Letter from A. M. ThorntonThornton, A. M.

.

Friend Douglass:
While on a visit recently to the North, I was much interested at a friend's house, by the hearing of 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. 's letter to the Hon. John C. Spencer. One sentiment of said letter, particularly, met with a response from the very depths of my soul. It is this, we should behold in each individual of the colored race, a "brother man, another self." This sentiment is not narrow, it is God-like, and I would that it was more prevalent. "Man's inhumanity to man," cannot be successfully stayed without it. But in disseminating this doctrine, we should remember that the oppressor, as also the oppressed, is our brother, our other self. Then what will
we do with our brother, our other self, who is so vile as to oppress his and our brother man? The doctrine of universal brotherhood, meets a ready welcome in my mind. And I am ready to ask, will God always permit his children to thus abuse themselves, and to tread upon the neck of their fellows.

You are at liberty to insert this if you deem it worthy.
A. M. Thornton.

Frewsburg, Dec. 11, 1851.