PETERBORO, May 7, 1855.

Dear DOUGLASS:—Have you read the
Opinion of Nicholas Hill, Jr., on the con
stitutionality of our Maine law? If you
have, then you are glad to find, that, in ef
fect, he holds, that all American slavery is
unconstitutional.

Most of our leading abolitionists seem to
have taken slavery into their tender keeping,
and to be continually and painfully upon
their guard against conceding away some of
its rights, and weakening some of its sup
ports. Hence, when we insist, that all Am
erican slavery is forbidden by that Article
of the Constitution, which says: "No per
son shall be deprived of life, liberty, or pro
perty, without due process of law," these
abolition protectors of slavery hasten to tell
us, that the Article restricts Federal power
only, and applies but to that part of our
country, which is under the exclusive juris
diction of Congress. Mr. Hill puts these
abolitionists to shame—for though he still
belongs to a pro-slavery party, he shows
himself to be both able and willing to teach
them the anti-slavery and true construction
of the Constitution. So plain is it to him,
that the Article in question binds all our
Legislatures, and all our people, that he does
not condescend to notice a single argument
to the contrary.

Were Mr. Hill to open a Law-School, our
excellent friends, Dr. Bailey, and Giddings,
and Chase, and Phillips, and 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
many other distinguished abolitionists, might
increase their knowledge of the Constitution,
by becoming pupils in it. I do not include
Charles Sumner—for you will never again
find him admitting, that there is, or can be,
any law for so piratical and abominable a
thing as slavery. I trust, that he is sick of
his famous "SLAVERY SECTIONAL." How
strange, that the wise and noble Chase should
continue to stand sentinel for slavery, at vi
tal points of the Constitution!

Mr. Hill maintains, that the Article under
consideration was intended to secure
"against forfeitures of every kind, except
for guilt judicially ascertained." Clean
work, therefore, does his interpretation make
of all American slavery.

I have nothing to say of the merits of Mr.
Hill's argument on our Maine Law, further
than that I believe it to have been written in
all honesty. Mr. Hill is more than a great
lawyer. He is an upright and honorable
man. I said, that he still belongs to a pro
slavery party. Nevertheless, I know enough
of his heart to believe, that there are the
elements of an abolitionist in it.

Mr. Hill denies, that "a statue, depriving
a man of his property, can be upheld." As
a friend of temperance, and of the policy of
prohibiting the traffic in intoxicating liquors,
I take no interest in the issue presented by
this proposition. What disposition shall be
made of that, which is no proper, is the
pertinent issue in the case. And, just here,
let me say, that I am well satisfied with the
disposition, which our Maine Law proposes
to make of the liquors, which shall cease to
be property. The best disposition of them
is to destroy them—for such disposition pro
duces the best influence.

My words imply the position, that the man
who puts his intoxicating liquors on sale
for a drink, forfeits thereby all property in
them. Need I defend this position? I certainly
need not defend the princple involved
in it—I mean the principle of foreitures.—
That has been long and abundantly recog
nized. If any thing in the position is of
doubtful propriety, it is the application of
this principle to the case in hand;—and
even for such application, precedents—highly
authoritative precedents—are not wanting.
Our own State Government and the Federal
Government also, have applied this principle
of forfeiture to intoxicating liquors. More
over, they have applied it, without the inter
vention of judicial proceedings, Mr. Hill's
argument against their right to do so to the
contrary notwithstanding. I have in my
eye the summary process prescribed for dis
posing of intoxicating liquors brought
among the Indians and upon parades.

I said, that the principle of forfeiture does
not need any defense. It needs no one's de
fence. There is no principle, which the
Courts are more ready to act upon, than the
principle, that persons, by putting their
property to a destructive, or demoralizing,
or even to a dangerous and reckless misuse,
may lose all rights of property in it. Mr.
Hill starts up State Street by the side of his
young child. They meet a man, who aims
his pistol at the child; and, farther on, a
man, whom aims his cane at it; and, father
on, a man, who puts a glass of whiskey to
the child's lips. Mr. Hill may dash the
glass upon the pavement, and break the cane,
and pistol in peices, and, yet, it will be
vain to sue him for their value. The Courts
will hold, that the misue of them worked
the forfeiture of property in them. Mr.
Hill is so fond of watching the movements
of a tiger, that he buys one, at the cost of
a thousand dollars. He would find no diff
culty in obtaining a Judgment for his tou
sand dollars against his neighbor, who whoots
the securely caged tiger. But if his nei
bor had found him unchained in the street
and shot him, the Courts would have told
Mr. Hill, that he had nothing to sue for
but, that, from the moment, he suffered the
dangerous animal to go at large, he forfeited
all property in him. So wide would Mr.
Hill find the difference between a caged and
an uncaged tiger;—as wide as between
absolute property and no property.

