Liberty Party

The first US political party with an abolitionist platform, founded in 1839. It opposed the annexation of Texas. Liberty Party members believed in using political means to help abolish slavery. Leading supporters included US poet John Greenleaf Whittier and politician James Gillespie Birney, who ran for president in 1840 and 1844. The party dissolved in 1848 when its members joined antislavery Democrats and Whigs to form the Free Soil Party.

A group of abolitionists organized the party in Warsaw, New York, in 1838, and it held its first convention the following year in Albany, New York. Less radical than William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, Liberty Party members were gradualists, who campaigned for specific measures such as preventing slavery from spreading rather than its total and immediate abolition.

As the Liberty Party candidate, Birney received few votes in the 1840 presidential election. In 1844, however, he drew enough votes away from antislavery Whig candidate Henry Clay to give the presidency to proslavery Democrat James K Polk. The abolitionists' political division also allowed proslavery leaders to incorporate Texas into the Union as a slave state (see Texas, annexation of).