“For the Means of Your Subsistence : : : Look Under God to Your Own Industry and Frugality”: Life and Labor in Gerrit Smith’s Peterboro

The rural hamlet of Peterboro, the home of Gerrit Smith, the nineteenth century’s most famous social reformer, has been portrayed as an idyllic and peaceful community free of class conflict. The extensive documentary record suggests a less harmonious situation and indicates that the community was fraught with struggle, engendered as much by Smith’s reform efforts as by general class relations. This article examines class-based struggle through several vignettes, including a look at the voting patterns of the Liberty party in Smithfield, the social conditions of African Americans who lived in Peterboro, and the story of the temperance hotel.