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
