New York State Convention of the Liberty League and National Reform Party

The combined New York State Convention of two abolitionist organizations, the Liberty League (a splinter group of the Liberty Party) and the National Reform Party (not to be confused with the modern-day party of that name), was held in Canastota on September 28, 1848. The site was the Toby House, just across the railroad tracks from the original location of the Dutch Reformed Church.

According to an account published in the Oneida Morning Herald of October 13, 1848, Samuel Wells of Madison County presided. Addresses were delivered by (among others) prominent abolitionist William Goodell, Peterboro abolitionist and philanthropist Gerrit Smith, abolitionist and later quack physician James Caleb Jackson, and abolitionist and schoolmaster Beriah Green of Oneida.

(Famed freethought orator Robert Green Ingersoll received his middle name as a tribute to Beriah Green; Green was a friend and fellow abolitionist to Ingersoll's father, the Rev. John Ingersoll; Green and had visited the Ingersoll home in Dresden shortly before Robert's birth in 1833.)

The party nominated an electoral ticket comprising
Gerrit Smith for President; Charles C. Foote for Vice President; William Goodell for Governor; Robert Anderson, for Lieutenant
Governor; John C. Harrington for Canal Commissioner; and Hiram Pitts for State Prison Inspector. Though none of these candidates was elected, it is presumed that each saw his candidacy primarily as an opportunity to bring further attention to the cause of abolition.

Thanks to Joe DiGiorgio for historical research.