PETERBORO, July 13th 1860.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS,

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I am frequently asked what the friends of Temperance and Freedom
should do at the approaching Election. My answer is the same as that which for so many years I have given to the same ques
tion. They should vote for the uncompromising enemies of the dramshop; and for those who, knowing no law for slavery,
accord not the least legality to its least pretensions.

The cause of Temperance is prostrate. Who prostrated it? Its professed friends. How? By trifling with it, and trampling it under foot at the polls. By voting for candidates whom they knew to be in favor of licensing the sale of intoxicating
liquors for a beverage. No man, who believes in the rightfulness of such sale, is fit for any political office. For the sole legitimate end of every such office is protection of the people: and hence they and they only, who love to be and study to be their
protectors, are fit for such office. But are they such protectors, who license the dramshop, that manufactory not of drunkards
and paupers only, but also of madmen, murderers and every other sort of criminals? Certainly not! As well might we elect
slaveholders to political office. And how unfit they who buy and sell people are to be entrusted with the protection of the peo
ple does surely not need to be argued. Nevertheless these friends of Temperance, yielding to other interests and partaking of
the frenzy of party politics, rush to the polls to vote for drunkards and drunkard-makers. The rumseller himself is not a more
responsible drunkard-maker than is he who licenses him. And if here or there is an earnest man, whose conscience sternly for
bids such prostitution of suffrage, he is scoffed at by these friends of Temperance as a fanatic or a fool. They are ever pro
claiming that the dramshop is the greatest of all curses;—and yet they are ever voting to maintain it. Is this their matchless
infatuation or their amazing hypocrisy?

A like treachery explains the like low condition of the antislavery cause. Abolitionists have from year to year voted
against it until at last, there are fewer Abolitionists than there have been at any time within twenty years. The mass of those,
who were once intent on abolishing slavery every where, do not go now for its abolition any where. The calculating policy of
non-extension has taken the place of the uncompromising principle of abolition.

In the year 1844 more than sixty thousand men voted for James G. Birney. They would have refused to do so, had he not
been opposed to the returning of fugitive slaves; to the continuance of slavery in the District of Colombia; to the continuance
of the slave trade between the States; and to the admission of slave States. But ere four years had gone by another spirit
had entered into them: and now even Martin Van Buren, with all his proslavery sins upon him, was fit to be voted for by men,
who had so recently consecrated their votes to that repentant slaveholder—that sublimely pure and just man—James G. Bir
ney. Of these sixty thousand probably not one thousand would not demand in their candidate the qualifications which they
demanded in 1844. Who of all the sixty thousand would have voted as he did, had Birney avowed himself in favor of a white
man's party, or of any however slight discrimination against the black man in the whole multitude of political rights? But
now how very few of them all would withhold their votes from their candidate because of such an atheistic avowal on his part?
I say atheistic—for what is plainer than that he who makes it does not believe in the God "who made of one blood all nations?"
Very few of the sixty thousand but would now denounce a candidate as foolish or fanatical for placing himself on any of those
high grounds on which Birney stood forth so openly and firmly and nobly. Now the sixty thousand call for cunning in their
candidate. Then they insisted on integrity. Then the candidate must be grandly moral as well as grandly intellectual in order
to be worthy of their votes. Now he must know how to shape his creed to the popular favor, and be skilled in contrivances
to get votes. Thus increasingly rapid are the downward steps in morals.

What a mighty host would the sixty thousand have become had they not fallen into the fatal error of giving up truth for
numbers! They were impatient for success—not knowing that they already had it, and would continue to have it so long as
they adhered to principle. For not only is it true, that such adherence works out and surrounds itself with every success, but
that it is itself the highest form of success. The sixty thousand had grown from seven thousand in four years. A far less
rate of progression would have put the Government of the country into their hands long ere this time. Evil was the hour in
which they listened to the proposal to purchase speedy victory at the price of their principles. The price was paid. But no
victory and not good came in return. Thanks for the eternal ordination that no good can be purchased at such a price!

The retrogradation of Northern Legislatures in respect to slavery illustrates the decline of Northern sentiment on that sub
ject.

Vermont is acknowledged to be the most antislavery of all the States. But would her present Legislature resolve by even
a bare majority in favor of abolishing the inter State slave trade; or slavery in the District of Columbia; or in favor of refusing
the admission of new slave States? The disastrous effect of such Resolutions on the coming Election would be an effectual plea
against them. Nevertheless in 1838 her Senate voted unanimously in favor of all these, and her Assembly by such an over
whelming acclamation, that no negatives were called for.

