Frank W. Bird, like J. B. Sargent, of New Haven, was a rare instance of an American manufacturer who believed in free-trade. This was one reason why he joined the Democratic party in 1872. He considered that protection encouraged sleazy and fraudulent work, and placed honest manufacturers at a disadvantage; though he obtained these ideas rather from reading English magazines than from any serious study of his own. He was naturally much more of a Democrat than a Whig, or Federalist, but he opposed the doctrine of State Rights, declaring that it was much more responsible for the Civil War than the anti-slavery agitation was.
The same political exigency which roused James Russell Lowell also brought Francis William Bird before the public. In company with Charles Francis Adams he attended the Buffalo convention, in 1848, and helped to nominate Martin Van Buren for the Presidency. He was, however, doing more effective work by assisting Elizur Wright in publishing the _Chronotype_ (the most vigorous of all the anti-slavery papers), both with money and writing; and in a written argument there were few who could equal him. He appears to have been the only person at that time who gave Elizur Wright much support and encouragement.
In 1850 Bird was elected to the State Legislature and worked vigorously for the election of Sumner the ensuing winter. His chief associates during the past two years had been Charles Francis Adams, the most distinguished of American diplomats since Benjamin Franklin, John A. Andrew, then a struggling lawyer, and Henry L. Pierce, afterwards Mayor of Boston. Now a greater name was added to them; for Sumner was not only an eloquent orator, perhaps second to Webster, but he had a worldwide reputation as a legal authority.
Adams, however, failed to recognize that like his grandfather he was living in a revolutionary epoch, and after the Kansas struggle commenced he became continually more conservative--if that is the word for it--and finally in his Congressional speech in the winter of 1861 he made the fatal statement that personally he would be "in favor of permitting the Southern States to secede," although he could not see that there was any legal right for it. This acted as a divider between him and his former associates, until in 1876 he found himself again in the same party with Frank W. Bird.