Syracuse University Library
Special Collections Research Center
Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection

To the proslavery ministers of the county of Madison.

Smith, Gerrit, 1797-1874.

Digital Edition.

This digitization project was supported by Regional Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing Program funds, awarded by the New York State Library.

Call number: Smith 422

To the proslavery Ministers of the County of Madison:

So you are really afraid that our County will declare herself for the slave, at the approaching Election! God be praised, that you have reason to be! God be praised, that the rapid progress of antislavery truth in it warrants the hope that the County will, so soon, stand forth for down-trodden, bleeding humanity! God be praised, that the downfall of American slavery, greatly accelerated, as it will be, by this local victory, will be your downfall also! You have the discernment to see that the anti-slavery cause is travelling rapidly toward its final and complete triumph, and to read in that triumph your own doom. Hence the multiplying demonstrations of your increasing alarm. You well know that, in the regenerated public sentiment which shall succeed - which shall have eflected the overthrow of slavery, your ministerial services will be in little demand. Your occupation will then be gone. You will then have your deserts. You will be despised, loathed, and execrated, even more than slavery itself, - for slavery itself is not so detestable and dangerous, as is that portion of its upholders who are recognized as chosen and authoritative teachers of religious truth. Indeed, but for these corrupt teachers - these "blind leaders of the blind" - slavery could not be: and, were it abolished, there is not so far as their power and influence are concerned, any security against its return, or against the production and prevalence of any other forms of wickedness.

My declaration, that I am willing to spend my Sabbaths in pleading for God's enslaved poor, has proved an occasion for a new and rich display of your proslavery and pharisaism. You are warning the people in your respective cages not to hear me "preach politics" on the Sabbath - that is, not to hear me explain how wicked and how murderous is your own proslavery voting. But, thanks to the Divine blessing on the power of truth, your captives, as well as those in the proslavery politicians' cages, are, in spite of your warnings, fast breaking down the bars which shut them in. The venerable hen clucks in vain after her brood of ducks, as they sail away from her on the bosom of their favorite element. In vain, also, is it that you attempt to restrain the promptings of a free spirit in your parishioners. Seven-eighths of them will turn their backs on your heartless whinings and cantings to attend upon a ministry which has truth, and soul, and love, and humanity, and God, in it. You have influence enough with your trustees and deacons and elders to get them to refuse me the use of the Churches under their control. But, thus far, the skies have favored us; and, beneath the grateful shelter of God-made trees, we have felt no need of man-made houses. You manifest great concern for the Sabbath; and, it is understood, that one of you is the author of the stupid, silly article in the Madison County Eagle, headed: "Gerrit Smith and the Sabbath." They must be blind as bats, however, who cannot see that this concern is the merest affectation. What care you for the Sabbath, who can consent to have millions of your countrymen robbed of it and of every other means of holiness and usefulness and happiness? And what know you of the proper observance of the Sabbath, who know not enough to improve the day in preaching and praying for the slave; and who know not enough to rebuke proslavery voters, and to keep proslavery votes out of your oven polluted hands? We declare it as certain, that, in the light of the philosophy of the Bible, you cannot, whilst living in such sins, know any thing, as you ought to know, of the claims and character of the Sabbath. Where does that Book promise light to him who wilfully walks in darkness, or knowledge to him who is disobedient? No where. But the burden of its teachings is: "If any man will do his will, he shall know." "Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord." "They stumble at the word, being disobedient." "Whoso is wise and will observe these things, even they shall understand the loving-kindness of the Lord." "The meek will He guide in judgment - the meek will He teach his way." "The path of the just is as the shining light." To look to you for instructions how to keep the Sabbath, is as absurd as to take lessons from a thief on the extent and nature, features and elements, of the crime of theft. It will be time enough to choose you for instructers, when you are seen to be performing the nearest and, therefore, plainest duties. Whilst you refuse to perform these, you will, necessarily, be unqualified to judge of those which are more remote and, therefore, more difficult to be understood. Says one of Carlyle's books: "Do the duty which lies nearest thee - which thou knowest to be duty. The second duty will already have become clearer." Would you perceive whether it is right for me, whose aptness to teach is, I admit, much less than my need of being taught, to quit hearing the word on the Sabbath and to turn preacher for the slave; then try what effect it will have on your perceptions, if you cease to vote the bible out of the hands of the slave, and the lash upon his back, and cease to vote away his right to marry, and to vote that lie shall be bought and sold like the ox. The new light which obedience to God, in this plain case, would pour upon your path, might reveal other duties; and, amongst these duties, you might perhaps find your obligation to preach for the slave on the Sabbath, and also mine to do so, in the event of your continuing to be "dumb dogs, that cannot bark." Then, what you now stumble at, or ignorantly condemn, might be plain and proper in your sight. Then, what your present guilty disobedience renders you as unfit to judge of as a blind man is of colors, you might be able to pronounce upon intelligently.