The only Anti-Slavery to be found in any of the present Parties is an unsteady opposition to the establishment of slavery
in a Territory. Occasionally surrendered it must be also occasionally renewed to the end that an apparent, albeit well-nigh infinitesimal, difference may be kept up between the Republican and other Parties on the question of slavery. A Republican vo
ter needs to hear and say something now and then against Territorial slavery, not only to prevent others from confounding him
with a Douglass Democrat, but to preserve the hair's breadth difference in his own consciousness. At every other point than this
of Territorial slavery all the Parties allow slavery its full swing. And how inconsistent and vain would be even an earnest and
steady opposition to slavery at this point, if accompanied, as the present vacillating opposition is, by the admission that slavery
may exist in a State— yes, in every State! For what is slavery but the practically asserted claim of property in man? And if
the rightfulness of that claim in a State is conceded, is is virtually conceded in a Territory also. What is property any where
is property every where. That "what the laws make property is property" is one of the things in the big bundle of atheisms.
Property makes necessity for laws: but God alone ordains what is property. To the school of great Nature, and not to the en
actments and conventions of men, are we to go to learn the elements and subjects of property. That Government may author
ize the destruction of property in cases where it may become a source of actual apprhended evil I do not deny. But I do de
ny that this admitted power affords, as some maintain, ground for the claim that Government can transmute into property that
which is not property, and can look away from the light of nature, common sense, and common law to determine what is property.
Perhaps instead of saying that Government may authorize the destruction of property, I had better said that it may authorize
the destruction of that in which the rights of property are already forfeited or lost.

Would then any political party consistently and effectually oppose the introduction of slavery into a Territory, it must recall
every admission it has made in favor of the lawfulness of slavery in a State. At this point of Territorial slavery the Anti
Squatter Sovereignty Democrats have on the score of consistency an immense advantage over the Republicans and Douglassites.
It a man may be property in a State, if follows that he can be rightfully carried as property into a Territory. These Democrats
make themselves strong by adopting this inference, and their opponents weaken themselves by rejecting it. But these Democrats would make themselves far stronger, if they would push their consistency further, and insist on the right to carry this
man-property not only into any Territory but into every State also. And they will yet come to this, and bring the Nation to
this, provided the Abolitionists do not succeed in the mean time with their counter doctrine that man is property no where.
Either Jefferson Davis or Wendell Phillips is right. All between them, be it Mr. Douglass [sic?] or Mr. Lincoln or whoever else, are
wrong. If the being, made in the image of God, may be a slave any where he may be a slave every where: and if not every
where then nowhere. Vice President Breckenridge in his Letter of Acceptance just now published—a Letter by the way evincive of the high order of his cultivated mind—says: "Nothing less than sovereignty can destroy or impair the rights of persons
or property." A sound proposition this, were the words "less than sovereignty" omitted. But a very unsound proposition is
it, which acts sovereignty (human laws) above Nature and God. The rights of persons and property stand in Nature and God:
and every invasion of them is sacrilege. The one legitimate function of Civil Government is to protect these rights in all their

original fullness and sacredness. But the Vice President is a slaveholder, and in self-defence he must assert the power of Civil
Government to destroy the rights of persons. So too he must assert its power to destroy the rights of property, and to abolish
slavery. For to abolish slavery is, as he holds, to destroy those rights: and he clearly sees that if Civil Government cannot
abolish slavery, then upon his own principle it cannot create it.

The Vice President has made a mistake. The only position at this point on the side of slavery, which he could have taken
with consistency, he has failed to take. In one breath he makes property in main to be as full as property in any thing else—as
property "of whatever kind." In another breath he admits that the State can abolish property in man. What if his State
should undertake to abolish property in the matchless blue grass fields around his Lexington, and in the highly improved breeds
of cattle, that graze upon them—would he not resist such abolition? From what I personally know of his spirit and intelli
gence, I venture to affirm that none would be before him in declaring that God and Nature have said what is property, and that
their authority is paramount to that of Kentucky. To have been consistent then he should not have admitted the right of the
State to abolish property in man. He has admitted a distinction between slave property and other property; and if not so
wide as that the Republicans claim, nor even so wide as that acknowledged by the Douglassites [sic?], sufficiently so nevertheless to
give countenance to each, and to deprive his opposition to each of the dignity and force of a contest for a principle. The only
contest for a principle at this point is that, which the Abolitionists are waging against Republicans, Democrats, Douglassites [sic?] and
all other enemies and despisers of human rights. The sound abolitionist tolerates in no circumstances the claim of property in
man. He respects God, and cannot consent to sink to the level of brutes the being made in His image.

