Gerrit Smith

• Gerrit Smith
• Born: March 6, 1797
• Died: December 28, 1874

Philanthropist and reformer, was born in Utica, New York, the son of Peter Smith and Elizabeth (Livingston) Smith and the grandson of James Livingston, a Canadian who fought in the American revolutionary army. On his father’s side Smith was descended from Dutch ancestors of Rockland County. Peter Smith developed his wealth partly through land speculation, in partnership with the fur entrepeneur John Jacob Astor. In 1806 he moved his family from Utica to Peterboro, New York, a sparsely populated area that became, like central New York, a breeding ground for many varieties of reform movements. Peter Smith seemed often to be melancholy to the point of being distracted, and his son was introspective and passed through periods of depression. Gerrit Smith was one of six children, four of whom reached maturity.

Smith was graduated from Hamilton College in 1818 and after studying law began to help his father manage the substantial family fortune; this, with reform and philanthropy, was to occupy his life. On January 11, 1819, he married Ann Backus, the daughter of Azel Backus, the president of Hamilton College. She died in August 1819, and on January 3, 1822, he married Ann Carroll (Fitzhugh) of Hagerstown, Maryland, and Rochester, New York. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1822; a son, Fitzhugh, in 1824; a daughter Ann, in 1830; and a final son, Green, in 1842; Elizabeth Smith Miller became a feminist and was the originator of the Bloomer costume.

As his father became more melancholy and withdrew more from worldly affairs, Gerrit Smith began to assume control of the family wealth, valued at $400,000, and to engage in land and business investments, which increased the value of the holdings. By the time he was twenty-five he was exhibiting an inner restlessness, manifested in a desire to enter the gospel ministry and leading him ultimately to write some 200 circular letters, speeches, and pamphlets and to support, even if tangentially, an extraordinary variety of reforms from colonization of freed blacks in Africa to vegetarianism.

Unlike many other reformers, such as his daughter, who addressed themselves to a few movements, Smith felt drawn to the entire breadth of reform activity. He began in 1824 with Juvenis, a pamphlet urging political reform in New York State. Demonstrating impulses connected with feelings of religious revival, he supported, financially and personally, the Sunday School movement and the United Domestic Missionary Society in the 1820s. He encouraged the New York Temperance Society when it began in 1829; and he gave up meat, spices, tea, tobacco (he speculated on the value of an antitobacco movement) and even set up a temperance hotel at Peterboro, to which he devoted himself for a time.

During the 1820s and 1830s Smith undertook widespread philanthropy, partly as a reform weapon, helping to build churches and giving generously to theological schools and other educational institutions. Causes such as dress reform, woman suffrage, and colonization of blacks (to which he adhered briefly) became important to him. In the 1830s he protested prison abuses and the mistreatment of Irish, Italian, and Greek nationalists abroad and became vice president of the American Peace Society.

Abolitionists sought him out in the early 1830s, hoping to turn him from support of colonization. Persuaded, he became an abolitionist and in 1835 played host to an antislavery convention at Peterboro. He helped to interest his cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the cause of abolition (and of temperance as well). He became vice president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, gaining a national reputation in the process. Although depressed by the death of his son Fitzhugh in 1836, he accepted the presidency of the New York Anti-Slavery Society and began to write the first of fifty antislavery essays, many with religious themes that were used to counter proslavery religious arguments. He was concerned not solely with freeing the slaves, but also with the moral health and understanding of all Americans. “The grand object of the antislavery enterprise,” he wrote evangelically in a letter to The Liberator, “is to abolitionize the public mind.” Here he connected mid-nineteenth century abolitionism to the American revolutionary spirit of democratic enlightenment.

