they declared there should be “absolute and unqualified division of the General Government from slavery”—which implied an amendment of the constitution. They proposed to use ordinary moral and political means to attain their ends—not, like the Garrisonians, to abstain from voting, or favour the dissolution of the Union.
After 1840 the attempt began in earnest to organize the Liberty Party thoroughly, and unite all anti-slavery men. The North-west, where “there was, after 1840, very little known of Garrison and his methods” (T. C. Smith), was the most promising field, but though the contest of state and local campaigns gave morale to the party, it made scant political gains (in 1843 it cast hardly 10% of the total vote); it could not convince the people that slavery should be made the paramount question in politics. In 1844, however, the Texas question gave slavery precisely this pre-eminence in the presidential campaign. Until then, neither Whigs nor Democrats had regarded the Liberty Party seriously; now, however, each party charged that the Liberty movement was corruptly auxiliary to the other. As the campaign progressed, the Whigs alternately abused the Liberty men and made frantic appeals for their support. But the Liberty men were strongly opposed to Clay personally; and even if his equivocal campaign letters (see Clay, Henry) had not left exceedingly small ground for belief that he would resist the annexation of Texas, still the Liberty men were not such as to admit that an end justifies the means; therefore they again nominated Birney. He received 62,263 votes[1]—many more than enough in New York to have carried that state and the presidency for Clay, had they been thrown to his support. The Whigs, therefore, blamed the Liberty Party for Democratic success and the annexation of Texas; but—quite apart from the issue of political ethics—it is almost certain that though Clay’s chances were injured by the Liberty ticket, they were injured much more outside the Liberty ranks, by his own quibbles.[2] After 1844 the Liberty Party made little progress. Its leaders were never very strong as politicians, and its ablest organizer, Birney, was about this time compelled by an accident to abandon public life. Moreover, the election of 1844 was in a way fatal to the party; for it seemed to prove that though “abolition” was not the party programme, still its antecedents and personnel were too radical to unite the North; and above all it could not, after 1844, draw the disaffected Whigs, for though their party was steadily moving toward anti-slavery their dislike of the Liberty Party effectually prevented union. Indeed, no party of one idea could hope to satisfy men who had been Whigs or Democrats. At the same time, anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats were segregating in state politics, and the issue of excluding slavery from the new territory acquired from Mexico afforded a golden opportunity to unite all anti-slavery men on the principle of the Wilmot Proviso (1846). The Liberty Party reached its greatest strength (casting 74,017 votes) in the state elections of 1846. Thereafter, though growing somewhat in New England, it rapidly became ineffective in the rest of the North. Many, including Birney, thought it should cease to be an isolated party of one idea—striving for mere balance of power between Whigs and Democrats, welcoming small concessions from them, almost dependent upon them. Some wished to revivify it by making it a party of general reform. One result was the secession and formation of the Liberty League, which in 1847 nominated Gerrit Smith for the presidency. No adequate effort was made to take advantage of the disintegration of other parties. In October 1847, at Buffalo, was held the third and last national convention. John P. Hale—whose election to the United States Senate had justified the first successful union of Liberty men with other anti-slavery men in state politics—was nominated for the presidency. But the nomination by the Democrats of Lewis Cass shattered the Democratic organization in New York and the North-west; and when the Whigs nominated General Taylor, adopted a non-committal platform, and showed hostility to the Wilmot Proviso, the way was cleared for a union of all anti-slavery men. The Liberty Party, abandoning therefore its independent nominations, joined in the first convention and nominations of the Free Soil Party (q.v.), thereby practically losing its identity, although it continued until after the organization of the Republican Party to maintain something of a semi-independent organization. The Liberty Party has the unique honour among third-parties in the United States of seeing its principles rapidly adopted and realized.
See T. C. Smith, History of the Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest (Harvard University Historical Studies, New York, 1897), and lives and writings of all the public men mentioned above; also of G. W. Julian, J. R. Giddings and S. P. Chase.
LIBITINA, an old Roman goddess of funerals. She had a sanctuary in a sacred grove (perhaps on the Esquiline), where, by an ordinance of Servius Tullius, a piece of money (lucar Libitinae) was deposited whenever a death took place. Here the undertakers (libitinarii), who carried out all funeral arrangements by contract, had their offices, and everything necessary was kept for sale or hire; here all deaths were registered for statistical purposes. The word Libitina then came to be used for the business of an undertaker, funeral requisites, and (in the poets) for death itself. By later antiquarians Libitina was sometimes identified with Persephone, but more commonly (partly or completely) with Venus Lubentia or Lubentina, an Italian goddess of gardens. The similarity of name and the fact that Venus Lubentia had a sanctuary in the grove of Libitina favoured this idea. Further, Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 23) mentions a small statue at Delphi of Aphrodite Epitymbia (A. of tombs = Venus Libitina), to which the spirits of the dead were summoned. The inconsistency of selling funeral requisites in the temple of Libitina, seeing that she is identified with Venus, is explained by him as indicating that one and the same goddess presides over birth and death; or the association of such things with the goddess of love and pleasure is intended to show that death is not a calamity, but rather a consummation to be desired. Libitina may, however, have been originally an earth goddess, connected with luxuriant nature and the enjoyments of life (cf. lub-et, lib-ido); then, all such deities being connected with the underworld, she also became the goddess of death, and that side of her character predominated in the later conceptions.
See Plutarch, Numa, 12; Dion. Halic. iv. 15; Festus xvi., s.v. “Rustica Vinalia”; Juvenal xii. 121, with Mayor’s note; G. Wissowa in Roscher’s Lexicon der Mythologie, s.v.
LIBMANAN, a town of the province of Ambos Camarines, Luzon, Philippine Islands, on the Libmanan river, 11 m. N.W. of Nueva Cáceres, the capital. Pop. (1903) 17,416. It is about 412 m. N.E. of the Bay of San Miguel. Rice, coco-nuts, hemp, Indian corn, sugarcane, bejuco, arica nuts and camotes, are grown in the vicinity, and the manufactures include hemp goods, alcohol (from coco-nut-palm sap), copra, and baskets, chairs, hammocks and hats of bejuco and bamboo. The Libmanan river, a tributary of the Bicol, into which it empties 2 m. below the town, is famous for its clear cold water and for its sulphur springs. The language is Bicol.
LIBO, in ancient Rome, the name of a family belonging to the
Scribonian gens. It is chiefly interesting for its connexion with
the Puteal Scribonianum or Puteal Libonis in the forum at
Rome,[3] dedicated or restored by one of its members, perhaps
the praetor of 204 B.C., or the tribune of the people in 149. In
its vicinity the praetor’s tribunal, removed from the comitium
in the 2nd century B.C., held its sittings, which led to the place
becoming the haunt of litigants, money-lenders and business
people. According to ancient authorities, the Puteal Libonis
- ↑ Birney’s vote was reduced by a disgraceful election trick by the Whigs (the circulation of a forged letter on the eve of the election); a trick to which he had exposed himself by an ingenuously honest reception of Democratic advances in a matter of local good-government in Michigan.
- ↑ E.g. Horace Greeley made the Whig charge; but in later life he repeatedly attributed Clay’s defeat simply to Clay’s own letters; and for Millard Fillmore’s important opinion see footnote to Know Nothing Party.
- ↑ Puteal was the name given to an erection (or enclosure) on a spot which had been struck by lightning; it was so called from its resemblance to the stone kerb or low enclosure round a well (puteus).
