Chapter 1
He Feeds the Sparrow
At Peterboro … it was all Abolition—Abolition in doors and out—Abolition in the churches and Abolition in the stores—Abolition in the field and Abolition by the wayside.
—Charles Wheeler Dennison, New York abolitionist, 1841
In late August 1872, Gerrit Smith, a radical reformer in upstate New York, got a thank-you letter from a flyspeck hamlet in the Adirondack Mountains. All in a day’s work. Smith, seventy-five, had a nation-spanning name for philanthropy as rich and deep as his own voice. A life of steady giving had earned him thank-you notes enough to paper every room in his mansion and the columns on his portico besides. He kept some, answered others, and threw away the rest. He spent as many as fifteen hours a day in his high-ceilinged study, whipping off letters in his swift, sometimes impenetrable hand to presidents, land agents, contract farmers, big-city editors, fellow reformers, and cousins twice removed. He wrote about temperance, Cuban independence, Italy’s freedom fighters, and the famine-making grasshoppers of Kansas. He had a lot to say.1
In 1872, when Smith heard from the Adirondack homesteader John Thomas, he was in his land office near his Peterboro home, penning speeches on behalf of the presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant. The powerful newspaper publisher Horace Greeley was running on a multiparty ticket against the war hero and incumbent, and though Grant had his liabilities (the chronic tippling, the blatant cronyism), most Republicans felt bound to defend him. Smith, who knew that civil rights for nearly five million Black Americans could happen, if it happened, only with a Republican in the White House, flogged Grant’s candidacy with a fervor near fanatic. A friend chided him for his “unaccountable … relentless severity” toward the Democrats: “It would seem as if your philanthropy was leaking out.” But Smith dug in, arguing that “the Anti-Slavery battle is not yet fought out—and, until it is, we shall need Grant’s continued leadership.”2
Still, caught up as he was in the campaign, Smith saved the letter from John Thomas. His old hopes for his Adirondack land giveaway were dead, and nothing Thomas had to say would brighten Smith’s view of it. Yet here was this full-hearted, unexpected thank-you note from one of Smith’s three thousand Black beneficiaries, still up there in the North Country, and still farming as Smith had hoped. Smith wouldn’t, couldn’t, give it to the coals.
Close to a million acres had come to Smith in early manhood upon the death of his father, Peter Smith, a fur trader turned spectacularly wealthy land speculator. Gerrit Smith then bought more land on his own, much of it at auction. But selling Adirondack land proved much less easy than inheriting or buying it. By 1846, he’d had enough. Why labor unavailingly to peddle wild land when he could make a gift of it to those unable to afford it? With 120,000 acres broken into 40-acre lots, Smith could give as many as three thousand Black New Yorkers a reason to leave the city, remake themselves as yeoman farmers, and enjoy the fruits of citizenship when they gained the right to vote. After the 1821 Constitutional Convention, New York law withheld the ballot from free Black men who could not show they owned $250 in taxable property. The point of this racialized voting requirement was to check Black enfranchisement before slavery was legally abolished in New York in 1827, and it worked. A Black electorate was administratively aborted before it could be politically empowered. When Smith announced his plan to give away a portion of his land in 1846, this “mean and wicked exclusion” had already kept a generation of Black New Yorkers from the polls.3
1846 was also the year of the first state Constitutional Convention in New York since 1821. Convention delegates from every county poured into Albany to debate a range of changes to New York’s constitution, including the question of Black enfranchisement. After a summer of rancorous debate, the issue remained unresolved. The weary delegates handed off the fate of equal suffrage to a plebiscite, and that November, New York voters (white men all) went two to one to keep the for-Blacks-only $250 restriction. When Smith announced his giveaway in August 1846, this outcome was not certain. But it loomed, and he knew what it would do. For decades free Black Americans had protested the suppression of a Black electorate. More than two hundred national and state Colored Conventions took place from 1830 into the 1890s, with Black rights and suffrage justice, the measure of full citizenship, at the head of the agenda. Smith foresaw how it would resonate for Black New Yorkers in 1846 when white voters, once again, kept them from the ballot. His land distribution effort was a preemptive strike that stood for hope. No one of his gift lots held the worth of the $250 voting requirement, but if land was cleared, fields planted, and holdings doggedly improved, the rising value of these gift lots would be noted by the town assessor, and the voting requirement might be met. “Since the State has … determined [that] Black men … must become landholders that they may be entitled to vote they will become landholders,” Smith reasoned. “Vote they will, cost what it will.”4
Hon. Gerrit Smith of New York. Matthew Brady, photographer, 1855–60. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, LOC.
