Politics & Power Quote by Gerrit Smith

Smith’s line lands like a moral refusal, not a policy memo: the government is a tool, and the moment it starts acting like an owner, it has breached the basic terms of legitimacy. The phrasing is deliberately transactional and physical - “use,” “slaves,” “property” - because Smith is speaking in a country where slavery wasn’t metaphorical. He drags civic theory into the realm of bodies and rights, making “government overreach” impossible to sanitize into mere bureaucratic inconvenience.

The intent is abolitionist-adjacent even when it’s not explicitly about abolition. Smith, a radical antislavery politician and philanthropist, is targeting the era’s constant temptation to treat the state as an authority that defines who counts as fully human and who doesn’t. By framing the “doctrine” he rejects, he’s exposing a quiet American heresy: that citizenship is conditional and can be revoked, managed, or owned by institutions “for order.” His counterclaim - government “for the use of the people” - is small-government language with a sharp edge: it’s not libertarian solitude; it’s a demand that public power exist to secure equal standing, not enforce hierarchy.

The subtext is also a warning about complicity. If people accept being “property” of their government, they become accessories to the logic that makes actual property of other people possible. Smith’s rhetorical move is to collapse the distance between political passivity and moral catastrophe, insisting that democracy isn’t just voting; it’s refusing the state’s claim to possession.