Marriage Quote by Gerrit Smith

What makes Gerrit Smith's line sting is how calmly it detonates a staple pro-slavery alibi: the claim that slavery was a "Christian" institution. He doesn’t start by accusing slaveholders of cruelty in the abstract. He grants, almost theatrically, the enslaved person's desire to do the very things antebellum America publicly praised: marry properly, read Scripture, study God's word. Then he drops the trapdoor: "forbidden him". The moral charge is embedded in the contradiction, not shouted from a pulpit.

The intent is prosecutorial. Smith is building a case that slavery is not merely harsh but structurally anti-Christian, because it requires the active suppression of Christian practice. Marriage matters here because it marks personhood and moral agency; denying or voiding it turns people into inventory. Literacy matters because it threatens the entire regime: a Bible read by the enslaved becomes a weapon, not a comfort. In the South, laws and customs restricting Black education, religious gatherings, and movement weren't incidental; they were the operating system.

Subtext: the real object of devotion in the slave system isn't God but control. Slaveholders could invoke Scripture when it disciplined labor, but had to muzzle Scripture when it empowered conscience. Smith, a Northern politician and abolitionist tied to the radical wing of the movement, is also speaking to Northern Christians who wanted to stay respectable and neutral. He's telling them neutrality is complicity: if you claim to honor God's word, you cannot defend a society that criminalizes people for reading it.