Land reform was the other great goal of his giveaway, and this Smith deemed quite as urgent as racial justice at the polls. “I am an Agrarian,” he told his Black city agents in his explanatory letter about his “scheme of justice and benevolence.” “I would that every man who desires a farm might have one.” He had pressed for environmental justice before, but in this letter, he clarified the link between poverty and racism, each the stoker and enabler of the other. In New York City, whole fields of working-class employment were closed to Blacks. In public spaces and professions, schools, businesses, and churches, segregation was the rule. Hence Smith’s belief that city Blacks would benefit the most from his land gifts in the woods; if poor Black New Yorkers faced hardships unimaginable to poor whites, poor Black city people had it worse. The agents Smith chose to cull his grantees in metropolitan New York were as unhappy with Black prospects in the city as he was, and had long urged an outmigration of Black people in the city to small towns and the country. Smith’s giveaway gave Black agrarianism a compass. Black urbanites now had a place to go, not just a place to leave.5
That destination, the Adirondack wilderness, was imperfect, as Smith knew. Little of the gift land was homestead ready. There would be gift lots under water, or straddling the shaggy spines of mountains. Some would be in country so remote, so impenetrable, it had yet to be surveyed. And Smith’s knowledge of it was thin. What he saw from the coach that juddered him around the region to check in with his rent collectors was fleeting, and those journeys, always arduous, were infrequent. Smith traveled only when he had to. Home and office were his keep. Like the baronies of many speculators in his era, his near-million-acre empire surged and ebbed on tides of paper. But about his gift land he could say this: It might not match more richly soiled land out west, and would always suffer from the impatient brevity of the Adirondack summer, but it was free of liens, or close enough, and most taxes were paid up. It had value, and it could gain more.6
Other benefits of his new scheme Smith kept to himself. No need to dwell on the fact that these land gifts would relieve his tax burden and the dreary work of long-distance land management. Also left unstated was his hope that Black New Yorkers, once enfranchised, would vote for the Liberty Party, the only dedicatedly antislavery party in New York. Smith, a keen disciple, stumped for the Liberty, attended its conventions, published handbills for the cause, and sometimes saw his name on its ticket. But he never asked for votes from his giftees. He knew better. In March 1846, he had carelessly confessed that he cared less about Black voting rights than about whether the enfranchised Black voter could be relied on to “cast his vote in the right spirit, and for the right ends.” Whig newspapers smirked for weeks at this admission that Smith’s interest in equal suffrage was motivated by the expectation of Black votes for his party: “So is the liberty of the Liberty party of New York!”7
The depth of Smith’s commitment to his interest in Black voting rights also came under fire in the spring of 1846 when he refused to back a one-time Liberty-Whig alliance that might have beefed up the prosuffrage lobby at the New York Constitutional Convention. Nothing, Smith fumed, not even a better shot at equal rights for Black New Yorkers, could excuse deal making with the Whigs. A party that counted slaveholders among its leaders was in cahoots with Satan. The mere idea of collaborating filled Smith “with surprise, shame and sorrow.” Smith’s toughness on this point recalled to some Whig editors the Liberty’s old name as a spoiler. Hadn’t this same radical intransigence as much as put the slave-owning Democrat James Polk in the White House in 1844, poaching precious swing votes from the Whig contender, Henry Clay, and wasting them on the unelectable antislavery “Ultraist” James Birney? For New York Whigs, the bitter grievance had not died.8
But the giveaway put party politics to the side. Here was a gift outright, or very close—a gift that asked only that its beneficiaries be Black, poor, nondrinking, and living in Smith’s New York. Smith was not dunning for his beloved party or putting principle ahead of practical reform. If his earlier positions gave him a name for obduracy, the giveaway was pointedly conciliatory. It suggested a common cause between white land reformers and Black agrarians; it gave abolitionists Black and white, at odds on points of strategy, something to agree on; it did not privilege any of the sparring factions in the Black reform community; and, above all, it birthed a new fraternity of Gerrit Smith giftees. What bound them? Nothing more or less than the shared fact of ownership, and ownership of something so unknown that it partook (briefly) of the ideal: a land that promised self-sufficiency, a farm economy so productive, so fine-tuned, it had no need of cash or credit, debt or interest. In his cultural history The Gift, Lewis Hyde observes that when people share the condition of being gifted all together, they discover a “society … where there was none before.” The promise of membership in this new-made society was as much Smith’s gift as the deeds themselves.9
The Perfectionist’s Agenda
The giveaway gifted Smith too. Its charitable spirit honored the claims of faith. Notwithstanding his rejection of his father’s strict Presbyterianism, Smith was a man of God. Hewing to a usable “religion of Jesus”—a faith-in-action that asked Smith to bring his business into line with Christian goals each day—this was his life’s challenge. Through an accretion of conscious acts and gestures, Smith could make the world more perfect, more a facsimile of heaven on this earth. This was how the world was saved, his road map to Perfectionist redemption.10
