"But as well may you, when urging a man up-hill with a heavy load upon his back, and with your lash also upon his back, tell him, that be has nothing to do either with the load or the lash"
About this Quote
It lands like a moral trap: if you are the one cracking the whip, you do not get to lecture the whipped man about “personal responsibility.” Gerrit Smith’s image of the uphill laborer is brutally efficient because it refuses abstraction. Load and lash are not metaphors for bad habits or attitude; they are imposed conditions. The sentence forces the reader to inhabit the absurdity of blaming someone for constraints deliberately fastened onto his body.
Smith, an abolitionist politician speaking into the hot moral economy of antebellum America, is aiming at a familiar dodge: the claim that enslaved people (or any oppressed group) should simply rise, behave, work harder, be patient, be grateful. His analogy exposes that advice as a second cruelty. It’s not just that the burden is heavy; it’s that the same power demanding motion is also manufacturing the immobility. The “urge” and the “lash” belong to the same actor. That pairing is the point.
The subtext is accusation dressed as common sense. Smith doesn’t need to name slavery, racial hierarchy, or the legal machinery of bondage; the reader supplies it. “Up-hill” signals a rigged terrain, not a neutral playing field. The line also anticipates a modern argument about structural inequality: it’s incoherent to talk about freedom of choice while actively narrowing the choices.
What makes it work rhetorically is its contempt for euphemism. Smith speaks in the plain language of bodies, pain, and physics: weight plus violence equals control. Any politics that denies those forces is, by his measure, just another lash.
Smith, an abolitionist politician speaking into the hot moral economy of antebellum America, is aiming at a familiar dodge: the claim that enslaved people (or any oppressed group) should simply rise, behave, work harder, be patient, be grateful. His analogy exposes that advice as a second cruelty. It’s not just that the burden is heavy; it’s that the same power demanding motion is also manufacturing the immobility. The “urge” and the “lash” belong to the same actor. That pairing is the point.
The subtext is accusation dressed as common sense. Smith doesn’t need to name slavery, racial hierarchy, or the legal machinery of bondage; the reader supplies it. “Up-hill” signals a rigged terrain, not a neutral playing field. The line also anticipates a modern argument about structural inequality: it’s incoherent to talk about freedom of choice while actively narrowing the choices.
What makes it work rhetorically is its contempt for euphemism. Smith speaks in the plain language of bodies, pain, and physics: weight plus violence equals control. Any politics that denies those forces is, by his measure, just another lash.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Gerrit
Add to List
