assembled, Mr. Garrison betook himself to the water-cure, and it fell to Quincy to counsel the readers of the Liberator in regard to the budding Free Soil Party.
Though its aims were circumscribed, he said, abolitionists must incidentally give it1 help.
‘Their relation to it is of a totally different character from that they bore to the late Liberty Party,’ which was the antagonist and not the ally of the antislavery movement, and officered by deserters.
The Free Soil movement sprang from an honest hatred of slavery, and it would be fed by the abolitionists—the first product of whose teachings was always political voters—as its predecessor had been.2 ‘It was our agitation alone,’ continued Mr. Quincy, ‘that kept the Third Party alive until it was merged in the Independent Democratic Party by the nomination of Mr. Hale.’3
Hale had, very deliberately, accepted the Liberty Party's4 nomination, declining to take the badge of its name, but consenting to its ends.
Soon after, he gave the finishing stroke to the myth of sole heirship to immediate abolitionism so assiduously cherished by the Leavitt, Birney, and Stanton faction.
Holding that faction's commission for the Presidency, he assured the U. S. Senate that “we desire no interference with, nor disturbance of, the existing institutions of the States. . . . Let us alone—it is all that we desire, all that we ask.”
Lib. 18.30. Some weeks later
2 Wendell Phillips wrote to Elizabeth Pease in October, 1844 (Ms.): ‘In three towns where I lectured summer before this, the Liberty Party vote trebled the next election; and though some thought I did not, on these occasions, labor as much on the point of the sin of that party as I ought, still, with us all, the result is something like this. Wherever Abby Kelley lectured last winter, they followed the next week, and would often, notwithstanding all she could do, get more subscribers for their papers than she could for the Liberator. You, who know the Liberator, know that it requires a pretty full-grown man to relish its meat.’ Earlier in the same year, addressing the same correspondent, he wrote (Ms. April, 1844): ‘As fast as we, the Old Organization, make abolitionists, the new converts run right into Liberty Party, and become almost or wholly hostile to us. This results from the strong leaning of our national character to politics. . . . It is disheartening to see that every blow we strike thus tells in a degree against ourselves, and yet duty bids us keep on striking.’
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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