FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO GERRIT SMITH

Rochester. N.Y. 9 March 1863.
My DEAR SIRSmith, 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. :
I congratulate you upon your SIXTY SIXTH birth day.¹Gerrit Smith was born 6 March 1797. Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 3. May Heaven spare you to see yet many more birth days. Your life has been a blessing to all classes and conditions of men, but to none more than to those who are now meted out and trodden down in slavery. For the sake of these as well as for your own—and your dearly loved ones at home, my hearts desire and prayer is that you may long be preserved in health and vigor.
If you said in your Albany speech,²Gerrit Smith’s “Stand by the Government” address delivered in Albany, New York, on 27 February 1863. DM, 5:823-26 (April 1863). (and I have not seen it) that you are for the preservation of the union at all hazards and at all costs, and that you should prefer the union even with slavery than to allow the slave holders to go off—and set up a government for themselves. I should agree with you even in that, for I fear that there is more hope for the slave, even in the old union, if that were possible than there would or could be in an exclusively slave holding Government. You will have received a line from me ere you get this, on the Subject of inlistments for the 54th Mass. regiment.³In his letter to Smith, written on 6 March 1863 and reproduced in this volume, Douglass expressed a hope that the abolitionist would send him a letter, pledging financial support for his recruiting activity, in care of the Reverend Samuel J. May, whom he planned to visit at Syracuse. I hope for an answer at Syracuse on Wednesday.

[FREDERICK DOUGLASS.]

ALf: Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU.