Gerrit Smith

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Gerrit Smith

American philanthropist and social reformer

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Last Updated: Mar 2, 2025 • Article History

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Born:: March 6, 1797, Utica, New York, U.S.

Died:: December 28, 1874, New York, New York (aged 77)

Political Affiliation:: Liberty Party

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Gerrit Smith (born March 6, 1797, Utica, New York, U.S.—died December 28, 1874, New York, New York) was an American reformer and philanthropist who provided financial backing for the antislavery crusader John Brown.

Smith was born into a wealthy family. In about 1828 he became an active worker in the cause of temperance, and in his home village, Peterboro, he built one of the first temperance hotels in the country. He became an abolitionist in 1835, after witnessing the disruption of an antislavery meeting by a mob in Utica. In 1840 he took a leading part in the organization of the antislavery Liberty Party, and in 1848 and 1852 he was nominated for the presidency by the remnant of this organization that had not been absorbed by the Free Soil Party. In 1852 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as an independent. At the end of the first session in 1854 he resigned his seat.

After becoming an opponent of land monopoly, Smith gave numerous farms of 50 acres each to indigent families, and he also attempted to colonize tracts in northern New York with free blacks, but this experiment was a failure. Peterboro became a station on the Underground Railroad, and after 1850 Smith furnished money for the legal expenses of persons charged with infractions of the Fugitive Slave Law. He became very intimate with John Brown, to whom he gave a farm in Essex County (New York), and from time to time supplied him with funds, though it seems without knowing that any of the money would be employed in an attempt to incite a slave insurrection. Under the excitement following the raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, he became temporarily insane, and for several weeks was confined in an asylum in Utica.

Smith favoured a vigorous prosecution of the Civil War but at its close advocated a mild policy toward the late Confederate States, declaring that part of the guilt of slavery lay upon the North. He even became one of the securities for Jefferson Davis, thereby incurring the resentment of Northern Radical leaders.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

abolitionism

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abolitionism

European and American social movement

Also known as: abolition movement, antislavery movement

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Apr 25, 2025 • Article History

Also called:: abolition movement

Key People:: William Lloyd Garrison; John Newton; Anna Murray Douglass; Frederick Douglass; Horace Greeley

Related Topics:: slavery; social movement; personal-liberty laws

On the Web:: Khan Academy - Early abolition (Apr. 25, 2025)

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abolitionism, (c. 1783–1888), in western Europe and the Americas, the movement chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. The intensification of slavery as a system, which followed Portuguese trafficking of enslaved Africans beginning in the 15th century, was driven by the European colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies, where the plantation economy generated an immense demand for low-cost labour. Between the 16th and 19th centuries an estimated total of 12 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. The brutality of slavery, made increasingly visible by the scale of its practice, sparked a reaction that insisted on its abolition altogether.

Origin of the abolition movement

The abolition movement began with criticism by rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment of slavery’s violation of the “rights of man.” Quaker and other, evangelical religious groups condemned it for its un-Christian qualities. By the late 18th century moral disapproval of slavery was widespread, and antislavery reformers won a number of deceptively easy victories during this period. In Britain, Granville Sharp secured a legal decision in 1772 that West Indian planters could not hold slaves in Britain, because slavery was contrary to English law. In the United States, all the states north of Maryland abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804. But antislavery sentiments had little effect on the centres of slavery themselves: the massive plantations of the Deep South, the West Indies, and South America. Turning their attention to these areas, British and American abolitionists began working in the late 18th century to prohibit the importation of enslaved Africans into the British colonies and the United States. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, these forces succeeded in getting the slave trade to the British colonies abolished in 1807. The United States prohibited the importation of slaves that same year, though widespread smuggling continued until about 1862.

Antislavery forces then concentrated on winning the emancipation of those populations already in slavery. They were triumphant when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies by 1838 and in French possessions 10 years later.