"I believe that government is for the use of the people, and not the people for the use of the government"
About this Quote
Gerrit Smith turns the relationship between citizen and state right-side up. Government is a tool, not a master; its legitimacy comes from serving human needs, protecting rights, and advancing the common good. When the state begins to use people for its own ends, it slips from republican stewardship into domination, trading consent for coercion.
Smith earned the moral authority to make such a claim. One of the 19th century’s most committed abolitionists and philanthropists, he spent his fortune and reputation fighting institutions that treated human beings as means rather than ends. He backed land reform to expand suffrage, funded Black settlements in upstate New York so free Black men could meet property requirements to vote, and supported women’s rights and temperance. His activism, and his brief service in Congress, taught him how easily law and bureaucracy can harden into instruments of privilege. The Fugitive Slave Act offered a stark example: a federal command turning free citizens into enforcers for slaveholders. For Smith, such uses of government inverted the very purpose of political life.
The line also rings with a biblical cadence, echoing the idea that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Institutions exist to serve human flourishing; when they demand obedience divorced from justice, they become idols. Smith’s vision aligns with the core American claim of popular sovereignty, later captured by Lincoln’s formula of government of, by, and for the people. It calls not for anarchy but for accountability: policies should be justified by the benefits and liberties they secure, not by the convenience of officials or the preservation of the machinery itself.
The test he sets is enduring. Do laws empower people to live freely and with dignity, or do they conscript them into maintaining systems that forget their purpose? Measured by that standard, reform is not hostility to government; it is fidelity to what government is for.
Smith earned the moral authority to make such a claim. One of the 19th century’s most committed abolitionists and philanthropists, he spent his fortune and reputation fighting institutions that treated human beings as means rather than ends. He backed land reform to expand suffrage, funded Black settlements in upstate New York so free Black men could meet property requirements to vote, and supported women’s rights and temperance. His activism, and his brief service in Congress, taught him how easily law and bureaucracy can harden into instruments of privilege. The Fugitive Slave Act offered a stark example: a federal command turning free citizens into enforcers for slaveholders. For Smith, such uses of government inverted the very purpose of political life.
The line also rings with a biblical cadence, echoing the idea that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Institutions exist to serve human flourishing; when they demand obedience divorced from justice, they become idols. Smith’s vision aligns with the core American claim of popular sovereignty, later captured by Lincoln’s formula of government of, by, and for the people. It calls not for anarchy but for accountability: policies should be justified by the benefits and liberties they secure, not by the convenience of officials or the preservation of the machinery itself.
The test he sets is enduring. Do laws empower people to live freely and with dignity, or do they conscript them into maintaining systems that forget their purpose? Measured by that standard, reform is not hostility to government; it is fidelity to what government is for.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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