Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/263

Rh politicians of the two great organizations probably thought at the time of less practical importance even than Tyler's corporal's guard. It was the convention of the “Liberty party.” Its presidential candidates were James G. Birney and Thomas Morris. The Liberty party consisted of earnest anti-slavery men who pursued their objects by political action. They were not in sympathy with those abolitionists who lost themselves in “no government” theories, who denounced the Union and the Constitution as a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” and who abhorred the exercise of the suffrage under the Constitution as a participation in sin. In the language of Birney, they regarded the national Constitution “with unabated affection.” They interpreted it as an anti-slavery document, and declared that they had “nothing to ask except what the Constitution authorizes, no change to desire except that the Constitution be restored to its primitive purity.”

Their first practical step was to interrogate the candidates of the existing parties concerning their views on slavery, in order to throw the weight of their votes accordingly. Then they attempted a party organization of their own, to furnish a nucleus around which future political anti-slavery movements might gather. Their first presidential candidates, as we have seen, were offered to the people in the election of 1840, when they received about seven thousand votes. The popular excitement caused by the Texas question augmented their