I scarcely need add, that our own Legis
lature has repeatedly recognized this prin
ciple of the forfeiture of property by per
version of the thing from legitimate to ille
gitimate uses. It has done so, in authoriz
ing the immediate destruction of the gam
bling apparatus brought upon parades, and
in declaring a virtual forfeiture of the horse,
that is brought upon the forbidden race
course.

I said, that if any defence is required in
the present case, it is merely of the appli
cation of this principle of forfeiture to in
toxicating liquors. But why is it, that even
this defense can be requisite? It is not be
cause liquor drinking is less mischievous
than horse racing, or than gambling on the
parade ground. It is a million fold more
mischievious than either. It is mainly be
cause the habit of liquor drinking being so
general, there is a general insensibility to its
immeasurable evils—an insensibility, by the
way, not confined to the subjects of that bad
habit. Whoever gets his eyes wide open to
these evils, and sees the dramshop to be the
great manufactory of paupers and madmen,
and that more peril to life and property, and
more burdens upon the industry of the sober,

and mere heart wringing sorrows come from
it than from any, or even all other, sources—
whomever gets so enlightened will not hesitate
to subscribe to the doctrine, that, from the mo
ment a man put his intoxicating liquors on
sale for a drink, he forfeited all property in
them. He will not be held back by any
alleviating features, or occasional good, in
the dramshop—for there are none. It is
"any evil continually."

Whether the Legislature may authorize
the destruction of property is an issue, which
the friends of "Prohibition" should be very
careful to decline—be that issue tendered by
Mr. Hill, or by any one else. Nor should
they accept the issue whether even the Ju
diciary can authorize its destruction. That
both the Legislature and the Judiciary—aye,
and the people, too, if neither the Legisla
ture, nor the Judiciary will do it for them,
have the right to treat as no property, and
therefore, to destroy intoxicating liquors kept
for sale for a drink, is a ground, from which
they should never allow themselves to be
drawn away. It is wide enough for them all
to stand on sure and undebateable—and
from which they can deal out death blows to
all opposition.

We have no controversy with the owners
of property. We war not upon the rights
of property. We war not upon alcohol when
it is confined to the property and innocent
uses of alcohol. Our war with it is only
when it is let loose to its work of death.—
We say to its owner: "Keep your tiger
caged, and we will not molest him:—but un
cage him, and we will surely kill him."

The day is coming, when the Courts will
not need a "Maine Law:" and when they
will feel their power to be as ample in the
case of intoxicating liquors kept for sale for
a drink, as they now feel them to be in such
cases as I have supposed—that of the run
ning-at-large tiger, and that of the uplifted
cage, and that of the murder-aimed pistol.
In that day, when they shall say that of all
instrumental death alcohol is the most po
tent and appalling, they will feel no need of
legislative direction and authority in determ
ining how to dispose of it, when it dares to get
out of its place. In that day, the Courts
will as soon think of punishing a man for
beheading the rattlesnakes, which their
malignant owner has let out of their boxes
into the streets, as of punishing him for
knocking in the head of any barrel of whis
key which is put on sale for a drink.

We shall, yet, have Judges more worthy
of their office than are some of our present
Judges. Those future Judges will not recog
nize property in man, and sanction the re
duction of the image of God to the level of
the brute. Yes, both ruin and slavery will
fare hard, when our Judges shall be the full
grown men of another and better genera
tion.

In the Jewish economy there was no legis
lature. The law of his reason and the law
of his God were held to be the sufficient
guide of the Judge. Will it not be so, the
earth over, when, the earth over, a true
christianity shall reign among men?

I invoke no "higher law." I have no faith
in the doctrine of a "higher law." On the
contrary, I regard the doctrine as entirely
false and exceedingly pernicious. Law is
one, and the law of earth is as high as the
law of Heaven. What is not as high is no
law.

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. .