“But drunkenness stays.” He suggested that this continuing form of bondage might be more miserable, and more dangerous, than the one recently abolished. The occasion was the founding of a new political party, and Smith delivered the keynote speech. But Smith had other passions, and four years later he resurfaced in Chicago, insisting that his life’s work was unfinished. Photograph from New York Daily News / Gettyįor much of his life, Gerrit Smith was one of the most prominent abolitionists in America, a distinction he retained until 1865, when the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, made abolitionists obsolete. The war on alcohol united Progressives and Protestants, federal agents and Klansmen.
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