President Buchanan in his Speech of last Monday asks what he "as a Pennsylvanian would say or do" in case it should
be contended that a Territory could outlaw iron or coal. And I ask him what he would say or do in case Pennsylvania herself
should attempt such oulawry. If he is still a man—if the politician has not yet entirely consumed the man—he would promptly
resist his State, and scout the idea of her power to strike down the rights of property. But, Mr. President, you did consent to
her abolishing slavery—or, in other words, to her abolishing property in man. What then becomes of the basis doctrine of
your Speech—that property is property—and that property in men is as sacred as any other property? The rights of property
are as inviolable and indestructible as those of person:—and the justification of Pennsylvania for abolishing slavery is that she
therein touched no rights of property!

Just here let me say that the Parties vastly overrate the importance of the petty issues between them. The battle is to be
fought between the Slaveholders and the Abolitionists: and it will be fought just as soon as these Parties, that block the way,
get out of the way. The result will be, not this or that condition, this or that liability, of a Territory:—but a Nation all over
spread with slavery, or all emptied of it. The result will be to give the lie to the "Declaration of Independence," or to honor
its great doctrine, that "All men are created equal."

It is true that many members of the Republican Party believe slavery to be unconstitutional wherever the Federal Gov
ernment has exclusive jurisdiction. But they all acquiesce in the proposition that this Government has no right to array itself
against slavery in the States: and nearly all would accept the logical sequence that this Government is bound to protect State
slavery from all foreign aggression. In a word all the Parties believe that the North is pledged by the Constitution, not only to
return the fugitive slave, but even to march South for the defense of slavery. Truly, this is being pledged to the perpetration
of enormous wickedness! For my own part I do not see that this pledge exists. But the North does: and hence her only
wise and christian course is to entreat the South to liberate her from it either by consenting to change the Constitution at this
point or by consenting to let her, the North, go out of the Union. Surely, the people of the South will not insist that we shall
continue to trample upon our consciences and kill our souls by contributing to uphold a system, which, however innocent it
may be in their eyes, is in our own more full of injustice to man and dishonor to God than any other on earth. Let the South
do to the North as in an exchange of circumstances, she would have the North do to the South. What if the Northern States
should adopt the policy of enslaving her light-haired people, and the South should then be holding as she does now, in common
with the North, to the doctrine of the absolute right of a State, as against the National Government, to do what she will with
her people!—she would, of course, regard herself as Constitutionally bound to uphold this policy. How deeply desirous there
fore would she be to be released from all responsibility for it! For she would believe it to be an exceedingly wicked policy.
Yet, what more wicked is it to enslave people because of their light hair than because of their dark skin?

I believe the Constitution to be antislavery. I believe, that it imposes that it imposes no obligation upon me to uphold and fight for mur
der in Maryland or for the worse crime of slavery in Kentucky. But Constitution or no Constitution, I would have the North
vote slavery to death. The North however believes the Constitution to be proslavery, and that whilst it remains unchanged
such voting would be wrong. Again, I would have every slave run away from his master; and I would afford him every facility
for his peaceful escape. I would tell him, as I have been telling him these twenty years, to "take the horse, the boat, the food,
the clothing;" and to believe in no rights of property any where in the South against his needs—nor indeed in the North
either, so long as it continues to be to him an "enemy's country." Let him take what he will, human life alone excepted.
But the North, interpreting the right of the slaveholder to his slave to be a Constitutional right, and holding every Constitu
tional right to be sacredly inviolable and paramount to every other right whether in earth or heaven, cannot consistently put
forth its hand in any way to deliver the slave.

I repeat then that the North, taking her at her own view of her obligations, has no other alternative than to cast herself
upon the good feeling of the South, and petition for a change in the Constitution or a peaceable release from the Union. The
right of such release—be it the release of the North or the South, the East or the West—I argued in my Speech in Congress
on the Mexican Treaty. That right I hold to now: and that right I believe the South is just and generous enough to acknowl
edge. As you are aware, I am as ready to look South as North for justice, generosity and manliness. Do you say that the
South is greatly corrupted by slavery? She is: but not more than the North. Slavery is upheld at the South in accordance
with education. At the North in the face of education. The South believes it to be morally right to demand the return of fu
gitive slaves. The North believes it be morally wrong—Constitutionally right but morally wrong—to return them; and yet re
turns them. Is not the North then the more wicked—the more corrupted—of the two? Certain is it to my own mind, that
the North bears a more corrupting relation to slavery than does the South.

