Politics & Power Quote by Gerrit Smith

Smith opens by refusing the national habit of euphemism. "It is not to be disguised" isn’t just a throat-clearing; it’s a moral accusation aimed at everyone still calling secession a "misunderstanding" or a "crisis" that can be smoothed over with the right committee. The line does two things at once: it names the conflict as war, and it indicts the rhetorical cover that lets comfortable people pretend otherwise.

The target sharpens in the second sentence. "Political and commercial men" are cast as a class with a shared reflex: stabilize markets, quiet the streets, get back to business. Smith doesn’t deny their energy ("industriously striving"), he questions their motive and imagination. Their peace is "superficial, false, and temporary" because it’s built to stop noise, not to settle accounts. The repetition is deliberate, like a prosecutor stacking charges: shallow in substance, dishonest in premise, doomed in duration.

Context matters: Smith was a prominent abolitionist politician in the orbit of radical antislavery politics, writing in a moment when "compromise" meant, in practice, bargaining over slavery’s expansion and federal protection. His subtext is that any peace not grounded in emancipation and equal citizenship is just a ceasefire for the benefit of capital and incumbents. The sentence is an early warning about the seductions of normalcy: a political economy that would rather manage conflict than confront its cause, even if that management guarantees a worse reckoning later.