.

[Footnote 284: _Autobiography of Thurlow Weed_, p. 31.]

[Footnote 285: "Many years ago I was riding with Gerrit Smith in
northern New York. He suddenly stopped the carriage, and, looking
around for a few minutes, said: 'We are now on some of my poor land,
familiarly known as the John Brown tract;' and he then added, 'I own
eight hundred thousand acres, of which this is a part, and all in one
piece.' Everybody knows that his father purchased the most of it at
sales by the comptrollers of state for unpaid taxes. He said he owned
land in fifty-six of the sixty counties in New York. He was also a
landlord in other States."--H.B. Stanton, _Random Recollections_, p.
189.]

Gerrit Smith's conversion to abolitionism helped the anti-slavery
cause, much as the conversion of St. Paul benefited the Christian
church. He brought youth, courage, enthusiasm, wealth, and marked
ability. Although alienated from him for years because of his peculiar
creed, Thurlow Weed refers in loving remembrance to "his great
intellect, genial nature, and ample fortune, which were devoted to all
good works." When the people of Utica, his native town, broke up the
meeting called to form a state anti-slavery society, Smith promptly
invited its projectors to his home at Peterborough, Madison County,
where the organisation was completed. He was thirty-three years old
then, and from that day until Lincoln's proclamation and Lee's
surrender freed the negro, he never ceased to work for the abolition
of slavery. The state organisation, nourished under his fostering
care, led to greater activity. Anti-slavery societies began to form in
every county and in most of the towns of some counties. Abolitionism
did not take the place of anti-Masonry, which was now rapidly on the
wane; but it awakened the conscience, setting people to thinking and,
then, to talking. The great contest to abolish slavery in the British
West Indies, led by the Buxtons, the Wilberforces, and the Whitbreads,
had aroused public indignation in the United States, as well as in
England, by the overwhelming proofs that men and women were being
constantly flogged; and that branding female slaves on the breast with
red-hot iron, was used as a means of punishment, as well as of
identification. Other more revolting evidences of the horrors, which
seemed to be the inevitable accompaniment of the slave system, found
lodgment in American homes through the eloquence of the noted English
abolition