Syracuse University Library
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Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection

To the men who put me in nomination!

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 516

To the men who put me in nomination !

Now that the Election is past and my labors connected with it are ended, I owe a few words to those who did me the honor to name me for the office of Governor.

As soon as I accepted the nomination I entered upon the work of holding Meetings in all parts of the State. They numbered fifty three, and consumed an average time of about two and a half hours. They were generally large, and frequently there was not room for the crowd. To attend them has cost me some four thousand miles of travel and two and a half months' time.

The novel character of the Meetings was enough to make them interesting. They were filled up with questions and answers and occasional discussions between my questioners and myself. They were emphatically a school for acquiring knowledge of the province and duties of civil government - a school in which we were all pupils, and in which we were all at liberty to be teachers. Should such a school be opened by all the candidates for high executive office and legislative office, the masses could not fail to grow rapidly in political wisdom.

I hope that the good accomplished by these Meetings will not be estimated by the smallness of my vote. They have perhaps had the effect to reduce rather than increase it. Very unpopular answers were drawn from me by those who questioned me in regard to the Common School, the Poor House, the Rights of Woman. the Legalization of a Sabbath, Tarifi's, &c. &c. Manifestly the people are not yet prepared to receive the thoroughly democratic theories, which I have spent so much of many years in inculcating. Manifestly I must live and die an unpopular politician. Still I may not have lived in vain; and the words, which I have spoken and written, may not all die with me.

I cannot doubt that my Meetings have exerted considerable influence against the Caucus System - that bad System which has robbed the people of the right of suffrage, and left it to handfuls of demagogues to dictate the choice of rulers. That the voters are degraded to the one work of registering the decrees of the Caucus need but be said to be believed. Happily, the practice of interrogating the candidate in the presence of the popular assembly cannot obtain without subverting the Caucus System. Is there any thing else that can subvert it?

You, who put me in nomination, are abolitionists and prohibitionists. Indeed, it was to promote the shutting up of the dramshops in our State and the shutting out of the kidnappers from it, that you desired my election. I trust that my Meetings have done something toward reviving Temperance and Freedom. I found them well nigh dead wherever I went: and, I confess, that they still show but few and faint signs of life. What folly to connect such great sacred causes with a vulgar political party ! What folly for reformers to go into such a party ! How many of the sadly partyized old friends of Freedom and Temperance have within the last three months told me that I was ruining the Republican Party! So stone-blind were they to the obvious fact that the Republican Party was ruining them!

That there are but few abolitionists and prohibitionists in this State is evident from my small vote: - few, I mean, who are earnest enough to place their abolition and prohibition above the claims of party. There are, it is true, many who prate against slavery. Surely it can be no more than prating, so long as they vote for candidates who admit slavery to be law, and candidates who are willing that our State should suffer the kidnapper to prowl through it in quest of his prey. There are many too who prate for prohibition. But that this also is mere prating is manifest from the fact that only a very small proportion of the professed prohibitionists were willing to break out from their parties in the recent Election, and vote for the only prohibition candidate for Governor. I know it will be said that many real prohibitionists voted for Mr. Morgan because they were duped into the belief that he is a prohibitionist. Alas, they were willing to be duped! So transparent a falsehood could carry away none but such as were willing to be carried away by it. Let what will be said to the contrary, they, who have now voted with the Republican and Democratic and American Parties, have voted in effect that the dramshop shall continue its horrid work of multiplying drunkards and pests and blasphemers and murderers. If any of them were cheated by misrepresentations, they were for the most part those, whose political relations and state of mind were such, as made them glad to be cheated.

I have referred to the smallness of my vote. I confess that it is far below my expectation. Early in the last month I believed it would go as high as fifty thousand. More than this, it seemed at one time as if the Republican Party was getting discouraged, and that I might therefore possibly get a still larger vote than I had counted on. But by the middle of the month I found that the results of the Elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana had inspired Republicans with confidence and Democrats with fears. The inclination of Republicans to come to me was now arrested: and Democrats had become more accessible. In this altered state of things I saw the necessity of reducing the estimate of my vote - for I could not expect to get more than one Democrat toward making up my loss of three or four Republicans. Nevertheless even down to the day of the Election I felt sure that my vote would go as high as thirty thousand; and I told many and wrote many that I hoped it would reach forty. My opinions of the result of a political canvass will not henceforth be valued very highly.

I am not sure but Governor Seward's Rochester Speech did more than all things else to damage my prospects.It passed for an Abolition Speech: especially because it espoused our old Abolition doctrine that in the end the States must all be blessed with Freedom, or all given up to the curse of Slavery.

I hope that the friends of Temperance will not be discouraged by this Election from further political action. Such action must be continued, or Temperance will continue to decline.The dramshop must be shut up, or the desolating tide of drunkenness will keep rising. Hence he must not be regarded as an earnest Temperance man, who votes for anti-prohibitionists. Never did I feel more need of the shutting up of the dramshop than in my recent tours through the State. Almost every where I met evidences of the greatly increased use of strong drink and tobacco. As a general proposition they go together. The relinquishment of the one will be the relinquishment of the other. What a curse are they to this generation! And a greater curse will they probably prove to the generation that shall inherit our rum and tobacco-defiled, debased, dwarfed nature. I am aware that such matters are held to lie without the province of statesmanship.But to my mind no statesman should be ignorant of them, or unmoved by them.

