Leadership Quote by Gerrit Smith

Smith’s opening move is restraint masquerading as permission. “I do not object” is lawyerly, almost bored on purpose: a politician’s way of stepping aside so the real argument can walk in. In the mid-19th century, railroads and canals weren’t neutral “improvements”; they were the signature projects of state power, private capital, and territorial ambition. To say you don’t object is to acknowledge the era’s default assumption that progress equals infrastructure, that the nation should be stitched together by iron and water.

The subtext is that Smith is not here to be cast as anti-modern or anti-growth. He’s clearing the rhetorical minefield before he criticizes what usually comes bundled with internal improvements: subsidies, land grants, corruption, and the moral laundering of expansion. For an abolitionist-minded reform politician, “development” could look like a shiny delivery system for human misery, speeding cotton to port and binding new territories to a slave economy even as it promised prosperity.

The line also signals tactical coalition-building. Many voters and colleagues loved canals and rails; opposing them outright risked political isolation. Smith instead positions himself as reasonable, even progressive, which lets him pivot to the harder claim: not all “national progress” deserves automatic moral approval, and not every public investment serves the public.

It works because it weaponizes moderation. By adopting the language of civility and practicality, Smith can smuggle in an ethical test: if the infrastructure is so obviously good, why does it so often arrive with coercion, favoritism, and the quiet reinforcement of an unjust order?