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. and the Anti-Slavery Standard.

Messrs. Editors:ーI beg a small space in the columns of your paper, in order that I may call the attention of your readers to an article from the pen of Mr. Sidney Howard Gay, in the Standard of the 31st of August. The article to which I refer, is under the caption of "Changes," and principally relates to Gerrit Smith, Esq., and is highly seasoned with that disingenuousness and uncharitableness for which Mr. Gay is so remarkable.ーThe young gentleman's remarks commence well, but end ungracefully. By perusing his article, you will perceive, that if for the sake of a "change," Mr. Gay "raises a mortal to the skies," it is for the purpose of dragging him down again. But enough is said by way of introduction. Read for yourselves, and compare what you read with the life of this of this great-hearted philanthropist. The Standard admits that Mr. Smith is an abolitionist, yet he cannot let the opportunity pass without hawking at him. The vulture, when eversomuch pressed with hunger, will not destroy its own kind. Hear Mr. Gay:

"The tone of the first part of Mr. Gerrit Smith's letter refreshes an old abolitionist who is not so far carried away by the new movement as to forget after all, even if succesful, it will leave the abolition of slavery in the States a thing to be contended for as much as when 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. first unfurled the banner of Immediate Emancipation. Though we do not agree with Mr. Smith in his view of the Constitution, and therefore can only consider his position as an absurd one, and his efforts to establish a political party upon the ground of the unconstitutionality of slavery as utterly futile, yet we cannot but respect the integrity which still maintains a position so hopeless, and the sincerity of which he gives so strong an evidence. But should he quite persuade us that the hope of the slave rests only in him and his party, we should indeed despair of the Republic when, on reading the closing passage of his letter, we learn that after all the anti-slavery cause is quite a secondary matter, and that the overthrow of that monopoly of which he is so distinguished a representative, is the direct and real road to the destruction of the monopoly of laborers. If Mr. Smith thinks himself a worse man than the slaveholder, his duty as a reformer is surely a plain one, and his field of labor is not only at his own door, but in his very land office."

When did Mr. Smith place the destruction of chattel slavery as a secondary thing to any of the oppressions that afflict mankind? In the spirit of his Divine Master, he labors to break every yoke. In the midst of all his arduous labors in the cause of true reform, he has ever looked to that measure as being calculated to remove all kinds of slavery. His language is, "I regard Land Monopoly, take the world together, as a far more abundant source of suffering and debasement, than is slavery." Take the world together, and you will find this remark to be true. In many parts of the world, where there is no chattel slavery, there do the iron heels of Land Monopolists grind out the life of the suffering poor. Behold Ireland! her mournful history records volumes. There is no slavery there, but the oppressions of Land Monopolists have engendered a lank and haggard famine, and the famine has swept away its thousands.

Again: let slavery be abolished in this country, and let the land and the labor monopolists have three or four hundred years the start of the emancipated, and still the free men will be heavy laden, with an up-hill course before them. Herein lies the secret of the trouble in the British West Indies. The old slaveholders are the landholders, and such they intend to be. The chains of the last slave on earth may be broken in twain, and still, while the unhold system of landlordism prevails, nations and people will mourn. But the moment that this wide-spread and monstrous evil is destroyed, the dawn of the gospel day will break forth, and the world will have rest.

But Mr. Smith is called a "a distinguished representative of the Land Monopoly." This charge is so utterly untrue, that it is not necessary to offer a refutation. There are three or four thousand poor men in this State who have received the gift of homes from Mr. Smith. These, and thousands of others, will testify against the charge. The most of his life has been spent in providing for the poor. Long, long before Mr. Gay became the salaried editor of the Standard, did Mr. S. "begin in his land office, and at his own door," to act in strict conformity with his principles.ーBut few persons are found who will accuse Mr. Smith with inconsistency. His motto is, Justice, Equality and Love to all men. He welcomes to his home men of all colors and of all creeds. He has but one table in his mansion, and that is spread as well for the black man as for the whiteーfor the rich and the poor. Some of our loud-mouthed and white-gloved philanthropists would do well to imitate his example in this matter.

Mr. Smith is a laborious man. His concern is, how he shall make others happy. His office is not the theatre of speculation, but an asylum for the oppressed. He takes a Christian view of civil government, and he withholds his suffrage from those who will not do the same.

H. H. GARNETGarnet, Henry Highland

Born a slave in Kent County, Maryland, Henry Highland Garnet (1815-82) fled north with his parents in 1824. He attended the African Free School in New York City, the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, and the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. Garnet was one of the founders of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and a stump speaker for the Liberty party. Licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Troy in 1842, Garnet went to Jamaica in 1852 as a missionary of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. An early proponent of black emigration to Africa and founder of the African Civilization Society, Garnet, in his appeal sanctioning slave uprisings before a National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York, in August 1843, praised the slave rebel Madison Washington. After the Civil War, Garnet was president of Avery College in Pittsburgh and the U.S. minister to Liberia (1881-82). Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1977); Dorothy Sterling, ed., Speak Out in Thunder Tones: Letters and Other Writings by Black Northerners, 1787-1865 (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 376; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 68, 185, 216-17, 226-27; ANB, 8:735-36. .

Peterboro, N.Y., Sept. 7.