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The idea that slavery was unconstitutional had a long history. It's a comforting idea, but it wasn't shared by most abolitionists or opponents of slavery, perhaps because other Americans wouldn't let them fall into such happy complaceny about American history.

If that is how you assess it, you are missing the argument entirely. Try reading Spooner's book and return when you know what you are talking about.

And just how large Spooner's faction was is another question. The Liberty Party was only one part of the abolitionist movement.

That it was, but never have I asserted anything otherwise.

Non-party activists like Garrison and Phillips probably carried more weight.

You can speculate that much if you desire, but it was a leader of the Liberty Party faction, Smith, who won election to major political office, not Garrison.

Many of their number joined Van Buren's Free Soil coalition in 1848. Free Soilers were of course not primarily abolitionists, but there were many abolitionists and opponents of slavery in their number, as was true of the later Republican party.

Tell your buddy mac that. He implied that they were one in the same and plagiarized statements about it off a website a few posts back to "prove" this.

Theodore Clarke Smith's "The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest" (1897) says that the national convention of the Liberty Party met in Buffalo on October 20, 1847 and voted down a resolution not to nominate anyone who did not believe that slavery was unconstitutional That was a clear slap in the faces of Smith, Goodell and Spooner.

Yet only two years later, they did the exact opposite and formally endorsed Spooner's book.

Smith and Goodell bolted the party and their Liberty League nominated Smith for President as an alternative National Liberty Party candidate. Smith's supporters were only a small part of the anti-slavery movement

You are blurring the lines now between abolitionism and simple "anti-slavery."

After the election of 1848, Gerrit Smith's supporters once again had control of the Liberty Party, but the party was only a shadow of what it had been when James Birney ran in 1844. If the Liberty Party endorsed Spooner's book in 1849 it was already on the way out, a rump party confined to Smith's followers.

Your buddy mac asserted the same thing, yet Smith won election to Congress three years later in 1852 and Spooner's book became a topic of discussion there at many points over the next decade. The party organization, as it formerly existed, alterred and realigned, but the figures themselves, Spooner and Smith, rose in prominence in the 1850's.

It's not surprising that Smith promoted a book that argued at length for the ideas that he had already stood up for years before, or that Smith's followers endorsed a book that he'd bought and paid for

So in other words, you are (a) attacking the book's significance because Smith agreed with it, though in a less complete and less articulated form, prior to that book and because (b) Smith funded it. In other words, you are using the classic diversion tactic of appealing to its circumstances rather than its arguments. Your new line of argument is emerging in a very bizarre manner, x. No longer does it seem to be the line that Spooner did next to nothing. Now you see that he did indeed do something, so your response is to diminish that something, which in turn diminishes Spooner's accomplishment of something, thereby achieving the same result of claiming that Spooner did next to nothing. You first claimed that Spooner was a minor figure of no significant influence on any major abolitionist or anything in the political scene. At that point, you yourself had admitted that Smith was a major abolitionist. But now that you have finally discovered that Smith heavily embraced and forwarded Spooner's abolitionist treatise, you respond by in turn diminishing Smith's contribution to abolitionism as but a small faction in itself. So now we hear that Smith wasn't very important compared to others, that Smith's faction was "controlled" by him, that the faction he "controlled" was of no significance, and that from 1848 on out it was downhill for that faction (even though Smith attained the height of his political career in 1852 when he was elected to Congress!). Since you could not discard Spooner as a man of no influence due to his heavy influence on Smith, now you are trying to diminish Smith, thereby casting the man who was heavily influenced by Spooner as minor himself - even though only a few days ago you were calling him major - since that is evidently what it takes to discard Spooner. The word is "convenient," x, and you seem to have a convenient excuse for ignoring or discarding irrefutable historical facts that conflict with what you say. I ask, x, what is next? Are you going to claim next that the floor of the United States Congress is not an important place of debate, since Spooner's work was discussed there, and since admitting that it was discussed there conflicts with your desired point that Spooner was not important? "Spooner was discussed in Congress, so Congress must not have been an important place of discussion" - is that the line, x? Where does it end?

One could draw a parallel to today's party situation. Howard Phillips is a big man in the Constitution Party, but not a major figure in American Conservatism. David McReynolds is a leader in the rump Socialist party, but far from the most important American leftist or socialist. So it was with Gerrit Smith.

But neither McReynolds nor Phillips has won a seat in Congress, x, and especially not after the point that most would claim they left the mainstream of their respective movements. Yet again, x, it all comes down to what is in fact driving your argument. It is not historical fact that drives your argument, but rather a desire to diminish Spooner. If somebody who you said was of great prominence only a few days ago is now found by you to have supported Spooner, your line changes and he is no longer of prominence but a limb of the fringe himself. What brings about this change for you, x? I think we both know - his association with Lysander Spooner, who you have already decided, all ammount of fact suggesting otherwise be damned, is of "minor" importance to abolitionism. Where does it end, x? Are you next going to call Smith's election to Congress in 1852 (AFTER the point you pronounced him unimportant to the "mainstream" of the abolitionist movement) a minor act in itself?

The argument that the Liberty Party was important because it had elected one abolitionist to Congress is weak.

...here we go again. Just as I expected - "winning a seat in Congress isn't so important either."

There were several abolitionists in Congress as Whigs, Free Soilers, Republicans, "Know Nothings," or perhaps even Democrats.

Not really. Perhaps what could be called "country club" abolitionists of the Charles Sumner type, but they were not true abolitionists any more than Ken Lay was a true Republican. But the true dyed in the wool abolitionists, be they of Garrison or Smith or another, were seldom elected to anything at that time. Gerrit Smith's election to Congress stands out as one of the only cases where a true hard-line abolitionist was ever elected to a major office.