The idea was not his. Smith grew up in the Burned-Over District of rural upstate New York. The land was scorched, it was said, because so many here had been evangelized at camp revivals that no “fuel” was left to burn. Faith through doing, faith inherent in each act and gesture, took vigilance and ingenuity; Smith seized the challenge. Private losses drove him too. In 1837, a nationwide financial panic drained much of his worth, and the same year marked the deaths of his father, Peter, and his and his wife Nancy’s son and daughter. Loss on this order devastated, but in radical abolitionism Smith found a working faith that let the world in and helped him find his focus. Abolitionism was not just one available expression of Christian love; it was its culmination. If nothing was dearer to God’s heart than the faithful observation of the Golden Rule, nothing could be more offensive than its opposite, and what greater violation of the Golden Rule than the reduction of a God-gifted human soul to chattel? Slavery insulted God’s best gift, derailed His plan and subverted any hope of a redeemed, perfected world. A true Christian theology was obliged to challenge this first sin any way it could.11
So when Gerrit and Nancy Smith’s hometown ministers balked at preaching antislavery Bible politics on the Sabbath, or would not call out slavery as sinful because it might offend the sternly “neutral” policies of distant church authorities, the Smiths formed their own church, the nonaffiliated Free Church of Peterboro. And like the democratic grassroots congregations of early Christianity, Peterboro’s church would be accountable to its own members and authority alone. As for “those stupid, nonsensical, absurd doctrines with which the churches have ever been puzzling their poor, pitiable brains”—a lot of mystic claptrap, Smith declared. The sole criterion of discipleship in the “Christ-religion” of the new church was “everyday conduct in the presence of the world.” Did the “Comeouter” congregant take Jesus as his model? Reject the “nonsense—that he, whom God has made a man, man can turn into a chattel”? Did she who called herself Christian understand this meant not just enacting the Golden Rule at every opportunity but spurning church denominations that admitted slaveholders, stores that peddled slave-made goods, and parties that counted slave owners among their candidates?12
This was a lot to ask. A Peterboro Presbyterian might say she hated slavery and still covet a frock of slave-grown cotton. A Congregationalist could call himself an abolitionist yet dose his tea with slave-milled sugar. Abolition faith said no. Why, asked the proponents of Bible politics, should one portion of one’s life be less subject to God’s law than another? Why not one unifying standard? Every corner of the secular realm was game for the work of perfectionist redemption. Bring it all under scrutiny, hold firm, and if members of this community squabbled, be a peacemaker. No antislavery reformer in the Burned-Over District did as much as Gerrit Smith to nurse and knit the radicals into a collaborative force.13
Another laboratory for a sanctified community was Smith’s Peterboro home. With the goal of hastening the great day of redemption, Smith made his daily world a model of love and justice. In the name of “[building] up the Redeemer’s Kingdom in this community,” he launched his hometown church, organized a Black trade school, and recruited applicants from New York City, some fugitives among them. In the village named for his father, he fenced his village green, improved the creek, and stocked an antislavery library in the spirits-free inn. He spruced up the cemetery and gave neighbors cash to paint their homes and buy them. This was not the easy, incidental charity of the giver who fires off a bank note to the antislavery outfit of his choice. Smith’s sleepless philanthropy was as reflexive as his breath.14
The farm colonies that Smith hoped to launch on his Adirondack gift land could not replicate his Peterboro, but they were Peterboro’s country cousins, suggesting (at least on paper) Smith’s dream of a perfected world. Putting antislavery settlers on the ground whose votes might abolitionize their backwoods communities was a beginning. And when Smith made sure the gift land was in a part of his property seeded with antislavery believers, devised rules of eligibility for land that screened God’s deserving poor from the impious and intemperate, and encouraged his Adirondack settlers to build an antislavery church “on the Peterboro platform,” he honored a Perfectionist agenda.15
Smith also offered the Black settlers a proxy version of himself— another rock-hard abolition man who had read about Smith’s plan for a Black farm colony on the Adirondack frontier and thought it something fine, even hoped to move his family there to help the pioneers. Would Smith support him? In April 1848, this sheep farmer came to Peterboro to share with Smith his hope to “give [the grantees] work as I have occasion, look after them in all needful ways, and be a kind of father to them.” A wonderful idea, Smith agreed, and a year later, John Brown, the name as plain as his garb and speech, moved his family of eleven into a vacant farmhouse in North Elba, hard by a fledgling Black enclave whose nickname, Freemans Home, would endure in local memory another hundred years. This commonsensical, no-nonsense Yankee, Smith believed, would work wonders for the “colored colony.” With John Brown in the grantees’ corner, Smith may have felt God read his heart.16
Yours with Great Respect
What the Adirondack grantee John Thomas offered Gerrit Smith in his thank-you note of 1872 (transcribed with a neighbor’s help, since he could not write) was a thumbnail sketch of his own life.
