ere in no
wise dismayed or disheartened. It would have taken a good deal of
persecution to frighten Beriah Green, or to confuse the conscience of
Arthur Tappan.

In the midst of such scenes came tidings that slavery had been
abolished in the British West Indies, and that the Utica indignity had
been signalised by the conversion of Gerrit Smith. Theretofore, Smith
had been a leading colonisationist--thereafter he was to devote
himself to the principles of abolitionism. Gerrit Smith, from his
earliest years, had given evidence of precocious and extraordinary
intelligence. Thurlow Weed pronounced him "the handsomest, the most
attractive, and the most intellectual young man I ever met." Smith was
then seventeen years old--a student in Hamilton College. "He dressed
_a la_ Byron," continues Weed, "and in taste and manners was
instinctively perfect."[284] His father was Peter Smith, famous in his
day as one of the largest landowners in the United States; and,
although this enormous estate was left the son in his young manhood,
it neither changed his simple, gentle manners, nor the purpose of his
noble life.[285] By profession, Gerrit Smith was a philanthropist, and
in his young enthusiasm he joined the American Colonisation Society,
organised in 1817, for the purpose of settling the western coast of
Africa with emancipated blacks. It was a pre-eminently respectable
association. Henry Clay was its president, and prominent men North and
South, in church and in state, approved its purpose and its methods.
In 1820 it purchased Sherbro Island; but finding the location
unfortunate, other lands were secured in the following year at Cape
Mesurado, and about a thousand emigrants sent thither during the next
seven years. Gerrit Smith, however, found the movement too slow, if
not practically stranded, by the work of the cotton-gin and the
doctrine of Calhoun, that "the negro is better off in slavery at the
South than in freedom elsewhere." So, in 1830, he left the society to
those whose consciences condemned slavery, but whose conservatism
restrained them from offensive activity. The society drifted along
until 1847, when the colony, then numbering six or seven thousand,
declared itself an independent republic under the name of Liberia. In
the meantime, Smith, unaided and alone, had provided homes in northern
States, on farms of fifty acres each, for twice as many emancipated
blacks, his gifts aggregating over two hundred thousand acres