I hope too that the radical friends of Freedom will not be discouraged by their fewness in this Election. Never was there more need of their perseverance - for never were her prospects darker. How very rapid her decline since the public mind was drawn away from the abolition to the non-extension of slavery! By the year 1846 the Liberty Party, which was ever intent on abolishing slavery, had swelled its numbers to sixty or seventy thousand. The strong antislavery sentiment of that year was responded to by the House of Representatives in a vote of 115 to 106 for shutting out slavery from all the territory we had wrested from Mexico. But by the next Session the majority was the other way. In 1847 the Liberty Party was swallow ed up in a virtually new Party, whose candidate had never been known as an abolitionist. The next year this new Party gave place to another, which placed at its head that preeminent opponent of the abolitionists, Martin Van Buren. Nevertheless this Party of 1848 was compelled by the popular sense to be somewhat of an Abolition Party. It promised (and with Mr. Van Buren's express consent) to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. So also in the next formed Antislavery Party - that of 1852 - there was a measure of Abolition. But utterly impotent for good did these Parties prove ; and so will every other, that does not go for the abolition of all slavery, and that does not, instead of conceding legal protection to any part of it, hold every part of it to be a piracy and an outlaw.

In his Inaugural Address (in 1853) President Pierce was emboldened by the growing proslavery public sentiment to say that slavery "is recognized by the Constitution and stands like any other admitted right, and that the States where it exists are entitled to efficient remedies to enforce the Constitutional provisions."

In 1854 the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and the absurd doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty" installed in its place. Absurd indeed - for since the American people own the Territories they cannot escape from the obligation to govern them. They can abdicate only when they cease to own them: and that cannot be until they become States.

[2]

In 1856 the Republicans built their platform and put in it not one Abolition plank. Even as late as 1854 an attempt was trade by the Antislavery Party in Congress to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act. But by the year 1856 sham Antislavery Parties had so far done their bad work upon the public mind, that there was no longer a call for such repeal.

Under the demoralizing processes of these sham Antislavery as well as Proslavery Parties the country was now prepared for that culmination of wickedness, the Dred Scott Decision. Next came the vote in Congress by which the Republican Party conceded to a Territory the right to come into the Union with or without slavery: - that sad vote, which cast this Party down into one indiscriminate heap with the other Parties upon the low ground of "Squatter Sovereignty."

Nothing now remains for the Republican Party, or for its speedy and more nationalized successor, but to fall in with the virtual doctrine of the Dred Scott Decision and of Mr. Buchanan's positions, that slavery exists, or may exist, in all the States by force of the Federal Constitution.

After all was I not wrong in attributing so dark a prospect to Freedom ? This antislavery quackery is necessarily near its end. The nonsensical movements against slavery will soon be all over. We shall soon touch bottom. Then for an upward movement. Then for an earnest and rapidly growing Abolition Party : - a Party, that will not meet slavery with mere negations and the whining, cowardly deprecation of its extension: but that will boldly array against that mighty positive power another and a mightier positive power - Liberty against Slavery. It is only in the grapple of these two powers with each other that Slavery can be conquered.

I referred to the Dred Scott Decision and Mr. Buchanan's positions. Abhorrent as they are to every right-minded man, nevertheless why should they be complained of by Republicans or by any other men, who admit the legality of slavery? Mr. Buchanan was entirely right in saying that slavery was as Constitutionally in Kansas as in Georgia or South Carolina. Nay, if man can be property, then can slavery, which is simply the reduction of man to property, exist any where, let statutes or even Constitutions say what they will to the contrary. The abominable Lecompton Constitution did not err in saying: "The right of property is before and higher than any Constitutional sanction". For property is not, as it is often called, the creature of law. Law can protect, but not create, it. Property, being such in the nature of things, is necessarily property everywhere. Barley and butter, being recognized as property in this State, she would not suffer Virginia to deny the rights of property in the barley and butter, which New Yorkers had carried to the Richmond market. If then New York allows that men can be property in Virginia, why should Virginia be expected to tolerate the denial of the rights of property in men who dwell in, or who are carried to, New York? Whoever admits that A B can lawfully hold slaves in Virginia is estopped by this admission from denying the right of A B to bring them to New York and continue to hold them in slavery, or in other words as property.

I do not forget that the safety of Kansas from slavery will be cited to show that I am wrong in what I have said of the worthlessness of the Non-extension-of-slavery Parties. It is true that Kansas is safe from slavery. So she has been for years. This however is not the work of Parties. It is work that has been done outside of Parties. Kansas owes her safety under God to her own brave spirits and strong arms. It is true that she could not have had them all but for help from abroad - but for the wisdom and benevolence of those lovers of Liberty who embarked and persevered in the work of sending her men and munitions and money. No man out of Kansas has done so much as Eli Thayer to save her: and no man in Kansas so much as John Brown - Old John Brown the fighter.

Oh no! Kansas owes her salvation to no Party - to no Speeches and no Votes either in Congress or elsewhere. She owes it to her ample preparations to repel by physical force the aggressions of slavery. She believed slavery to be a pirate the superlative pirate: and she prepared herself to deal with it in just that common sense way that every persistent pirate is to be dealt with.

Kansas would have been just as safe from slavery as she is now, even had the attempt been made by the President and all Congress to force the Lecompton Constitution upon her. Just as safe as she now is would she have been, had the Federal Government declared war upon her.

GERRIT SMITH.

PETERBORO, November 5, 1858.