Thomas was not always a New Yorker. For his first three decades, home was Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, where Thomas, his wife, and their children were enslaved. The babies died in infancy. Then in 1840, his wife was sold away to enslavers in Georgia. It was the calamity every married slave most feared. Thomas and his wife had made a world, a partnership, and in a day, maybe an hour, that world was loaded up like cordwood and carted out of sight. Thomas was immobilized. He could not think what to do. The next mood, a surging outrage, served him better. “Dissatisfied with my lot of being marketable property and a subject of involuntary servitude for no crime but that of the color which God gave me,” the twenty-nine-year-old slave resolved to give his master, Ezekiel Merrick, a very “long farewell.” That year, Thomas escaped from Merrick’s farm and made his way to Quaker farmers. They directed him to Philadelphia, where he lingered for half a year before he pushed north to New York’s upstate Troy, a boomtown on the Hudson River and his world for seven years.17
A strange new world he found here, too. No springy fragrance of the peach orchard, but coal-heated tenements and rank canals, and instead of hushed, clandestine meetings, were open speeches about slave catchers as murderers, slavery as sin. No more slave elders cloaking dreams of freedom and escape in homiletics, but bold-spoken activists blasting man-thieves, and young, well-educated Black ministers freely urging “resistance! resistance! resistance! … You had far better all die—die immediately, than live slaves.” And yet this same Troy, for all its Black churches and vibrant oratory, was no easy place to love. Still in the thrall of proslavery interests that kept its mills humming around the clock, it was beset with blackbirders (subsidized kidnappers of fugitives) and white gangs.18
Some of Thomas’s seven years in Troy were hopeful. Here he met and married his second wife, Mary Ann Vanderheyden. He joined the Liberty Street clapboard church of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, who, too, was born enslaved in Maryland and had fled north. Garnet, perhaps Smith’s most effective land agent, signed on interested grantees from Troy and its environs for two years running. And if he could not go north himself (a boyhood injury put farming out of reach), Garnet still made the gift land glow with all the promise Troy withheld. In 1849, the year Garnet left Troy for Geneva to pastor a small Black church, many congregants in Troy were packing for the Adirondack frontier. John Thomas, Mary Ann, and two children were among them.19
Thomas knew that starting over in the North would be daunting. A growing season quick enough to nap through, topsoil frayed as an old map, mosquitoes thick as woodsmoke, blackflies big as bats: the rumors hissed. Would he ever find his forty acres west of Plumadore Pond in Franklin County, Township 9? If he made the hike, his first view may well have been his last. To Gerrit Smith, he wrote that he sold this lot because of “the inconvenience of Church and School privileges at that time,” but this was tact talking. “Privileges” in this raw, tangled forest would not come for years. In Township 10, just to the south, Thomas found a better lot handy to both a rough road and a clear-running stream, with enough Black settlers in the neighborhood to explain the (still-used) name of Negro (and sometimes N——) Brook. By 1850, the Thomases were well entrenched, their potato patch full seeded, their fields bright with oats and hay. Twenty-two years later, Thomas could describe to Smith a home “which by labor and necessity has been enlarged into a handsome farm of two hundred acres, with all necessary Stock and farming implements,” and well secured, he noted proudly, with earnings of “two or three hundred dollars every year.”20
Thanks to “your generous donation,” Thomas assured Smith, he and his family “enjoy our rural home in peace and quiet.” And now that “the toils of life are nearly done,” he wanted his rich benefactor to know that he had “breasted the storm of prejudice and opposition, until I begin to be regarded as an ‘American Citizen.’ Heartily thanking you for the interest you have always taken in the welfare of my people, and hoping to hear from you at your earliest convenience. I remain, Yours with Great Respect, John Thomas.”21
The Long Silence
Why Gerrit Smith held on to this letter is no mystery. Its two pages vividly revealed one man’s life-risking courage, his enduring gratitude and faith in Smith’s original idea. Perhaps the more intriguing question is why Smith did not respond (his diligently maintained letter book holds no copy of an answer).
Smith took pains to answer those who wrote him; indeed, this was a reason he got as many letters as he did. Abolition scholars are well acquainted with the ones that came from antislavery activists Black and white; American, British, and Canadian; radical and moderate. Less known (and little studied) is the much greater part of his correspondence with people long forgotten—country ministers, small-town Liberty men, impoverished widows, lonely veterans, crackpot inventors, needy students, temperance zealots, and backwoods farmers from upstate New York. These letters, often appeals for help, were sometimes satisfied, often not. It didn’t matter. Regardless of the outcome, Gerrit Smith could be counted on to listen, and for many, this was philanthropy enough. “God cares for worlds, yet feeds the sparrow. He has made you one of his chief Stewards,” a McGrawville friend told him in 1861. “Though myself a stranger to you,” an upstate farmer’s wife observed, “I feel that congeniality which says, such an individual is no stranger to me.” An Ohioan knew what she meant: “Although I have never seen you, I seem to be writing an old friend.” It was this eager confidence in Smith’s empathy that emboldened an Onondaga County woman to believe Smith could help her find her missing son, an African seminary student in New York to ask Smith to buy him winter boots, a Vermont medical student to hope that Smith would underwrite his practice, a bankrupt painter in Philadelphia to invite Smith to pay his rent.22
Smith fed the sparrow. He took pains. But the Black Adirondack farmer who asked for no favor, loan, advice or gift, he did not answer. Why this silence?