Smith helped to encourage the abolitionists to enter electoral politics in the Liberty party, running as a candidate for governor of New York State in 1840. He attacked the annexation of Texas as proslavery. In 1847 Smith’s slogan “Free Men, Free Soil and Free Trade,” anticipated the program of Martin Van Buren’s Free Soil party a year later. In 1848 he worked with the abolitionist leader Lewis Tappan both on rejuvenating the Anti-Slavery Society and on strengthening the Free Soil party. (He declined the 1848 presidential nomination of some Liberty party dissidents who would not support Van Buren.) Amid this activity he continued his donations to abolitionist papers and to religious causes, declaring himself Presbyterian in personal faith. He also financed the resettling of 3,000 blacks in the Adirondacks area of New York State, with mixed results.

But it was as an abolitionist activist and thinker that Smith made his main impact. As the turbulent decade of the 1850s began, he supported resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act. Even before it passed Congress, he started to plan a “gathering of runaway slaves” that would include Frederick Douglass and other fugitives, as well as Wendell Phillips and other abolitionist leaders. Smith, convinced that it was not enough simply to aid slaves, recognized the importance of political action in mobilizing public opinion, an approach he shared with Phillips and others. Smith helped to free a slave named Jerry in 1851—a rescue in Syracuse that caused considerable furor. Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act crystallized the religious quality of Smith’s activism. When abolitionist William L. Chaplin was arrested in Maryland for helping the slaves of future Confederate leaders Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens to escape, Smith wrote that even in jail Chaplin had “freedom of soul, a freedom in Christ Jesus—which not men, nor Devils, can take from you.”

Smith was elected to Congress, as an Ultra-Abolitionist, in 1852; he was admitted to the bar in 1853, as his term began. In the nation’s capital this militant abolitionist entertained such political opponents as Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina (later the assailant of Senator Charles Sumner), and Representative William Tweed of New York (later “Boss Tweed.”) He introduced temperance legislation, attacked militarism, and defended the right of nations to repudiate war debts. In strictly Jeffersonian fashion he opposed federal subsidies, including grants to railroads—a view not characteristic of most who were to soon become Republicans. Smith resigned from Congress in 1854 and undertook a law practice at Peterboro.

Smith supported aid to abolitionists in Kansas after the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the territories to pro- and antislave migration. He also subsidized Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company in Massachusetts with possibly more than $14,000 (the society encouraged easterners to settle in the West—especially in Kansas, to help bring about the admission of Kansas as a free state). Smith defended his support of resistance to authority in Kansas by suggesting that “all existing governments” might be conspiracies justifying rebellion. From 1856 to 1858 he helped John Brown, whose 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry prefigured the Civil War. Smith gave Brown moral and perhaps financial support for the raid.

In 1858 Smith ran unsuccessfully for governor on the People’s state ticket, urging abolition, land reform, and temperance. The Civil War led him into Republican politics and, with some criticism, he supported Lincoln’s conduct of the conflict and his reelection in 1864. Then, growing more conservative, he backed Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and favored moderate Reconstruction for southern whites, although supporting black suffrage. As if to counterbalance his political moderation, Smith sharply criticized theologians in the 1860s, stopped giving money to churches, and renewed his interest in the peace movement. His collection of lectures and letters published in 1864 as Religion and Reason discusses nature and religion, among other issues. The Speeches of Gerrit Smith in Congress (1856) and the two-volume Speeches and Letters of Gerrit Smith on the Rebellion (1864-65) provide some insight into the politically moderate but spiritually adamant transitional thought of his later life. He died at seventy-seven in New York City.

Politially and philanthropically, Smith played a role in that amalgam of nineteenth-century reform movements whose major strands seemed connected in the geographical “reform belt” of central New York State. Focusing chiefly on antislavery politics, however, Smith ended in the establishment tradition of the Republican party.

The Smith Family papers are in the Library of Syracuse University. O. B. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith (1878; republished 1969) was subject to substantial editing by the family. A modern biography is R. V. Harlow, Gerrit Smith, Philanthropist and Reformer (1939). Other literature includes C. A. Hammond, Gerrit Smith (1900) and K. W. Porter, John Jacob Astor, 2vols. (1931). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1935). An obituary appeared in The New York Tribune, December 29-30, 1874.