The Fascinating Life of Gerrit Smith

A Man of Standing

Gerrit Smith’s father, Peter Smith, worked as a clerk in New York City before joining John Jacob Astor in a fur-trading venture. Although this partnership was short-lived, the two men cooperated in acquiring real estate in Upstate New York after Smith relocated to Utica in 1789. Smith traded with the Oneidas and operated businesses in the area, but his chief preoccupation was land speculation. In 1807, the Smith family moved to Peterboro, 30 miles west of Utica at the center of their 50,000-acre New Petersburg tract of land. When he retired 12 years later, Smith turned over management of a half-million acres scattered over nearly every New York county to son Gerrit and Gerrit’s uncle Daniel Cady, the father of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who would become a leader of the women’s rights and suffrage movements.

A Diploma and a Wife

In 1819, Gerrit Smith married Wealtha Ann Backus, whom he met on College Hill. The bride was the daughter of Rev. Azel Backus, the first president of Hamilton. The Smiths were married only seven months when Wealtha died suddenly of what her doctor diagnosed as “dropsy of the brain.”

A List of Causes

With diligence and a few good managers, Gerrit Smith had expanded his holdings in the state to almost one million acres by 1837. This enabled him to crusade almost full-time against slavery, alcohol, tobacco, capital punishment, Freemasonry, and, later, organized religion, total equality — and sensible clothing — for women, vegetarianism, Irish independence, and free trade. “A steady geyser of reform,” historian Morris Bishop called him.

A Party Founder

Gerrit Smith was one of the founders of the abolitionist Liberty Party in 1840. He ran for president as the Liberty Party candidate in 1848, 1856, and 1860, but never vigorously pursued the office.

The Timbuctoo Experiment 

In 1846, Gerrit Smith devised what he called a “scheme of justice and benevolence.” He divided 120,000 acres of untouched land that he owned in the Adirondacks into 40-acre plots and began granting them to 3,000 free African Americans. The settlement was known as Timbuctoo. He hoped that after farming the land, the men would be able to increase its value in order to meet the state’s voting requirement of owning $250 worth of property. Although Smith’s suffrage-seeking plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and most leading Black abolitionists, most settlers found the situation more than they could handle, and by 1855 the well-intentioned experiment was, for the most part, over.

Protesting the Fugitive Slave Act

In a celebrated 1851 incident in Syracuse, Gerrit Smith was a ringleader in a group that plotted to seize a runaway slave, “Jerry” (his name was William Henry), from a deputy U.S. marshal who sought to return him to his master in Missouri. The conspirators rescued him and spirited him off to Canada via the Underground Railroad, in which Smith was very active. Their purpose was to dramatize their conviction that the Fugitive Slave Act was not law, but “a conspiracy against human rights,” and that obeying it would be a crime. Though Smith was not among 13 arrested (only one was ever convicted), he was active as a lawyer in the defense.

Smith Heads to Washington 

In 1852, Gerrit Smith became the only full-fledged abolitionist elected to Congress. His wealth and international recognition gave him prominence unusual for a newcomer (his speeches during that period filled 400 printed pages). While in Washington, he entertained liberally, hosting two dinners a week and systematically inviting every member of Congress, Southerners as well as Northerners. Despite Smith’s abolitionist views, most of his congressional colleagues accepted his invitations, including 78 of the 85 Southern representatives and senators. Nevertheless, he concluded that his influence in Congress was negligible, and he abruptly resigned in 1854 before finishing his first term.

The Radical Abolition Party

Political abolitionists dissatisfied with the weak antislavery stand of the fledgling Republican Party met in convention in Syracuse in 1856. The gathering adopted an address drafted by Gerrit Smith that claimed the U.S. Constitution, as an antislavery document, should condemn the Republicans’ anti-extension platform for permitting slavery to remain unchallenged in the Southern states. The convention then formed a “Radical Abolition Party” to replace the moribund Liberty Party and nominated Smith as its candidate for President.

Failure at Harpers Ferry

Gerrit Smith was one of the “Secret Six” — backers of John Brown’s attempt to incite a slave insurrection in Virginia. On the evening of Oct. 16, 1859, Brown and his men seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in hopes that the local slave population would join the raid. Instead, the local militia and, later, U.S. Marines arrived and stormed the engine house, killing many of the raiders and capturing Brown. He was convicted of treason and hanged on Dec. 2, 1859.

A Mental Breakdown

Shocked by the failed Harpers Ferry raid, Gerrit Smith fell into a psychological tailspin. Five days after Brown’s hanging, Smith was committed to the State Asylum for the Insane in Utica. Not quite two months later, he returned home. His illness (and some manipulation) had spared him the investigations that followed. He burned all of the papers linking him to the plot for a slave rebellion and continued to deny any complicity. Further, he sued those who claimed he had faked insanity in order to escape answering for the raid. Aided by high-powered lawyers, he succeeded in winning out-of-court settlements, usually including retractions.

Mixed Emotions

Gerrit Smith could abide no less than 100% agreement with his causes, which led to repeated angry ruptures with Hamilton and its faculty. In 1836, the State Legislature had voted a $3,000 annual grant to the College. This was imperiled when undergraduates submitted to lawmakers an anti-slavery petition, which annoyed them. President Joseph Penney and the conservative faculty disavowed the petition. Smith, a trustee at the time, was of course in favor. He resigned from the board and ceased financial assistance to Hamilton. But by 1868, Smith was reconciled to his alma mater and delivered an affectionate Half-Century Annalist’s Letter in which he exulted over, among other things, “how marvelous the progress during this half century in the knowledge and assertion of human rights.”

Smith’s Legacy

Gerrit Smith died of a stroke on Dec. 28, 1874. The New York Times wrote in his obituary, “The history of the most important half-century of our national life will be imperfectly written if it failed to place Smith in the front rank of men whose influence was most felt in the accomplishment of its results.” The Evening Mail called him “one of the greatest and best men who has been reared on American soil … A mind more hospitable to new ideas, more thoroughly imbued with democratic principles, more vigorous in the unselfish service of the race has not been known in this century …”

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Much of this material for this article is excerpted from “An Encounter in a Courtroom: Irony and the Evanescence of Fame” by William M. Ringle ’44 that appeared in the Summer 1999 Hamilton Alumni Review. Other sources include adirondack.net, battlefields.org, and “‘He Stands Like Jupiter’: The Autobiography of Gerrit Smith” by John R. McKivigan and Madeleine L. McKivigan, available in the Hamilton College Archives