Charles Sumner, that pure and brave and strong and learned man, does, in his Speech of day before yesterday in New York,
distinctly convey the idea that the American Union is no more responsible for slavery in Charleston than the Constantinople.
How otherwise could he put himself in line with the Republican Party?—especially after having shot so far ahead of it in his
recent masterly Speech in Congress? But, it is impossible for my noble friend to bring himself into harmony with
that Party. There is not room enough within its exceedingly narrow limits for a soul so great—so expanded by the love of
truth—as is his. Even were there ground for his comparison between Charleston and Constantinople, he nevertheless
could not be of that Party. But there is not the slightest ground for it. The Union is not bound to maintain any sort of
Government in Constantinople. But is is bound to maintain "a republican form of government" in Charleston. It is not bound
to put down insurrections in Constantinople. But it is bound to put them down in Charleston. Is slavery incompatible with
republicanism, then the Union must put down slavery every where within the Union:—and so must it do if slavery has been
or is sure to be the source of insurrections in any of the States. It must not permit the safety of a State, and, through a
State, the safety of the Union to be thus endangered by the existence of slavery.

Does Mr. Sumner admit that the Constitution tolerates slavery in the States? Then does he virtually admit that the whole
Nation is bound to defend it—ay, in certain contingencies, to fight for it. Or does he deny that it is in the contemplation of the
Constitution, that a State may so outrage all just conceptions of "a republican form of government," as to set up or continue
slavery; or may furnish those frightful materials for "domestic violence" in which slavery abounds, then also does he virtually
admit that the whole Nation is responsible for it—as responsible under the Constitution to abolish it, as in the former case it
was responsible under the Constitution to maintain it.

Would that my dear friend might disembarrass himself of the few remaining hindrances in his glorious service of
the cause of Freedom, and hasten to plant himself by the side of William Goodell, Lysander Spooner and those other Radical
Abolitionists, who hold that the whole Nation is bound to shut out slavery from the whole Nation because the Constitution
does so!

I have spoken of the duty of the North in the light of the convictions and admissions of the North. I hardly need say
that I shall myself continue to go to the polls with a vote for men, who are not only anti-dramshop men, but who, knowing no
law for slavery, treat as nullities whatever Courts, Constitutions or Legislatures may say in favor of it. My vote must continue
to be for men who are content with the obedient to the law of heaven in respect to slavery. Increasingly disgusted as I am
with the cant of the churches about christianity, I must nevertheless continue to go for christianity. I have no knowledge of
Christ if it is possible that, in any circumstances, votes for rum men or slavery men can serve his cause or do him honor. I
should be glad to vote at the coming Election for names presented by a Temperance and Abolition Convention: and I hope
there will be such a Convention. But if there are not enough earnest Temperance men and Abolitionists left to get it up, I
will endeavor to compose my ticket without the help of a Convention.

I trust that the stress, which I lay on voting, will not be constructed to imply a censure of Mr. GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. and Mr. Phillips
and their noble associates. I still honor, as I always have done, the men who, differing broadly from myself in their interpretation of the Constitution, have conscience against voting under it.

I trust too that I shall not be regarded as seeing no merit in any who vote rum and slavery tickets. Many so vote, "the
latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose." The longer I live the more am I convinced that men
may be very good, and yet do things that I think to be very bad. They do not survey every subject from my standpoint.
Again, though their steps, where diverging from my own, may not be as defensible as my own, nevertheless the end they have
in view may be as good, and it may be cherished in a warmer and better heart. Even some of those, whose bad motto is: "The
end justifies the means," may on the whole be better than some of those who are very scrupulous on the score of means.

To illustrate my position that a very bad deed may be combined with a character in which there is much good—there is
nothing that in my eye is more unequivocally the work of Satan than casting back into the pit of slavery the poor brother or
sister who has escaped from it. Nevertheless through the blinding power of a wrong education good men are drawn into this
Satanic work. I know and respect Mr. Bell and Mr. Breckenridge. No little elevation and beauty of character mark them
both:—and yet their life-long connection with slavery reconciles them to the recapture of the fugitive slave. So too from the
like cause is General Houston reconciled to it. Nevertheless in regard to the wrongs done the Indian he is as tender as a woman. One can hardly fail in his social intercourse with the General to be pleased with him. Mr. Douglass too would have the
flight of the slave arrested: and all the greater is the crime in him from this having been educated in Vermont and New York.
But I have seen pleasant things in Mr. Douglass: and a relative of mine, who has long lived near him, told me years ago that
Mr. Douglass is eminently kind to the sick and suffering around him. Alas, even the other Presidential candidate does also
stand against, instead of by the side of, the poor trembling imploring fugitive! And yet, in respect to Temperance, Mr. Lincoln
is reported to have a very clear vision. Moreover, no man has spoken more sublimely than himself on the "Declaration of In
dependence." How painful to see in one, who has so many claims to our respect and admiration, so wide a departure from
justice and mercy!—and that too in the very case where justice and mercy are most called for!

