Justice & Law Quote by Gerrit Smith

Calling the complaint "nonsense" is Gerrit Smith doing more than dismissing a legal argument; he is trying to foreclose the entire moral frame that would make Ottoman "rights" the center of the story. Smith, an American abolitionist-politician with a talent for moral escalation, treats sovereignty as a prop that powerful states wheel out when it protects their interests. The intent is blunt: shift the debate from formal international etiquette to a higher court of public conscience.

The likely context is the 1853 Martin Koszta affair, when U.S. naval officer Duncan Ingraham threatened force in Smyrna to free Koszta, a Hungarian revolutionary claimed by Austria and held under Ottoman custody. Critics argued Ingraham bullied Turkey and violated neutral jurisdiction; Smith flips that critique into a moral absurdity. By naming "Turkey" rather than Austria, he also needles the convenient habit of blaming the weaker host state instead of the imperial power applying pressure behind the scenes.

Subtext: America should stop pretending that law is neutral when it can be used to launder oppression. Smith's rhetorical move is to delegitimize the procedural objection before it can harden into policy. "Rights of Turkey" becomes a phrase he wants to sound laughable, because if the audience accepts it as serious, they might also accept that he and Ingraham should have stood aside while a political refugee was shipped back into danger.

It works because it compresses a complicated diplomatic tangle into a moral binary: rescue versus cowardice, action versus complicity. Smith bets that readers will feel the pull of the second term more than the first.