Liberty Party

Liberty Party, first antislavery political party in the United States. It was formed in 1839 by a group of individuals who broke away from the militant American Anti-Slavery Society. The party was organized on November 13 at Warsaw, New York. Five months later, at Albany, New York, the abolitionist leader James Gillespie Birney was nominated as a candidate for the U.S. presidency. In the election of 1840, Birney received 7069 votes. In 1844, when Birney was again the presidential candidate of the Liberty Party, he received 62,300 votes. This relatively small vote drew enough support away from Henry Clay, the antislavery Whig candidate, to ensure the election of James K. Polk, the proslavery Democratic candidate. The split among the abolitionist forces resulting from the formation and growth of the Liberty Party also enabled the proslavery forces to incorporate Texas into the Union as a slave state. The party continued to grow, and its candidates polled more than 74,000 votes in the congressional elections of 1846. In the following year the party nominated the abolitionist John Parker Hale for the presidency. Hale withdrew his candidacy in 1848 when the party merged with the antislavery Democrats and Whigs to form the Free-Soil Party.