But however worthy may be the gentlemen I have named, I must not vote for any one of them. However mitigated may
be the crime of their proslavery by the misleading forces of their education and circumstances, I nevertheless am not permitted
to vote in their darkness, but am bound to vote in my own light. Not their ignorance of the wickedness of slavery, but my
knowledge of that wickedness, must govern my vote. My proslavery vote would not be excused at "the last day" on the
ground that my candidate did not know the sin of slavery; but it would be condemned on the ground that I did know it.

Should any one of the five Presidential Candidates be elected, and I should see him applying his official powers to give back
his brothers and sisters to the horrors and hell of slavery, I should be distressed. But had I voted for him I should die of re
morse. For I should feel that his superlatively guilty work was my work—I having made it such in advance by my vote to
give him the office, which I well knew he stood ready to use for this most diabolical purpose. In that case the summons of the
President for military or naval aid to the kidnappers would be my summons, and the guilt of it would crimson my soul as well
as his. For the stripes and tortures, that would await the returning captives, I, as well as he, would be responsible. Responsible I, as well as he, for their doom of a compelled and unrequited life-long toil. And the thought, that they were no more to
have right to husband or wife, parent or child, and no more to be permitted to read the Bible or spell the name of Jesus, would
be the excruciating thought, that to this possible and even probable end did I cast my vote, when I cast it for for one, whom I knew
to be in favor of consigning them to this fate. No, I must not vote for such an one. If others with their views can, I with mine
cannot. If there are others who can afford it, nevertheless I cannot. Some there may be whose stock of righteousness is so
large, that a balance would be left them even after voting (as does every voter for a slave-catching Presidential candidate) to
set the whole army and navy of the United States against the innocent fugitive. But I have no such surplus goodness to vote
upon: and therefore for me to cast such an unrighteous vote would be to reduce myself to utter and immediate moral insolvency.

Christian! were Jesus again on the earth, would you vote to have him lead the forces for returning the poor slave to the
disabilities and tortures from which he had escaped? The bare proposition is most abhorrent to you. How then can you con
sent to vote for Mr. Douglass, or Mr. Lincoln, or any other man, who virtually tells you that he is willing to lead them? Has
not party spirit blinded you? Nay, has it not corrupted you? What is too abominable for Christ to do is too abominable for
any man to do: and thus would you yourself decide in every case where the spirit of Christ and not the spirit of Party prompt
ed the decision.

I said that I must not vote for a slave-catcher. My profession of deep and tender interest in the slave is a life-long one.
To turn now and vote against him—to vote that if he escape from chattelhood to manhood, he shall be thrown down again from
manhood to chattelhood—would not that be giving an emphatic lie to this profession? Again, when men get to be as old as I
am, they have an especial reason for not adding to the number of their sins—particularly of their great sins. Their "space for
repentance" is reduced to a narrow one—too narrow to supply all the penitential tears, which even one such enormous sin, as
voting a man back into slavery, calls for.

But I am asked whether I would withhold my vote from a candidate because I forsee one official wrong in him, and yet
feel assured that he will be guilty of no other. Certainly, if that wrong is the murdering, or, what is worse, the enslaving of
his fellow men. The wrong done to one man is not cancelled by right dealing toward even all other men. Moreover, I am not
at liberty to feel assured, that he who is pledged to commit the most flagrant injustice against one man will not, when as strong
temptation calls for it, be guilty of as flagrant injustice toward other men.

There is but little hope for either Temperance or Freedom in our day. Too few of their present friends are their true
friends. God grant that the next generation may have the wisdom, integrity and courage to vote away the Dramshop and
Slavery! But in the mean time will not our land be more deluged with rum than it is even now? And (fearful question!)
will it not also be deluged with the blood of the slaveholder and the slaver? It does not follow that because four millions of
slaves submit to the yoke, six or eight millions will.

How, indeed, can we hope for either of these great Causes in our day? The friends of Temperance would like to vote
against Rum—but they love their Parties too well to do so. Politics have a far stronger hold than Temperance upon them.
As to Slavery, the North does not dislike it enough to break away from all scruples and all Parties for the sake of voting
against it: and neither North nor South is willing to come into the amicable arrangement of putting away Slavery by their consenting to share in the present loss of putting away the crime and curse for which both are equally responsible.

GERRIT SMITHSmith, Gerrit

Gerrit Smith (1797– 1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269– 87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170– 80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61– 76 (Fall 1985); NCAB , 2:322– 23; DAB, 17:270– 71. .