A BROAD CHRISTIAN.*
THE remarkable band of men who helped to make one side of the most important and interesting page in recent American history is beginning to break up. A few weeks since we were noticing the memoir of Levi Coffin, the quiet, humorous, brave old Quaker, President of the Underground Railway. To- day this volume reminds us of the death of another of the leading _Abolitionists, who has gone to his rest full of years and honours. There is probably no public man who in his life-time so puzzled and exasperated his fellow-man as Gerrit Smith, and having ever since the Free:soil struggle in Kansas shared these feelings—mixed with a somewhat unwilling admiration, which, in spite of our- selves, would assert itself in our minds—we turned with more than usual curiosity to this volume, and on the whole have been well repaid. For the character of the man is there. You can scarcely fail to get a clear idea of him out of it, and that is, per- haps, all that one has a right to look for. At the same time, we must protest against Mr. Frothingham's method. He tells us that for his purpose dates are of no consequence, and instead of a consecutive narrative gives a series of studies of his subject, under the heads, " Humanity," " Slavery," "Religion," "Tem- perance," &c. He is a practised writer, who handles his moat objectionable method with considerable skill, and as we have already admitted, has achieved his end. But this building-up a human figure by fitting it together piece by piece under our eyes, instead of letting it grow as nature intended, is an experiment we never wish to see repeated.
Gerrit Smith, unlike most of his fellow-workers, was a rich man from his birth. His father, Peter, had been partner with John Jacob Astor in the fur trade, in the conduct of which they used to visit the Indian territory, which then ran up to the suburbs of Albany, the State capital of New York. This partner- ship was successful, and on its dissolution Astor took to buying city lots in New York, while Peter turned his attention to wild lands, and became the owner, by purchase from the State, of vast tracts in Oneida, Madison, and other counties towards the north-west. Peter was a shrewd trader, with a morbid conscience, who tried to "ply the business of two worlds at once," with one eye on business and the other on salvation. In his journal, the struggle is expressed with unconscious humour,—" Oh ! what pains do the people of God take to cause me to see and pursue the right way. How vile, how hardened I must be I" " Just now saw two smart Vermonters going as settlers on Hoffmann town- ship. They give me $20 an acre." (Peter had never given more than $8 40, rarely more than $3.) "I am very much worried and fatigued ; very little attention to make me comfortable at this tavern. Oh, may I be resigned to all my trials! Give me, Heavenly Father, a contented mind," &c. (p. 11.)
Peter continued to acquire more land, and to become more morbid about his chances in another world, till 1818, when he re- tired from business altogether, and picked out Gerrit, his younger son, as the one who could carry on his affairs. To him he made over all his estate, charged heavily for himself and the other children. So, at the age of twenty-one, Gerrit Smith found himself the largest landowner in the States. When he graduated at Hamilton College, some eighteen months earlier, his dearest friend had presented him with a book inscribed to his "sincere, affectionate, sentimental, poetic, ambitions, superior-minded, noble, generous, honest, honourable, jealous, deceitful, hoax- ing, partial, epicurean, gambling Smith, as token of high esteem" (p. 24), and the cataract of incongruous epithets shows how well his chum appreciated him. He was a big-boned, handsome, rollicking lad, full of cleverness and good impulses of all kinds, who read hard and played
* Gerrit Smith: a Biography. By 0. B. Frothingham. Now York: Putnam; London: Sampson Low and Co. 1878.
hard, was nicknamed " Old Mariner," hoaxed his tutors, played cards on Sundays, and was selected as best man of his year to deliver the valedictory address on leaving. From the moment, however, that serious responsibility came on him he rose to the circumstances, managed his immense affairs with singular industry and ability, and not only paid all his relatives all they were legally entitled to, but shared with them profits of land sales, which more than doubled their fortunes. Once only was he in any serious difficulty, notwithstanding his enormous speculative dealings in land, and his apparently reckless expendi- ture in heating the many philanthropic irons which he kept always in the fire. On that occasion, in 1837, his father's old partner, John Jacob Astor, lent him a quarter of a million dollars, without caring to require the security of a previous deposit of deeds, which part of the transaction was, in fact, by mistake not completed for weeks. It would be impossible to give any higher proof of the estimation in which Gerrit Smith was held in his State as a man of business and a man of his word.
It would seem, however, that the constraint which he put upon himself, from the time he was twenty-one, in business matters, required to be eased off in other directions. So he gave away his well-earned land and money with a lavishness which made average people look on him as a dangerous oddity, and sham philanthrop- ists, schemers, and swindlers as their legitimate prey. He kept open house literally, turning no one from his door, and as Peter- borough became a well-known station of the Underground Rail- way, there was generally a sprinkling of blacks at his table. With whom Judges, Congress-men, ministers of all denominations, and travellers of all ranks, who were his constant guests, had to sit down, whether they liked or no. And it seems to us a singular testimony to the power and charm of the man's character that though his house at Peterborough was clean out of the world— nine miles from a railway—though there was no drop of alcoholic liquor to be had there, and a certainty of meeting very queer folk, yet that it never ceased to exercise an attraction for well-to-do and cultivated people.
