"If black men will riot, I will fear that emancipation is a failure." So spoke the great abolitionist, Gerrit Smith, from the pulpit of the Old African Church Tuesday night after the Davis trial. "Riots in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans have made me sick at heart." On the platform with him were Horace Greeley, Governor Pierpont, Colonel Lewis and Judge Underwood. His audience consisted of negroes, prominent white citizens of Richmond, Federal officers and their wives. The negroes, as ready to be swayed by good advice as bad, listened attentively to the wisest, most conservative addresses they had heard from civilians of the North, or than they were again to hear for a long time. Gerrit Smith, who was pouring out his money like water for their education, told them: "I do not consider the white people of the South traitors. The South is not alone responsible for slavery. Northern as well as Southern ships brought negroes to this shore. When Northern States passed laws abolishing slavery in their borders, Northern people brought their negroes down here and sold them before those laws could take effect. I have been chased in the North by a pro-slavery mob--never in the South." Referring to the South's impoverished condition, he said he wished the Federal Government would give the section six years' exemption from the Federal tax to make rapid rehabilitation possible. He plead for harmony between races; urged whites to encourage blacks by selling lands to them cheap; urged blacks to frugality, industry, sobriety; plead with them not to drink. "Why cannot you love the whites among whom you have been born and raised?" he asked. "We do! we do!" cried the poor darkeys who had yelled, "We will! we will!" when Hayward was inciting them to mischief. Horace Greeley said: "I have heard in Richmond that coloured people would not buy homes or lands because they are expecting these through confiscation. Believe me, friends, you can much sooner earn a home. Confiscation is a slow, legal process. (Underwood had not found it so.) Thaddeus Stevens, the great man who leads the movement--and perhaps one of the greatest men who ever sat in Congress--is the only advocate of such a course, among all our representatives and senators. If it has not taken place in the two years since the war, we may not hope for it now. Famine, disaster, and deadly feuds would follow confiscation." His voice, too, was raised against calling Southern whites "traitors." "This seems to me," he said, "to brand with the crime of treason--of felony--millions of our fellow-countrymen."