Monday, March 18, 2019

Gerrit Smith to Dr. George C. Beckwith, Secretary of the American Peace Society

Let us thank God that anything, even though it had to be the insanity of the whole south, has brought slavery to its dying hour. Never more will the American Peace Society witness the need of raising armies to put down a treasonable onslaught upon our government. For the one cause of so formidable an onslaught will be gone when slavery is gone. Besides, when slavery is gone from the whole world, the whole world will then be freed, not only from a source of war, but from the most cruel and horrid form of war. For slavery is war as well as the source of war. Thus has the Peace Society as well as the Abolition Society, much to hope for from this grand uprising of the north. For while the whole north rejoices in the direct and immediate object of the uprising—the maintenance of government; and while the abolitionists do, in addition to this object, cherish the further one of the abolition of slavery, the Peace men are happy to know that the abolition of slavery will be the abolition of one form of war, the drying up of one source of war, and of one source of occasions for raising armies.

SOURCES: Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography, p. 256-7

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