Our Correspondence.

For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

LETER FROM HON. GERRIT SMITH

[We are happy to be able to lay before our readers the following note from Hon. GERRIT SMITH. A mischievous use has been made of his supposed indifference to the question of the unconstitutionality of slavery, and we are, therefore, glad to have the matter set right. The great mind of our friend has, in our judgement, never been more nobly employed than when disproving the alledged guarantees in favor of slavery in the U. S. Constitution. His most masterly speeches and letters, to our thinking, have been connected with the discussion of this great question: and it would be strange indeed, if, after having studied the question thoroughly, and weighed its importance candidly, if Mr. Smith should now treat the conviction which he has been for twenty years endeavoring to establish as a non-essential. It is to us one of the greatest discouragements in this whole struggle, that a part of our anti-slavery men are racking their brain, and spending their precious time, not in urging men to act for the overthrow of slavery

under the Constitution, but to convince them that they can do nothing under the instrument. They are at work (we say nothing of their motives) in casting obstacles in the way of every conscientious voter who aims a ballot at the head of slave power. The women-whippers and cradle-plunderers of the South, can ask no higher service of an anti-slavery agent, than keeping up that "guilty fantasy" here at the North—that the Constitution is a slaveholding instrument.—ED.]

PETERSBORO, May 21, 1855

DEAR DOUGLASS—I see by the letter of Wm. Goodeil to the N. Y. Tribune, that I was referred to, in your recent discussion in New York with the 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. abolitionists.

It is true, that the paramount question with me in that direction is, "can there be law for slavery?" I can work cordially with all, who hold, that there cannot be—whatever they may think of the Constitution. Nevertheless, let it not be supposed, that I underrate the importance of using the Constitution to abolish slavery. I would, that all were wielding it to that end; and all would be, were they convinced, as I am, of its anti-slavery character and anti-slavery power.

By the way, on reading, this evening, the whole of what Nicholas Hill's Opinion says in that connexion, I find, that my late letter to you made too much of the Opinion for our construction of the Federal Consitution. He agrees with us, that "due process of law" means a judicial proceeding; and hence, we

are to regard him as agreeing with us, that men are not held in slavery by "due process of law." But on that point, whether the clause of the Federal Constitution, here referred to, binds the Federal Government only, or the State Governments also, he does not express himself—I wish he would express himself on this point.

Your friend,

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.