Friday, December 14, 2018

Gerrit Smith to Wendell Phillips, 1855

Considerable as have been the pecuniary sacrifices of abolitionists in their cause, they fall far short of the merits of that precious cause. It is but a small proportion of them who refuse to purchase the cotton and sugar and rice that are wet with the tears and sweat and blood of the slave. And when we count up those who have sealed with their blood their consecration to the anti-slavery cause, we find their whole number to be scarcely half a dozen.

In none of the qualities of the best style of men — and that is the style of men needed to effectuate the bloodless termination of American slavery — have the abolitionists shown themselves more deficient than in magnanimity, confidence, charity. They have judged neither the slaveholders nor each other, generously. . . . The quarrels of abolitionists with each other, and their jealousy and abuse of each other would be far less had they more magnanimity, confidence, charity. Many of them delight in casting each other down, rather than in building each other up. Complain of each other they must; and when there is no occasion for complaint, their ill-natured ingenuity can manufacture an occasion out of the very smallest materials. Were even you, whose trueness to the slave is never to be doubted, to be sent to Congress, many of your abolition brethren would be on the alert to find some occasion for calling your integrity in question.

. . . It is no wonder that slaveholders despise both us and our cause. Our cowardice and vacillation, and innumerable follies have, almost necessarily, made both us and it contemptible. The way for us to bring slaveholders right on slavery is to be right on it ourselves. The way for us to command the respect, ay, and to win the love of slaveholders, is to act honestly, in regard to slavery and to all things else. Do I mean to say that slaveholders can be brought to love abolitionists? Oh yes! and I add, that abolitionists should love slaveholders. We are all brothers; and we are all sinners too; and the difference between ourselves, as sinners, is not so great, as in our prejudice on the one hand and our self-complacency on the other, we are wont to imagine it to be.

SOURCES: Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography, p. 230-1

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