Rochester[, N.Y.] 6 Sept{[ember] 1856[.]

HON. 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. .

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I am just home from Ohio where I have been lecturing¹Evidence suggests that Douglass had just returned from making campaign speeches for Frémont. An article entitled “A Black Disunionist Stumping for Fremont” published in the 8 October 1856 issue of the Newark (N.Y.) indicates that Douglass delivered election addresses for Frémont in Otisco, Onondaga County, “the other day.” Newark (N.Y.) , 8 October 1856.—and find your kind letters for which please accept my thanks. What I think of your letter to our Friend William Gordell, will be Seen in my paper of yesterday.²Smith’s letter to Goodell was published in the 5 September 1856 issue of . Smith stated that he would not vote for John C. Frémont in the upcoming presidential election, but defended the Republican candidate from claims made during a recent speech by Edward C. Delavan. Specifically, Delavan acknowledged that he was drawn to the pro-temperance plank of the Know-Nothing party and asserted that Frémont was not a viable candidate for president because he was Catholic. Smith’s response asserted that the Republican party had a history of supporting temperance, and that Frémont was a Protestant. , 5 September 1856. I had noticed your letter before your note reached me—Yes! I get it all around. 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. tries his hand upon my case this week,³In an editorial entitled “Gone, Gone, Sold and Gone," Garrison criticized Douglass’s support for the Frémont-Dayton ticket in the 29 August 1856 issue of the . Garrison asserted that Douglass’s decision was for personal gain and that, as a result, the would be the sole remaining “Radical Abolitionist” newspaper. In “Another Somerset,” published in the 5 September issue, Garrison criticized Douglass’s abandonment of Smith and the transfer of his support to a candidate, party, and principles he had previously condemned. Garrison characterized Douglass as a political chameleon, morally inconsistent and self-contradictory. ., 29 August, 5 September 1856.
the most Skillful of them all. The Liberator and “"⁴The Boston and the New York .—Seem more shocked, at my apostacy from the Radical Abolition Society, than at Mr May’s apota[s]y from the American Society.⁵A leading Garrisonian, the Unitarian minster Samuel Joseph May had relocated to Syracuse from Boston in 1845. In an Fourth of July oration in 1856, May endorsed voting for the Republican party presidential ticket, causing a round of editorials and letters to the editor criticizing or defending his position in the Garrisonian press. , 2, 16, 23 August 1856; ., 22 August 1856;, 6:447-48. They are tender with him—but harsh with me. I shall endeavour to be at the Jerry Rescue (1st oct) Celebration⁶Douglass was scheduled to speak at the Jerry Rescue Celebration in Syracuse on 1 October 1856; he published a review of the event in . , 10 October 1856; , ser. 1, 3:xxvi.—and possibly in Syracuse at the Liberty Party meeting on the 17th Sept.⁷Douglass was scheduled to speak at the Liberty party meeting held in Syracuse on 17 September 1856. Minutes of the meeting published in , however, do not confirm his attendance. , 3 October 1856; , ser. 1, 3:xxv.

I am as ever yours Truly and affectionately

FREDERICK DOUGLASS—

ALS: Gerrit Smith Papers. NSyU.