Gerrit Smith to Frederick Douglass, March 6, 1854

LETTER FROM GERRIT SMITH, M. C.

WASHINGTON, March 6th, 1854.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS:—MY DEAR SIR:—An hour ago, I gave my vote against the Homestead Bill: and, that too, notwithstanding I had made a speech in favor if: and, that too, notwithstanding I have, for so many years, loved, and advocated, and acted on, the great essential principles of the Bill.

My apparent inconsistency in this case is explained by the fact, that, just before we were called to vote on the Bill, it was so amended, as to limit its grant of land to white persons.

If my fellow land-refromers, with whom I have, so long, toiled for the success of our land-reform doctrines, shall be aggrieved by my vote, I shall be sorry. Nevertheless, I can never regret my vote. I was a man before I was a land-reformer. And, for the sake of no gains, however great, or however many, can I consent to ignore the claims and even the fact itself, of a common manhood. But the advantages, which are sought, at the expense of trampling on human rights, are not gains. Such gains are losses—even to those, who get them. The Homestead Bill would have been purchased at too dear a rate had it proscribed only one negro, or only one Indian. The curse of God is upon the Bill, or there is no God. There is no God, if we have liberty to insult and outrage any portion of his children.

To reconcile me to the Bill as amended, I was told by one of the Members of Congress, that the colored people would not be shut out from the public lands:—but that they could still buy them! That is, the colored people must buy their homes, whilst the white people are to have free homes! What a comment this on the great justifying doctrine of negro-slavery, that the negroes are unable to take care of themselves! What a spectacle of merciless cruelty we present! The most frightful passages of history furnish no parallel to it. Our National Legislature joins our State Legislatures in holding out to the free colored people the hard alternative of returning under the yoke of slavery, or of being shut out from our broad continent. And, then, the excuse for this treatment is no less unreasonable and insulting than the treatment is cruel and murderous. It is, that the free colored people are too ignorant, and lazy, and worthless, to deserve any better choice than slavery or death.—And this is the excuse of those, who shut out the colored people from schools; and drive them into negro-pens; and banish them from society; and mark them as physical and moral lepers, to be every where shunned, and loathed, and hated!

That our free colored brethren should in these circumstances be no more discouraged and dejected; no more self-despairing, and self-despising; no lower in intelligence, and morals, and thrift, is to me amazing. That the mass of them should, notwithstanding the depressing, crushing influences upon them, be still rising and bettering their condition; and that there should be rapidly multiplying instances among them of the acquisition of wealth, and of distinction in writing, and oratory, and general scholarship, is more than I had supposed to be possible.

Your friend,

GERRIT SMITH