Smith did not coddle his missteps and mistakes. He stepped past them. He moved on. He outran a youthful romance with African colonization. From 1827 to 1835 he had defended it with zeal, but when abolitionist allies explained its rootedness in white racism, he spurned the “folly of a young man” and never looked back. He quit his love affair with the millenarian William Miller, a Vermont farmer who had devised an elaborate mathematical approximation of the Second Coming from an inventive reading of the Hebrew Bible. With legions of hopeful Millerites in the Northeast (estimates of Miller’s followers range from fifty thousand to half a million), Gerrit and Nancy Smith made ready for the Last Days on October 21, 1843. When the Messiah skipped His date with destiny, the Millerites were crushed. Donned in their ascension robes, squinting skyward from the hilltops, many had given up all their worldly goods to embrace the Second Coming. The Smiths were not among them. If they lost their hearts, they kept their heads; their fortune stayed their own.23
Smith also walked out on his congressional career, and with good reason, as I’ll show later. Well before his term was over, he packed up and returned to Peterboro. He wasn’t tired. He was impatient and he was bored. There was work to do, a ton of work, and Congress was no place for a man with plans. In this era in Washington, a brute culture of intimidation stood for statecraft, and the abolitionist could gain no ground. In Peterboro, he knew his strength. From the home place, as Frederick Douglass wrote, he made “his purse strings the common property of the anti-slavery cause.”24
In Utica in 1835, at the first meeting of the New York State Anti-slavery Society, Smith had singlehandedly and memorably turned a catastrophe into a blessing when he invited six hundred radical abolitionists to reconvene at his Peterboro home after their convention was mobbed by their opponents. History read the meaning of this gesture in its rebuke to hooliganism, but for the shaken delegates its value went deeper. Smith’s offer shattered old divides between public and private, rich and poor, rural and urban, and modeled a new kind of antislavery community, inclusive and empathic. The pies and good hot coffee he and Nancy fed the pilgrims, the rugs and blankets they passed around, suggested to their guests (how could they not?) perhaps something of how enslaved people felt when they were rescued and made safe. And as the delegates were powerfully moved by the experience, so was Smith himself. The self-named “convert of the occasion,” he there and then declared himself for radical abolitionism and immediate emancipation.25
From Smith’s home, too, he could underwrite and steward the New York State Anti-slavery Society, the New York State Vigilance Committee (a Manhattan-based organization that guided hundreds of fugitives to freedom), a dozen chronically cash-strapped antislavery papers, and the antislavery campaigns in Kansas, legal and illicit. Other kinds of gifts, unpublicized, unsystematic, known only to his secretaries, were no less lavish. The $8 million in gifts that we can track had a worth that now would exceed $1 billion. But as his biographer observed in 1878, “No one will ever know how much he gave away; no record of it was made.”26
From Peterboro, Smith crafted media events that unsettled the slave power more than any speech he gave in Congress. The two-day convention he pulled together in August 1850 to denounce the coming Fugitive Slave Act attracted as many as four thousand to the upstate village of Cazenovia. Press coverage was avid, and news of as many as fifty fugitives, all “guests of honor” mingling with white activists in pointed defiance of the Slave Act, whipped Southerners into a fury (and some Northern editors as well; the Poughkeepsie Journal called the meeting “Gerrit Smith’s Amalgamation Convention”). Particularly galling was the keynote. Said to have been written by an escaped slave (actually, Smith authored it himself), “A Letter to the Slaves” called for self-emancipation and assured Black fugitives that they could count on help from white supporters in the North. From Georgia to the capital, slavery’s defenders excoriated these lawless “wild fanatics.”27
“Can any scene be found more disgusting?” raged Tennessee’s Gallatin Tenth Legion. “If patriots tremble for the safety of our glorious Union, let them not look to the South… . [T]hey will find the true cause in such meetings as [this one].”28Let them tremble, Smith seemed to exult. Let them panic. Let them know our strength.
Fugitive Slave Law Convention, August 21–22, 1850. Cazenovia, New York. Daguerreotype. Ezra Greenleaf Weld, photographer. Seated at table on right is Frederick Douglass, and standing behind Douglass is Gerrit Smith. Courtesy of the Madison County Historical Society, Oneida, NY.
To make things happen: this was his joy, his rich man’s privilege. On October 1, 1851, in Syracuse, New York (the city that Secretary of State Daniel Webster had reviled as a “laboratory of abolitionism, libel, and treason”), an escaped slave, the cooper William “Jerry” Henry, was taken into custody. Happily, for Henry, this coincided with a Liberty Party convention, and when the radical abolitionists learned of this arrest, they moved. Two sallies with a battering ram broke Jerry Henry out of custody and put him on the road to Canada—and Gerrit Smith, who participated in the “Jerry Rescue,” rejoiced not just for Henry but for himself. Not, for once, to talk, but to risk life and limb to save a captured slave! Working at “the Jerry Level,” faith through action, physical and thrilling, was true commitment: “To tell what is right is good preaching. But to do what is right is better. The best of pulpits preaches but in words. The rescue of Jerry preached in deeds.”29
Smith could not “preach in deeds” in Washington. But in Peterboro, from his study, land office, and antislavery church, his work could resonate across the nation. He was fifty-seven when he left Washington without regret. He knew his strength. He shone when he felt useful, when he did work that made change: bought the freedom of a slave, a score of slaves; bankrolled an antislavery lobbyist, an abolition newspaper, a station on the Underground Railroad; busted a freedom seeker out of jail.