The same characteristic runs through all his efforts for social
reform. Not satisfied with the ordinary machinery of the Tem- perance Societies—which, however, he munificently supported— he started "the Anti-Dram-Shop party," and declared that the root of the matter would never be reached till the use of spirits was publicly declared and confessed to be immoral. His thorough- ness and trustfulness are amusingly illustrated by the story of his efforts to shut up the one tavern in Peterborough. How be built an excellent temperance hotel at his own end of the town, fitted it with every convenience and luxury, and after several hosts had failed sold it to a General who had been in his employ- ment,—a smart man, who bought the rival tavern also, shut it up, transferred the licence, and brought the mystery of iniquity to Gerrit's own door, so that he had to repurchase his own tavern at a ruinous advance of price—will be found in the chapter on "Temperance," and is instructive reading. (p. 115.)
Then he was a strong believer in the equality of the sexes, and his daughter was the first to " discard the trailing skirt." (p. 123.) But he seems to have puzzled even Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony by such sentiments as " Heaven speed the day when man shall be expected to blush as quick and as deep as woman at every degree of iniquity ;" and again, " Female modesty ! female deli. cacy ! I would I might never again hear such phrases. There is but one standard of modesty and delicacy for men and women, and as long as different standards are tolerated both sexes will be perverse and corrupt. It is my duty to be as modest and delicate as you are, and if your modesty and delicacy may excuse you from making a public speech, then may mine excuse me from making one."
He became very earnest in religion almost as soon as he had
left college, and started as a Calvinistic Methodist. It did not take him long to shake off these fetters, and by the time he was forty he had arrived at a point when nothing but founding a new Church would content him. So he started one at Peter- borough, on the lines of two resolutions,—(1), That the division of Christians into rival sects or parties is un-Scriptural and wicked ; and (2), that a common Christianity and a common Church should take the place of the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian, and other sects, which now divide, and afflict, and corrupt Zion." (p. 55.) He was, of course, denounced as " making war on the of God," but preached and prayed away in his own church at Peterborough, regardless of them all, going in manfully for Christianity as he understood it, and proclaiming that "no man's religion is better than his politics. His religion is pure
whose politics are pure, whilst his religion is rascally whose politics are rascally." (p. 72.) He was not amongst the earliest Abolitionists, perhaps because his father had held slaves, and his wife was from Maryland, but
contented himself with supporting the " American Colonisation Society" of Clay and his friends, till 1835. In that year he attended an anti-slavery meeting at Utica, which was broken up by rioters. Gerrit Smith and his wife went home staunch Aboli- tionists. He summoned a convention at once at Peterborough, and threw himself into the conflict with his usual energy. He spent untold sums in fighting the battle in the Law Courts and the Press, in buying the freedom of many slaves, and assisting the escape of many more. He broke open the prison of Syracuse, at the head of a mob, to rescue a slave named Jerry, who had been captured without a warrant ; started at two hours' notice for Toronto to act (successfully) as counsel for Anderson, a fugitive slave who had stopped at his house, and whom his master was claiming in Canada, under the Ashburton Treaty (p. 117) ; and was the warm friend and munificent sup- porter of John Brown, in the Free-soil war in Kansas. So when at last, in 1852, he was elected to Congress as an Independent, beating both Whigs and Democrats, he was welcomed by Sumner, Seward, Jay, and the whole anti-slavery party as a new tower of strength. Their disappointment was proportionately great when he refused to join the opposition to allowing a vote to be taken on the Nebraska Bill, on the ground that it was a breach of principle for a minority to thwart the will of the majority (though he went with them on the final and unsuccessful division), and supported the slaveowners' proposal to annex Cuba, on the ground that annexation would be the easiest way to emancipation in the island. Moreover, he kept open house at Washington, inviting every Mem- ber of the House, Whig, Democrat, Republican, Pro-slavery man, and Abolitionist in turn, to his temperance dinners. What could be done with such a man ? As the New York Times (p. 213) and other justifiably furious journals wrote it was "mere wan- tonness," " idle nonsense," to send such a man to take part in practical legislation. So Gerrit himself seems to have felt, for he resigned at the end of his first year, and went back to the home where he could go to bed at nine or ten and rise with the birds. There he lived on, " in a state of political hallucination," as Mr. Thurlow Weed said (p. 227), through the war, a leading Abo- litionist who was reasonable towards the South, but stern for putting down the rebellion ; and at the end of it, with Horace Greeley (with whom he had quarrelled desperately in print), stood out for conciliation and reconstruction, and became bail for Jeff Davis. He filled the cup of his political iniquities in the eyes of Sumner and other old friends by voting for General Grant's second term in 1872, but retained their personal regard and affec- tion notwithstanding all his vagaries. And no one can doubt, we think, after reading this book, that had he had a gleam of humour and of diffidence, a modicum of reticence and patience, and the good-fortune not to live in a back settlement where he was a little king, he might have left a record of enduring influence on the history of the great Republic, and not merely an interesting, somewhat bewildering, and pathetic psychological study.
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