Politics & Power Quote by Gerrit Smith

Gerrit Smith rejects any vision of the state as master and citizens as chattel. The language of slaves and property is not casual rhetoric; it draws a direct line between political subjugation and the legalized human bondage he fought to end. A radical abolitionist and philanthropist, Smith watched governments fortify slavery through statutes like the Fugitive Slave Act and through court rulings that stripped Black people of personhood. When officials demanded obedience to such laws, they implied that people existed to serve the machinery of the state and its entrenched interests. Smith counters with an older, Lockean idea: government is an instrument derived from the consent of free persons, obligated to protect their natural rights.

That reversal of ends and means echoes the moral grammar of the era’s reformers and anticipates Lincoln’s later phrase, government of, by, and for the people. It also resonates with the biblical cadence that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The point is not anti-government anarchism but a standard for legitimacy. Authority is justified only insofar as it serves human dignity, liberty, and justice. When it violates those goods, obedience is no longer a civic virtue but a moral hazard.

Smith’s life gives the claim its bite. He used wealth to fund abolitionist efforts, granted land to Black families to secure voting rights, served briefly in Congress, and helped sustain networks that defied slave-catching. For him, citizenship required resisting policies that convert persons into instruments, whether enslaved people treated as commodities or free citizens conscripted into enforcing bondage. The sentence becomes a test for any political order: Who is being used, and for whose benefit? If people are treated as means rather than ends, reform or resistance is not merely permissible; it becomes the measure of fidelity to the very purpose of government.