The land giveaway initiative was a big plan too. But like Congress, it let him down. It never struck the Jerry Level he adored, never delivered that Black voting bloc. His zeal for the plan was waning even before John Thomas and his family moved from Troy to Franklin County. In 1848, two years after the giveaway was announced, the land baron was chiding Black New Yorkers at political conventions for “clustering in cities and large villages”—that is, for not moving north. A few years later, Smith’s dismay was blunter still. He blasted Black New Yorkers for clinging to their “cities and villages … confined to servile employments … , your votes at the disposal of your employers… . Why do you not scatter yourselves over the country in the capacity of independent and upright farmers and mechanics?”30
In 1856, Smith wrote the autobiographical essay that referred to the giveaway so obliquely it was all but unrecognizable, just one of several land gifts he made to “various destitute people.” The next year, he was blunter. The Black grantees, he told Horace Greeley, had failed him: “Of the three thousand colored men to whom I gave land, probably less than fifty have taken and continue to hold possession of their grants. What is worse, half of the three thousand … have either sold their land, or been so careless as to allow it to be sold for taxes.” A few years later, disappointment had chilled to silence. To the editor of the New American Cyclopedia, Smith wrote, “I have given to colored people about 125,000 acres & to white people & to institutions of Learning, about 100,000 acres more”—but about his gifting’s greater aims for voting rights and agrarian redemption, he wrote nothing. “I do not like to speak of my gifts—& I will speak no more of them.”31
A Change of Course
Smith also gave, and gave generously, to the sheep farmer who came to him in 1848. Because of how Brown was helping, or aimed to help, the Black grantees, Smith took no payment for either the house he sold him or a land lot; Smith wanted him to stay. Smith could not know that only months after the Brown family moved near Freeman’s Home in North Elba, Brown himself would need to go to Massachusetts, then London, Leeds, Brussels, and Hamburg. Unexpected business challenges engaged him, and his Adirondack stays were brief—a month here, a fortnight there, occasionally a season. This is not to say he did not love his Adirondack aerie, or to say historians are wrong to emphasize Brown’s deep feeling for it and his interest in the Black grantees. When they needed money, Brown gave them work clearing his fields. If they ran short on food, he opened his larder. When he was home, he helped square away their deeds and boundaries. He asked them to dinner, organized church meetings, delivered sermons and advice. But mostly he was not home. Mostly his dream of mentoring the Black grantees was not realized. Kansas beckoned, then Canada, Ohio, and Harpers Ferry, where Brown’s fleeting capture of a federal arsenal won him the page in the nation’s story that reads as memorably today as it did in 1859.32
Once, in 1855, Gerrit Smith suggested that John Brown stay put for the sake of his Black neighbors. But he did not insist. The growing reach and power of the slaveocracy had shifted both of these activists’ agendas. An agrarian experiment in the Adirondacks no longer represented a useful battle strategy in a war against an invigorated slave power. The giveaway’s gains were too paltry, its long game just too slow, and maybe worse—distracting and irrelevant. In August 1856, Smith electrified antislavery convention-goers in Buffalo with a brusque, decisive disavowal of political action: “You are looking to ballots when you should be looking to bayonets; counting up votes, when you should be mustering armed men… . [And] all the time you are making this mistake, slavery is fortifying itself in Kansas, and weakening and expelling liberty.” The meaningful but episodic, quiet victories in the Black Woods (economic self-sufficiency, political empowerment, and peaceful integration) were too far from the war that counted. The cold truth: even if all three thousand grantees moved onto their lots, gained the ballot, and put antislavery candidates in office, slavery would thrive.33
So Smith would not protest when his North Elba ally John Brown shifted gears from community building in the Black Woods to a long-nurtured plan to raise a guerrilla band of antislavery fighters and wage a direct, emphatic war on slavery in Kansas, Missouri, and Virginia. Part of a group of Brown’s radical abolitionist supporters, which would eventually be described as the Secret Six (among them Rev. Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Franklin Sanborn, Samuel Howe, and George Luther Stearns), Smith helped underwrite Brown’s quick-as-lighting rescues, command appearances, and raids and skirmishes in Kansas, Ohio, Missouri, and Virginia, for five years. And if, as Smith claimed later, he was ignorant of Brown’s designs on a federal arsenal, Smith knew Brown’s aim.34
John Brown hoped to spark an insurrection, an uprising of slaves who would embrace the chance to join a tiny integrated army secreted in the Allegheny Mountains. From craggy hideouts the holy warriors would swoop down, more slaves flying to their ranks before white men had time to load their guns. The script was never realized, and scholars still debate the extent to which Brown’s plan made some sense, less sense, or no sense at all. Terrorist or patriot? Murderer or martyr? Since 1859 the question has heated enough debate to float an airship (and nothing in these pages suggests a resolution; for that, there are other books, and very good ones, vividly reported and furiously argued). Smith himself could not resolve his anguish about what Brown did at Harpers Ferry. Much as he loved Brown’s courage, shared his outrage at the grudging pace of reform, and marveled at a raid that galvanized a nation and readied it for the war that toppled slavery, he could not reconcile his complicity. What happened at that lightly guarded federal arsenal in the fall of 1859—the people killed, some with pikes and rifles bought with Smith’s money, and then Brown’s capture, his too-rushed trial and controversial hanging—should not have come as a surprise. Brown himself was ready for it. This was the cost of what he chose to do. But Smith resisted. Horror gripped him to the end.35
