At a Glance
Inheritance, Evangelical Awakening, and the Transformation of a Landlord
Gerrit Smith's transformation from conventional landlord to radical abolitionist was one of the more dramatic personal evolutions in the history of American reform, and it was driven primarily by the encounter between his inherited wealth and the evangelical Protestant conscience that the Second Great Awakening had awakened in him. His father Peter Smith had been a land speculator of the old school — a man whose relationship to his enormous property holdings was primarily financial, and whose philanthropy, though genuine, was conventional and bounded by the assumptions of his class. Gerrit inherited not only the property but the social position and the obligations that came with it, and he spent the first decade of his inheritance trying to reconcile those obligations with a religious conviction that told him his wealth was a trust to be used for human benefit rather than a possession to be enjoyed.
The evangelical movements of the 1820s and 1830s — particularly the revivalism of Charles Grandison Finney, who preached in the burned-over district of upstate New York where Smith lived and built his fortune — provided the theological framework within which Smith's developing radicalism found its expression. Finney's insistence that genuine Christian conversion required social engagement and reform, that faith without works was dead, and that the reform of American society — including the abolition of slavery — was a religious imperative as much as a political one, spoke directly to Smith's situation as a wealthy man who had inherited his fortune and was wrestling with what to do with it.
His conversion to abolitionism was gradual but eventually complete. He moved through the stages of antislavery opinion that characterised the period — from gradual emancipation with colonisation (the idea that freed Black people should be sent to Africa) to the immediate abolitionism of Garrison's movement to the political abolitionism of the Liberty Party — with a consistency of direction if not of pace that reflected the logic of his developing convictions. Each position he held was held with genuine conviction and then abandoned when he came to believe it was inadequate to the moral demands of the situation.
The Land Grant and the Economics of Black Freedom
The 1846 land grant — the distribution of 120,000 acres of Adirondack land to approximately three thousand Black New Yorkers — was one of the most ambitious and most characteristic acts of Smith's philanthropic career. Its immediate motivation was the New York property requirement for Black male suffrage — the constitutional provision, maintained in New York even as the property requirement was removed for white male voters in 1821, that required Black men to own property worth $250 to exercise the right to vote. Smith understood that this requirement was a form of systematic political exclusion, and that one way to partially remedy it was to provide Black New Yorkers with the property that the state required for their political participation.
The deeper motivation was an understanding of the connection between economic independence and political freedom that was fundamental to Smith's broader thinking about land reform. He believed, with the intensity that characterised his other convictions, that the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small elite — including his own family — was a fundamental injustice that produced economic dependency and political subordination for those who did not own land. The grant to Black New Yorkers was both a specific remedy for the specific injustice of the suffrage requirement and an expression of this broader land reform conviction.
The practical results of the grant were disappointing. The land Smith distributed was largely in the remote and agriculturally marginal Adirondack region — beautiful country, but unsuited to the kind of small-scale farming that the grant was supposed to enable. Many of the recipients had no farming experience and no resources to develop the land they had been given. Some made the attempt and failed; others sold their parcels for whatever they could get. John Brown, who was one of Smith's most important correspondents and allies, actually moved to the North Elba community in the Adirondacks to help the Black settlers there develop their land — an act of solidarity that was characteristic of Brown's combination of idealism and practical commitment. The community at North Elba remained small and struggling, but it was a genuine experiment in the kind of interracial land reform that Smith had envisioned.
Frederick Douglass, the North Star, and Political Abolitionism
Smith's relationship with Frederick Douglass was one of the most important partnerships in the history of American abolitionism and one of the most complex interracial relationships of the era. The two men met in the mid-1840s and developed a genuine mutual respect that sustained a correspondence and a collaboration lasting decades. Smith funded the North Star — Douglass's newspaper, founded in Rochester, New York in 1847 — at a time when the paper's financial survival was genuinely uncertain, and his contributions made it possible for Douglass to maintain the independent editorial platform from which he developed the distinctive voice and the political positions that made him the most important Black figure in American public life.
The relationship between the two men was shaped in part by a shared commitment to political abolitionism — the belief, which distinguished both Smith and Douglass from the Garrisonian wing of the movement, that the Constitution could be interpreted as an antislavery document and that working through the political system, including voting and running candidates for office, was a legitimate and necessary strategy for abolitionists. This position put both men in conflict with Garrison, who maintained that the Constitution was a pro-slavery compact and that political participation in a system that included slaveholders was a form of complicity with slavery. The Smith-Douglass position ultimately prevailed, in the sense that the Republican Party — which grew out of the political antislavery tradition that Smith had helped to build — was the vehicle through which Abraham Lincoln won the presidency and the Civil War was fought.
Smith's friendship with Douglass also involved the kind of direct material support that Douglass, who had escaped slavery without resources or connections, genuinely needed in the early years of his public career. Smith provided financial support, offered hospitality at Peterboro, and used his political connections on Douglass's behalf. The relationship was not without its complications — it was a relationship between a wealthy white patron and a Black former slave, and the power differential was real — but it was, by the standards of the era and by the testimony of both parties, a relationship of genuine mutual respect and genuine shared commitment.
