Success Quote by Gerrit Smith

Smith’s sentence doesn’t bother dressing itself up as polite debate; it reads like strategy. “Manifestly vital” is a pressure phrase, a way of declaring that the argument has already been settled by reality itself. If you disagree, you’re not merely wrong - you’re blind. That certainty matters because he’s not targeting slavery only as an economic system, but as a moral story kept alive by trusted narrators.

The real object here is clergy power. By singling out “proslavery, especially of slaveholding, ministers,” Smith is naming a uniquely toxic fusion: men who claim spiritual authority while materially benefiting from human bondage. The subtext is damning. In a culture where sermons functioned as mass media and ministers were social referees, a slaveholding preacher wasn’t just a private hypocrite; he was a legitimacy machine. He could launder brutality into “order,” baptize greed as “tradition,” and frame abolition as dangerous extremism.

“Destroyed” is the tell. Smith isn’t calling for a mild rebuttal or a better pamphlet; he’s calling for dismantling an institution’s credibility. That choice reflects the antebellum conflict’s central insight: slavery survived partly because it was given a theological permission slip. The anti-slavery cause, in Smith’s view, can’t win by arguing policy alone. It has to sever the moral supply lines - to make proslavery preaching socially radioactive, to strip ministers of the aura that lets violence pass as virtue. This is politics as moral demolition: attack the authority, and the system’s defenses start to collapse.