The extent to which you presume on the ignorance and stupidity of the people, is amazing. It was only last Winter that one of you betrayed his proslavery heart in a speech at Morrisville. The tenor of his speech made it safe to charge him on the spot with having cast a proslavery vote, at the last hall's Election. He seemed to be greatly surprised at the charge. Whether his surprise was, that lie should be suspected of having committed the crime, or that any thing which one of his holy profession does should be construed into a crime, I do not know. However that may be, the charge, which he was constrained to admit the truth of, put even his impudence to the blush. It of course made utter havoc of all the professions of love for the slave, with which he had interlarded his speech. You rely very much on your sly and sanctimonious manner of slipping in your proslavery votes to exempt you from detection and censure. But the people are waking up to your disgusting and abhorrent wickedness; and your successful imposture is fast drawing to a close.

How strange, that you should flatter yourselves that the people will forever remain ignorant of the proslavery character of the National parties to which you belong! Do you think they will never find

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out that your National Methodist and rational Presbyterian parties have bound themselves, by many and deliberate and published Resolutions, to oppose the abolition of slavery? Do you think that the people can always be kept ignorant of the countenance which Northern Baptists give to the man-stealing practised by Southern Baptists? Do you think that the people will always be blind to the fact, that Northern Whigs are pledged to Southern Whigs, and Northern Democrats to Southern Democrats, to uphold slavery? In a word, do you flatter yourselves that the people will never find out that every National party in this country, whether political or ecclesiastical, must (because the South will consent to be in no other) be proslavery as long as the system of American slavery endures?

I defy contradiction when I allege that, to please the South and keep her from breaking out of the National religious parties, the National Methodist party and the National Presbyterian party take the ground that a sin, however great and glaring, ceases to be a sin when the civil government approves of it: that the National Presbyterian party, at the very time when it is declaring that it is a high crime to move the feet to music, refuses to say that the buying and selling and heathenizing of men, women and children, is, in the least degree, sinful: that the National Methodist party pronounces all colored persons, whether bond or free, in the Church or out of it, to be liars: and that the American Baptist party acquiesces in the doctrine that slavery can cancel marriage and justify bigamy. Inexpressibly wicked as are these parties, you are, nevertheless, wicked enough to belong to them.

I also defy contradiction when I allege that to please the South and keep her from breaking out of the Democratic and Whig parties, these parties allow the prisons which are built with the Nation's money to be used for confining the victims of the slave-trade - and persons to be licensed, on the payment by each of four hundred dollars a year, to carry on that trade, even in the city of Washington and the National flag to give protection to that trade. Under this same motive, these parties plunge our Nation into proslavery wars; thereby wasting its wealth (the Florida war cost more than forty millions of dollars) and consigning to banishment or slaughter whole tribes of Indians, whose only crime is that they have lands which slaveholders covet, and hiding-places to which those slaves whose wrung hearts can endure oppression no longer are wont to fly. But blood-red as is the guilt of these parties, such is your guilt for belonging to them.

You, however, have your excuses, and speak of your good deeds. You say you do not belong to

these parties for the sake of upholding slavery. It matters not for what sake you belong to them, or for what sake they uphold slavery: you and they are guilty of the crime of upholding it; and the plea that you are not is as empty as would be the plea of the highway robber, that, since he did not commit his murders for the sake of committing them, but only for the sake of getting money. he ought not to be held responsible for them.

You say that you are kind to your neighbors, and pity the poor and the suffering around you. But this is no justification for the wrongs which you inflict on those remote from you; and, since your infliction of these wrongs shows that you are not actuated by principle in your treatment of your fellow men, it is fair to add that nothing is wanting but, opportunity, interest, temptation, to enlist your agency in enslaving those who are the objects of your present kindness. Contributing, as you do, to uphold the infernal system under which other men's children are bought and sold like cattle, there is no security that, in supposable circumstances, you would not lend a helping hand to extend the grasp of that system to the children of your nearest neighbors and most intimate friends. Having proved yourselves to be but mere mercenaries, we are at liberty to say that you have put yourselves into market for a price, which is the highest attainable amount of selfish gratification, cost what that gratification may to the rights and hearts of others.

You say that you preach the gospel. I doubt not that you utter many gospel doctrines. But if you mean that to declare, in an abstract form, any or even all of the doctrines of the gospel, is the

sum, or any considerable part of the sum, of preaching the gospel, I widely dissent from you. To apply its doctrines - that is to preach the gospel; and he who, like yourselves, has not the courage,

honesty, and self-denial, to do so, is not a preacher of the gospel. To call him a preacher of the gospel who shrinks from identifying himself with the anti-slavery cause, and refuses to press the claims of that cause on a community of slaveholders, is to dignify cowardice and treason with a name which is most significant of courage and integrity. I speak of this as a slaveholding community, and I do so with the most perfect propriety: for are not the people of the State of New-York as truly slaveholders as if they were slave-owners also? Are they not as truly slaveholders as are the people of Virginia? The people of New-York are slaveholders in virtue of their being a party to the making and maintenance of slave laws, and in virtue, also, of their pledge to back up these laws by their physical power. And is it not in the same way that the people of Virginia have made themselves slaveholders?

I entreat you, then, in the name of truth and decency, that you no more number yourselves with the preachers, but with the betrayers of Jesus Christ; no more with the friends, but with the enemies of God; no more with the friends, but with the enemies of man; until you shall have repented and have taken your stand by the side of those who, in the face of proslavery politicians and proslavery priests, of oppressors, and of devils, are laboring, in the strength of their God and of their own good cause, to deliver the millions of their enslaved countrymen.

GERRIT SMITH.

PETERBORO, August 10, 1843