The Secret Six, John Brown, and the Road to Harper's Ferry
Smith's relationship with John Brown was the most consequential and the most dangerous of his many collaborations in the antislavery cause. Brown was a man of absolute conviction and ruthless practicality — a man who had decided, years before most of the antislavery movement was prepared to acknowledge it, that slavery would not be destroyed by argument and that the only effective antislavery strategy was the kind of direct, violent disruption of the slave system that would make it impossible to maintain. Smith was drawn to Brown's radicalism and to the practical directness of his approach in ways that reflected Smith's own growing conviction that the conventional strategies of the movement — lecturing, petitioning, political campaigning — were insufficient to the magnitude of the crisis.
He funded Brown's Kansas operations — the guerrilla warfare that Brown and his sons conducted against pro-slavery settlers in the Kansas Territory in the mid-1850s — and he was one of the six men who, in the late 1850s, provided the funds for the much more ambitious operation that Brown was planning: the raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. The Secret Six — Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns — knew that Brown intended to seize the arsenal, arm enslaved people in the surrounding area, and provoke a general uprising that would spread through the slaveholding South. They provided approximately three thousand dollars in total for the operation, of which Smith's contribution was approximately five hundred dollars.
The Harper's Ferry raid of October 1859 failed militarily — Brown's force was overwhelmed by a detachment of US Marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee — but it succeeded in its larger political purpose of demonstrating to the South that the slavery question would ultimately be settled by force. Brown was captured, tried for treason, and hanged in December 1859. The Secret Six, facing investigation by a Senate committee, responded variously: some fled the country, some claimed ignorance, and Smith suffered a psychological collapse severe enough to require his admission to the Utica Insane Asylum, where he spent several weeks. His subsequent public denials of prior knowledge of the raid were believed by almost no one, but they served their purpose of keeping him out of the dock alongside Brown's other supporters.
Congress, the Liberty Party, and the Politics of Abolitionism
Smith's career in electoral politics was an expression of his commitment to what he called political abolitionism — the belief that the antislavery movement needed to engage with the electoral system directly, running candidates for office and building political majorities for antislavery positions rather than refusing to participate in a system that included slaveholders. He was a central figure in the Liberty Party, founded in 1839 as the first explicitly antislavery political party in American history, and he was himself the party's presidential candidate in 1848, receiving a small number of votes that were nonetheless significant as a demonstration of the political viability of the antislavery position.
His election to the United States House of Representatives in 1852, as an independent from New York's 22nd congressional district, gave him a platform from which to argue for immediate emancipation on the floor of Congress — a position that was not merely unpopular but regarded by many of his colleagues as dangerous and deluded. His single term in Congress was marked by his willingness to say directly what the movement's political allies were usually constrained to say obliquely, and his resignation in 1854 — citing the moral impossibility of continuing to participate in a legislative body that included slaveholders — was characteristic of the uncompromising quality that made him simultaneously admirable and, in the political judgment of many of his contemporaries, impractical.
Peterboro, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Ecology of Reform
Smith's estate at Peterboro, New York, was one of the most important nodes in the network of the antebellum American reform movement. His household was famous for its hospitality to reformers of all kinds — abolitionists, women's rights advocates, temperance campaigners, land reformers — and the conversations that took place there over decades helped shape the intellectual and political development of a significant portion of the movement's leadership. It was at Peterboro that Elizabeth Cady Stanton — Smith's cousin — was first immersed in the world of organised reform, and it was there that she met Henry Stanton, the antislavery lecturer she would marry in 1840. The role of the Peterboro household in connecting and nurturing the various strands of antebellum reform is one of the most important and least recognised aspects of Smith's contribution to the movement.
The estate was also an Underground Railroad station — a place where escaped slaves could find shelter, food, and assistance on their way north. Smith's personal involvement in the Underground Railroad was consistent with his broader approach to abolitionism: he was not content to fund the movement at a distance but wanted to be personally engaged in its practical work, and the station at Peterboro represented his direct participation in the network that was physically extracting enslaved people from bondage and carrying them to freedom.
Legacy: The Indispensable Patron and the Limits of Money
Gerrit Smith died on 28 December 1874, in New York City, having survived the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery by nine years. He had spent the better part of his enormous inherited fortune on the causes he believed in — exact figures are difficult to reconstruct, but estimates suggest that his total philanthropic expenditure over his career ran to millions of dollars in nineteenth-century money, a sum that would be worth many tens of millions in contemporary terms. He had funded newspapers, lecture circuits, legal defences, political campaigns, land grants, and military operations. He had been a congressman, a presidential candidate, a patron, and a conspirator. He had been, by any reasonable measure, the single most important financial supporter of the American antislavery movement.
His legacy is complicated by the Harper's Ferry episode — by his subsequent denial of prior knowledge, which was almost certainly false, and by the psychological collapse that the raid's failure produced. These were not his finest hours, and they contrast awkwardly with the clarity of conviction that characterised the rest of his career. But they do not diminish the significance of what he did over forty years of consistent, generous, and genuinely courageous engagement with the most important moral and political question of his era.
He is less well known today than the figures he funded — less famous than Frederick Douglass, less celebrated than John Brown, less remembered than the movement's great orators and writers. This relative obscurity is partly a function of the nature of his role — patrons are less visible than the people they support — and partly a function of the uncomfortable truths embedded in the story of a very wealthy man whose generosity, however genuine, never quite resolved the tension between the inherited privilege that gave him his power and the egalitarian convictions that drove him to use it.