The worst, of course, was Brown’s own fate. Charged with treason, found guilty, Smith’s good friend would hang. And Smith faced repercussions too. As details of his long alliance with John Brown surfaced, Smith’s notoriety exploded. Arrest threatened, and the prospect of a trial. Soon after Brown’s capture, Smith was admitted to the state asylum at Utica (whether by his own consent or the connivance of his family is unclear). Skeptics at the time judged this twenty-two-day medical retreat craven and opportunistic. Others observed that Smith had long suffered from “hyper-melancholia,” and that if anything could trip an episode of deep depression, it was the prospect of a trial and a public hanging.36
Neither Smith nor any member of the Secret Six would be indicted. And while Smith recalled “much of the year 1859” as “a black dream … much of it hazy & uncertain,” he rallied. With his Utica physician’s guidance (rest, beef broth and cod liver oil, marijuana, no newspapers, and no writing), he regained his confidence and vigor. Back in Peterboro in the summer of 1860, the old campaigner was sufficiently revived to accept a nomination for president on the Radical Abolition ticket. Victory was hopeless, but, as with all his bids for office, he hoped a third party would compel main-party candidates to clarify their stance on slavery, and this could be of use.37
His renewed political career would not untangle his name from Brown’s, however. As soon as Smith’s role in the Secret Six was revealed, his biography was remade in John Brown’s image. And it must be stressed that until Harpers Ferry, that’s not how Smith saw his role, and that’s not what he wanted. The John Brown who came calling on Smith in 1848 was one more cash-needy scripture-quoting small-town abolitionist among a hundred looking to do good, another walk-on with a bit part in the great man’s script. Smith was more than pleased to see that bit part grow. He helped it grow. The hundred-dollar bank note Brown had on him when he was seized at Harpers Ferry bore Smith’s name. But to see his image of himself shaved back from leading man to shadowy accomplice—this was not how Smith expected to be known.
A Waning Reputation
Come the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Gerrit Smith at once made the preservation of the Union his first cause. “Stand by the Government!” he exhorted. Of the nineteen speeches he gave during the war, a dozen might have been thus titled. “Since the Rebellion broke out,” he said, “I have been nothing but an anti-rebellion man.” The war unleashed a fervor for the Union that so utterly outpaced his Bible politics and eclipsed his abolitionism that Smith’s Black friends grew alarmed. Call it triage, he explained: “In time of war, when the question is whether there will be a party left to differ about—nay, whether there will be so much as a party left to us to govern—then, clearly, all should give up party, and join hands to save the country.” Smith oversaw enlistment drives and supplied recruits from his upstate district with stationery, stamps, Bibles, and a pig roast. In 1863, he helped finance the new Black regiments in Massachusetts and New York.38
He liked to say that the rebellion was a wayward child in need of discipline. This was the homely rhetoric of the Sunday school teacher, reducing history to a Bible lesson. It got Smith into trouble. After Appomattox, when the rebellion (likened, in Smith’s figuring, to an impudent, impious brat) was subdued (shamed, disciplined, and back in check), Smith then envisioned the ruined South as a prodigal son, and made ready to forgive. Our Christian duty insists on this, he told his fellow Unionists. Yes, the slaveholders are criminals, but isn’t the slaveless North complicit? Northern merchants who dealt in slave-made products, northern voters who backed slaveholding presidents, northern bounty hunters who pursued fugitives, northern hooligans who preferred to put their cities to the torch rather than submit to a draft in a war for human rights—they all supported slavery, and they were sinners too. Were not mercy and forbearance everybody’s portion? Leviticus 19:18: Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.39
“Slavery is a crime of the north as well as of the South.” Other abolitionists made this point, but Smith’s grasp of the link between the confidently unconcealed white supremacism of the South and the sedimented racism of the North was unrelenting. “Who are to be held amenable for this crime [at Fort Pillow]?” Smith asked in 1864. “The rebels. Yes, but not the rebels only… . All who have held that Blacks are unfit to sit by the side of whites in the church, the school, the car and at the table. All who have been in favor of making his complexion shut out a Black man from the ballot-box… . All, in short, who have hated or despised the Black man.” To pardon the arrant South required that the North first know and face its own complicity. And after that, and only after, could it forgive itself.40
Thus, Smith’s controversial gesture of May 11, 1867. With Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and some dozen wealthy Virginians, Smith stepped up to cover Jefferson Davis’s bail. Since the war’s end, the deposed president of the Confederacy had languished in Fort Monroe on the Virginia coast. Smith and Greeley felt confining him without a trial or conviction was unjust. Southerners agreed. They hailed Davis’s release and the large-minded Yankees who enabled it. Northern Unionists were baffled and dismayed. This, of all things, from the great Republican and patriot Horace Greeley and the radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith?41
