Gerrit Smith moved from believing slavery could be ended by persuasion to advocating political action and, as nonviolent methods failed, accepting that slavery might have to end through physical force. A major influence in the formation of the Republican Party from the abolitionist-oriented Liberty Party in the late 1830s, he broke with the American Colonization Society, which advocated exporting free blacks, and with the Garrisons, who avoided political activity. Through his efforts, the Town of Smithfield and Madison County elected abolitionist candidates to public office, and Peterboro residents accepted diverse ethnicity in their midst. Smith accepted nominations for the New York State Assembly in 1825, the New York State Senate in 1827, New York State governor in 1840, 1842, and 1858, and president of the United States in 1848, 1852, 1856, and 1860, and he served in the U.S. Congress in 1853-54. With Frederick Douglass he organized a convention in Cazenovia in 1850 to protect passage of the Federal Fugitive Slave Bill, and he wrote a resolution advocating that enslaved people use all means necessary to escape, including theft of materials for escape and force against owners. After anti-slavery advocates were forced out of Utica, 400 of them accepted his invitation to meet in Peterboro on October 22, 1835, to establish the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. In 1843, in opposition to the pro-slavery Presbyterian Church, Ann and Gerrit Smith left and formed the Free Church of Peterboro, which was free of sectarian identification and served as a forum for anti-slavery speakers. When the fugitive slave Jerry was arrested in Syracuse under the Fugitive Slave Act, Smith advocated a forcible rescue, and on October 1, 1851, he, Charles Merrick, Rev. Jermaine W. Loguen, and Rev. Samuel J. May led abolitionists who freed Jerry from jail and transported him to Canada. In 1848 John Brown first came to Peterboro to meet Smith, and Gerrit Smith joined five Boston-area abolitionists as the Secret Six in supporting Brown’s anti-slavery activities. In February 1858, while Brown waited in the Smith mansion, Smith and Franklin Sanborn discussed Brown’s intention to invade the South and decided to find the action that would turn the country into a fiery hell, with Smith saying, “I can see no other way.” Brown’s raid ignited the Civil War. Although Smith was a vice-president of the American Peace Society, he acknowledged that ending slavery might require violence and bloodshed, and after slavery was abolished in 1865 he spent much of his last decade fighting continued discrimination against blacks.