Gerrit Smith was closely involved with people in need, treating the oppressed not as faceless classes or races but as individuals with names and circumstances, as shown by his diary entries about hosting a fugitive slave, an Indian, a drunken visitor, George Brown of Corning with his wife, child, and heavy pack, Mrs. Crampton, William Corning, Dr. Winmer of Washington City with five deaf mutes and a blind child, Brother Swift and his family, Mrs. Phiak of Port Byron, and other poor and disabled travelers. He championed just and humane rights even when others' beliefs or behavior opposed his own, visiting Ku Klux Klan prisoners in an Albany jail and protesting the mob abuse of Henry Devan of Peterboro on the grounds that it violated Devan's equal rights as a citizen. Smith's fundamental motive in reform was the breach of human rights, and he believed that mistreating another person defamed the wrongdoer as well. He also supported Civil War soldiers: in 1862 he won Lincoln's original handwritten preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in a lottery raising funds for the Sanitary Commission for the Benefit of our Sick and Wounded Soldiers, then donated it back for further fundraising, after which the New York State Legislature purchased it for what is now the New York State Library. After the Civil War, he urged benevolence toward the southern states and shareholders, paid $25,00 of Jefferson Davis's $100,000 bail bond to secure the former Confederate president's release from jail, and forgave a Yorkville, South Carolina, widow a debt her late husband had owed him in an effort to reduce sectional hostility.