Newspapers across the nation debated the reasoning, or lack of it, behind Davis’s release. How to fathom Christian charity for the man that millions called a traitor? For Unionists, Gerrit Smith’s bail making for the officer who called for Smith’s conviction after Harpers Ferry epitomized the flaw in Smith, the random-seeming changes of heart. But this misunderstood him. Smith’s gift of bail was right in line with his devotion to the Golden Rule. How better to express his great faith in the individual’s capacity for moral transformation, and an empathic civic brotherhood? And what clearer way to model the human fellowship the white South owed the emancipated slave?42
Finally, and not least, what a good way to free his name from John Brown’s? Eight years after Harpers Ferry, Smith had high hopes for the impact of this bailout on his public reputation. What he did for Davis earned him the most exposure of his life after John Brown’s capture. But while Southerners applauded it, Northerners would never love his charity for the head of the rebellion more than what he did for Brown. Nor would the ex-rebels find in Smith’s gospel of lovingkindness a model for a changed relationship with freed Blacks. Smith himself, by the last year of his life, had relinquished any hope of this. Too many reports had crossed his desk that testified to the vigorous resurgence of Southern white supremacism and racialized atrocities. A letter to him from a Northerner in late 1874 was typical. “This is the calm, clear truth,” his unnamed correspondent offered. “To-day the old rebel oligarchy is awake, active, vigilant [and] hopeful. It is now more hopeful, hating, bitter and aggressive than at any time since the war.” Smith’s letter to his old friend George T. Downing defending “Equal Rights for Blacks and Whites” suggested just how great was his late-life retreat from any gospel of reconciliation. The Democrats, he offered, in defending the slaveocracy before and after the war, had committed “a sin not to be forgiven.” This was the language of a man betrayed.43
Pilgrims started coming to North Elba as soon as John Brown was buried on December 8, 1859. Until recently, however, visitors to Brown’s historic farm learned almost nothing about the benefactor who got the Brown family to the region in the first place. Indeed, in memory, both the giveaway and its originator languished in Brown’s shadow. By the time Smith got his thank-you note from John Thomas in 1872, the Black Woods that stood for Black civic standing, voting rights, integration, and agrarian reform had been overtaken by John Brown Country, an idealized storyscape of white sacrifice and valor. And Smith, for his part, was sick and tired of them both.
Others in the Secret Six visited Brown’s North Elba grave. Never Gerrit Smith. Brown’s widow, Mary, hoped the family place would be a monument to abolitionist memory. Smith shrugged. “It does not strike me as important that the farm be owned by the Anti-Slavery Society,” he told the caretaker at the farm. “Let it be … by some farmer, who will put it [to] use and keep it in good order.” The storied pilgrimage from Utica to Peterboro in 1835, the Fugitive Slave Law convention in 1850, the rescue of Jerry Henry in Syracuse in 1851—all this, with his philanthropy, his good work for the Liberty Party, his efforts for the Union, Smith recalled with pride. As would his admirers. “Many thousands bear the name of Mr. Smith in our country. Nevertheless, if a person should address a letter to Mr. Smith, America, it would doubtless reach to the beautiful little village of Peterboro,” gushed a fan in Oswego. A Chenango County phrenologist deemed Smith “the man who has encouraged more persons in their struggles from darkness to light than any other man on the planet.” From Onondaga County, an activist predicted, “The day is not yet distant when a statue in Central Park, New York, shall be unveiled of the liberator of slavery, the friend of the oppressed … Gerrit Smith.” Smith was like Moses, like Noah, indeed, in his munificence, like God himself; why, even “the smallest sum” from Gerrit Smith, wrote a petitioner, was “as manna from our heavenly Father, in whom thro’ all our privations I have never failed to trust.”44
There were praiseful letters for the giveaway as well, at least in the beginning. But when Smith’s “scheme of justice and benevolence” did not flourish as he hoped, he turned away and moved on. And when he gave up, and John Brown, too, history followed suit. Accounts of the giveaway would snip its threads to voting rights, community building, and environmental distributive justice. In white memory, and only decades after Smith’s death, the gift that had once captivated New York’s friends of abolition was good only for what it said about the eccentricity of the giver—for who but an “eccentric” would dream of giving land to the poor Black men of New York? This was how the New York Times introduced him in an article in 1904. Smith, an instinctive unifier who in a blink could see the common ground that joined the fight for racial justice with the rights of women, immigrants, and children; Smith, the most syncretic of reformers, ever prescient in his grasp of linkages between seemingly uncongenial causes, was down to an “Eccentric Philanthropist.”45
The self-emancipated slave John Thomas, who stayed in the Black Woods until his death in 1894, did not regard Smith as eccentric. A man he’d never met had changed his life, and in changing his, Smith changed much more. Thomas’s white neighbors would be changed by their dealings with Black farmers. Thomas’s descendants stayed in the Adirondack region for 150 years. Thomas had urged Smith to answer him, but the absence of a letter in Smith’s copybook suggests he never did. Did this pain the pioneer? It may have, but hearing from Gerrit Smith was never Thomas’s goal. He wasn’t angling for the rich man’s blessing. The blessing had been his to give—his own long-pondered gift of thanks.
Then, the right thing done, the letter stamped, sealed, and on its way, he got back to his farm.