Politics & Power Quote by Gerrit Smith

Abolitionist politician Gerrit Smith lands a lawyerly jab that doubles as a moral feint: America may not be guilty of harming Turkey, he concedes, but Turkey is still guilty of harming America. The line works because it flips the usual geography of blame. Instead of asking what the United States has done abroad, Smith asks what a distant empire is doing inside the American republic. The trick is that Turkey is less a target than a mirror.

In Smiths 19th-century political vocabulary, "Turkey" signaled the Ottoman world and, by extension, Islam and "Oriental" despotism as imagined by American Protestants. That shorthand carried a ready-made contrast: freedom versus tyranny, Christian civilization versus imperial decay. Smith exploits the contrast to reframe a domestic issue as a foreign intrusion. The "rights of America" being violated are not borders or trade privileges; they are moral and civic self-understanding. If the nation tolerates practices it brands as unfree - slavery is the likely subtext, along with fears of polygamy or despotism - then America is being conquered culturally without a single soldier crossing the Atlantic.

The syntax is the point: "cannot be justly charged" versus "can be justly charged" sounds like courtroom balance, but it tilts hard. Smith is policing legitimacy. Even when America is innocent in the narrow diplomatic sense, he insists it is vulnerable in the larger ideological one. The quote is a piece of political jujitsu: outsource the accusation to an external villain so the real defendant, the United States, feels the verdict as shame rather than policy dispute.