As it was for many antebellum reformers, temperance was Goodell’s portal to the arena of social critique. However, he was never comfortable as a single-issue reformer. His antislavery sentiments were unwelcome in some corners of the temperance community and, by the early 1830s, abolition had become his chief cause. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and through much of the decade he collaborated closely with Garrison.

Addressing the New England Anti-Slavery Society at Boston’s historic Park Street Church in May of 1837, Goodell proclaimed that “abolitionism is the science of human rights.” Goodell’s use of “science” here signals his attention to the logical implications of first principles, a habit of mind often praised by his antislavery contemporaries. Although the concept of human rights is often considered to be a twentieth-century development, it pervades abolitionist thought and was a hallmark of Goodell’s expansive reform interventions.

Abolitionism in a New Key

In 1840, Goodell broke decisively with Garrison over matters of theology and politics. Goodell espoused what he called “radical orthodoxy,” which held that Christianity’s demand of impartial love had profound social implications. He believed Garrison’s focus on moral suasion — the effort to convince enslavers to liberate their human property — was incommensurate with the goal of eradicating the slave system. Slavery might be ameliorated by an appeal to conscience, but it could be eliminated only by political and legal means. This required abolitionism in a new key, which led Goodell to join others in forming the Liberty Party, whose sole aim was the eradication of slavery. It also convinced him to read the nation’s founding document with fresh eyes. His 1844 Views of American Constitutional Law, in Its Bearing upon American Slavery offered a radical abolitionist reading of the Constitution, which Frederick Douglass eventually adopted and described in “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

By the mid-1840s, Goodell had become restive in a party whose platform had a single plank. Unearthing the Constitution’s liberatory potential coincided with Goodell’s developing vision of universal reform. As the Liberty Party diluted its anti-racism to broaden its electoral prospects, Goodell pushed to make it a comprehensive human rights party. His key ideas are most fully developed in the long convention addresses he delivered at Port Byron, New York, in 1845, and at Macedon Lock, New York, in 1847. The Port Byron address called for voting rights for black men, elimination of the Electoral College, free distribution of public lands to “temperate, industrious settlers,” resolution of international disputes through arbitration rather than arms, and proscription of policies that would restrict what people read, how they worshipped, or the disposition of their labor.