Gerrit Smith Biography Quotes 31 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Gerrit Smith was born in 1797 in upstate New York and grew up in the hamlet of Peterboro, where his family built a large estate. His father, Peter Smith, amassed a fortune through land speculation and the fur trade, working at times with John Jacob Astor. The scale of that fortune set the stage for Gerrit Smith's unusual career: he would become one of the wealthiest landowners in New York and turn much of that wealth toward reform. In 1819 he married Ann Carroll Fitzhugh, whose Rochester family was also prominent in western New York. Their household became a crossroads of reform, religion, and politics. Among their children were Elizabeth Smith Miller, who later emerged as a leader in women's rights and dress reform, and Greene Smith, an enthusiastic naturalist. The Peterboro home regularly attracted activists, ministers, and politicians who found in Smith a host, a financier, and a formidable debater.

Wealth, Conscience, and Philanthropy
Smith's inheritance included vast tracts of land across central and northern New York. Unlike many contemporaries, he treated his holdings as a lever for social change. He poured money into antislavery newspapers, churches that rejected sectarian control, integrated schools, and communities for the poor. A committed temperance advocate, he barred alcohol sales on his lands and funded societies that sought to reduce drinking. He gave liberally to reform-minded colleges such as those that welcomed Black students and women, and he would quietly purchase the freedom of enslaved people when he could. His philanthropy extended beyond cash: he also offered time, reputation, and legal aid to those he believed were unjustly targeted under proslavery laws.

Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad
By the 1830s Smith had moved from cautious sympathy to outspoken abolitionism. He helped sustain antislavery organizations and press outlets associated with figures such as William Lloyd Garrison, Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Dwight Weld, even when he disagreed with their strategies. He became particularly close to Frederick Douglass, supporting Douglass's efforts as a lecturer and editor. Smith's money and hospitality strengthened the Underground Railroad networks of central New York, linking Peterboro to hubs in Syracuse and Rochester. Allies like Jermain Wesley Loguen and Samuel J. May relied on his counsel and contributions during dramatic confrontations over the Fugitive Slave Act. Smith also used his land to strike at the political foundations of racial inequality in New York. Because the state imposed a property qualification on Black voters, he deeded tens of thousands of acres in the Adirondacks to Black New Yorkers so they could meet the requirement. A settlement near North Elba became known as Timbuctoo, and Smith invited John Brown to live among and advise the Black farmers there.

Political Action
Although he respected the moral suasion approach of Garrison, Smith pressed hard for political solutions. He backed the Liberty Party in the 1840s, joining allies like James G. Birney in arguing that antislavery voters could move national policy. He accepted the Liberty Party's presidential nomination in 1848, an uphill campaign that nonetheless signaled a growing antislavery constituency. In New York he supported anti-rent agitation and other measures that would broaden access to land and weaken monopolies. In 1852 he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives and took his seat in the 33rd Congress in 1853. There he denounced the Fugitive Slave Act and the unfolding designs that would become the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Troubled by ill health and disgusted by proslavery power in Washington, he resigned in 1854 and returned to Peterboro, where he believed he could do more good through direct aid and state-level advocacy.

Women's Rights and Reform Networks
The Smith home served as an incubator for women's rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a relative and frequent guest, was married to Henry Brewster Stanton in the Peterboro mansion, linking Smith to abolitionists who would help launch the women's rights movement. Smith championed the right of women to vote and hold property, and he publicly endorsed women's equality before the law. He maintained friendships and working ties with reformers such as Lydia Maria Child and Abby Kelley while encouraging his daughter Elizabeth Smith Miller to test new forms of public leadership and dress that symbolized female autonomy. His willingness to argue for women's suffrage in the 1840s placed him among the early male advocates of the cause.

John Brown and the Secret Six
Smith's most controversial commitments grew from his conviction that slavery was a state of war upon human rights. He gave sustained support to militant resistance, including to John Brown, whose family had settled at North Elba on land within the Adirondack tract Smith distributed. As national tensions sharpened, Smith became one of the so-called Secret Six who privately aided Brown. After the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid collapsed, Smith was named in the press and suffered a severe mental and physical breakdown. He was briefly confined to an asylum in Utica, then slowly recovered. The episode confirmed to friends like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns that the burdens of clandestine resistance were immense. To his enemies, it marked him as dangerous. To his allies, it revealed both the risks of radical action and the depth of his conscience.

Civil War, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation
When the Civil War began, Smith supported the Union and emancipation, continuing to aid Black refugees and soldiers' families. He worked with Frederick Douglass and other leaders to push for equal pay and fair treatment for Black troops. After the war, his humanitarian streak led him, controversially, toward reconciliation. In 1867 he joined Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt in signing the bond that secured Jefferson Davis's release from prison. Smith argued that leniency would speed national healing, but many former abolitionists and Union veterans condemned the gesture. He continued to fund schools and churches for newly freed people and backed civil rights measures, even as he recoiled from the violence of Reconstruction-era white supremacy.

Character and Ideas
Smith's public life merged evangelical ethics with radical democracy. He believed that property carried obligations; that law, to be legitimate, must respect natural rights; and that private action could achieve what parliaments would not. He pursued temperance, prison reform, and pacific settlement of labor disputes with a zeal that sometimes estranged allies. Yet even critics acknowledged his generosity and personal austerity. Visitors to Peterboro found a host who could quote scripture and political economy with equal fluency, and who would just as readily open his purse as his library.

Final Years and Legacy
In the early 1870s Smith's health declined, but his correspondence and gifts continued. He backed campaigns for equal suffrage and education, and he remained a touchstone for reformers who traced their causes to antebellum origins. He died in 1874, with burial at Peterboro amid the countryside that had framed his life's work. Gerrit Smith left a legacy measured not only in laws and elections, but in farms deeded to the dispossessed, editors and lecturers kept in print and on the road, and alliances that linked figures as different as Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Brown, Horace Greeley, and Jermain Wesley Loguen. He showed how wealth, harnessed to conscience, could alter the moral weather of a nation, and how one household in central New York could become a nerve center for some of the nineteenth century's most consequential reforms.

Our collection contains 31 quotes who is written by Gerrit, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Justice - Freedom - Honesty & Integrity - Human Rights.