CHARLES W. STUART TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Lora, C[anada] W[est.] 10 March 1856.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ESa::
DEAR SIR:—
I thank you for your publication 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 Governor Chase,¹Salmon P. Chase in your 426th whole number.²Printed in the 22 February 1856 issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper (whole no. 416), Gerrit Smith’s letter to Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio criticizes the latter’s endorsement of the Republican party and its cautious antislavery stand. What a blessing to his country—what an honor to human nature is such a man! But there are thousands and tens of thousands in the United States, more or less like him; and as long as they remain free to feel, and to write, and to act as he does, there is yet hope for your country, fearful as is its danger; crimsoned as it is with the blood of its guiltless poor; and loathsome as is its outrageous hypocrisy, ecclesiastical and civil! May Gerrit Smith’s exposition, as luminous and unanswerable as it is considerate and kind, of the striking error of minds so characteristically noble and accomplished as Chase’s and Seward’s, &c., be blessed to their perception and acknowledgment, that the clear transgression of any of God’s fundamental laws, never can be rightfuly legalized; and, of course, that the United States system of Slavery, being the sum of all villainies, can, not only have no rightfully lawful existence; but is properly and emphatically only fit for utter abhorrence, and for immediate and thorough abolition.
Yet amid all the excellencies of his glorious mind, bright in intellect, fraught with knowledge, Christian in heart, heroic in will, eloquent in utterance, person and gesture as he is, Gerrit Smith seems to me to forget himself, when he says, “all admit, that Cuba should belong to us; and all should be able to see, that Mexico must be miserable, until she becomes a part of us.”³Smith’s letter to Chase included an attack on what he regarded as the Republican party’s apathy toward slavery, attributing it to the party’s stance on the potential annexation of Cuba and Mexico. According to Smith, Northerners and Southerners believed it would benefit all three nations to bring Cuba and Mexico into the Union. Although opposed to the expansion of the “slave power,” the North was willing to allow slavery to continue “where it exists” rather than eliminate it altogether. Smith argued that this stance was hypocritical and would not gain the Republican party support among abolitionists. FDP, 22 February 1856.
For my part, I cannot imagine by what law, deserving the name of law, Cuba should belong to the United States; or, that Mexico, free as she is from Slavery, must be miserable, until she becomes a member of a slaveholding nation.
But even if the United States were as free as they pretend to be, I cannot see, by what right, Cuba ought to be hers, or that she would have any right to annex Mexico by aggression.
Does might make right! Great Britain and France, have a better right than the United States, to attack and conquer Cuba for themselves; or to defend it from the aggressions of others.
Does proximity constitute right! Then is every powerful State in the neighborhood of a weaker, entitled to conquer or annex it: and to carry this principle out (a thoroughly slaveholding and tyrannical principle)—

every strong man would have a right to take his weaker neighbor into his charge, to govern him as he thought best.
Nations and Individuals, have nothing like wisdom equity, and benevolence enough, to act sanely and honestly on such principles.
Let me add a few testimonies of my own judgment in relation to yourself. Your life has attested you to me, as a vigorously independent and sincere mind; sometimes mistaken, as I think you grossly were—(though all the time with decided sincerity)—in your zealous coincidence for a season with the peculiarities of W. L. 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 G. Thompson:⁴George Thompson (natural and generous coincidences as they were, considering what you at first owed to the prompt and earnest services of the former of those gentlemen.) But fully vindicating your bright and independent integrity, by acting as you have since done, truly for yourself; and by generally seeking more to live down, than to write down, their subsequent and continued abuse. Go on—let them alone, except it be to acknowledge whatever good may be in them.—But pass by with pity their striking errors; for deeply as I differ from them in many fundamental points, I am yet quite convinced, that as far as their mere intentions go, the slave has no friends more sincere and devoted than they. You have truth on your side in your difference with them; for I believe that God is leading you, in your abolition course, and you can well afford to let growlers growl, without reply.
I wish you would illustrate the fundamental axiom, that, every really wise government, must contain within itself, a lawful provision, for the fearful correction of whatever abuses may exist in its principles and practices, and that such a provision undeniably exists, in the 5th Article
of your Constitutional amendments.⁵Ratification of any proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires passage by three-fourths of the states, as laid out in article V.

CHARLES STUART.

PLSr: FDP, 21 March 1856.