Time & Perspective Quote by Gerrit Smith

Smith’s line weaponizes discomfort as a moral tell. He isn’t arguing policy details; he’s staging a psychological indictment. The “good man” is a key choice: Smith concedes the possibility of baseline decency, then shows how quickly that decency curdles when it “lends itself” to slavery’s defense. The verb matters. This isn’t a villain twirling a mustache; it’s someone renting out his conscience, temporarily, for party loyalty, profit, or social peace.

The sentence hinges on “at least for a time,” a ruthlessly realistic allowance. Smith knows people acclimate. Moral horror can be trained out of you, especially when an entire intellectual infrastructure exists to do the training. That’s the subtext of “new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning”: pro-slavery argumentation isn’t presented as raw brutality but as a domesticated ideology, complete with respectable vocabulary and tidy logic. Smith’s point is that slavery doesn’t just demand cruelty; it demands a makeover of the mind. You don’t merely endorse an institution. You adopt a dialect that makes it sound inevitable, lawful, even benevolent.

Contextually, this lands in the pre-Civil War period when American elites were professionalizing their justifications for human bondage - biblical proofs, pseudo-science, constitutional hairsplitting. Smith, an abolitionist politician, aims to split moderates from their rationalizations. “Any where but at home” is both empathy and trap: if you feel uneasy, good. Don’t wait for that feeling to pass. The most dangerous moment is when it stops.