Justice & Law Quote by Gerrit Smith

Smith’s line is a blunt rebuke to the 19th-century habit of treating rights as permissions dispensed by the state, the party, or the majority. By calling his rights “infinitely nobler” and rooting them in “the favor and grace of God,” he yanks the argument out of legislative horse-trading and plants it in moral absolutes. That rhetorical move matters: if rights come from government, they can be revoked by government; if they come from God, then law is merely a tool for recognition, not a source of legitimacy.

The subtext is confrontation. Smith isn’t just being pious; he’s staking out a position that delegitimizes any legal order built on slavery, racial hierarchy, or selective citizenship. In antebellum America, where abolitionists battled a Constitution that many saw as compromised by slavery, appealing to divine authority was a way to indict the whole system without sounding like a mere partisan. It turns civil rights into a kind of theological debt the nation refuses to pay.

The phrasing also smuggles in a radical egalitarianism. “Favor and grace” suggests something unearned, not allocated according to property, whiteness, or male status. Smith, a politician aligned with abolitionist movements and a supporter of broader reform, is making rights non-negotiable and non-merit-based.

It’s persuasive because it corners the listener: disagreeing isn’t just political dissent, it risks sounding like moral heresy. That’s the power and the peril of the claim; it elevates human dignity, while narrowing the space for democratic compromise.