He studied another year with Timothy Dwight at the academy at Greenfield Hill in Fairfield and went on to attend lectures at the Medical College of Philadelphia in 1790.
Smith was the youngest member of the Connecticut Wits, and alongside Richard Alsop, Mason Cogswell, Theodore Dwight, and Lemuel Hopkins, he contributed to The Echo, a series of satiric poems with a Federalist slant.
[1][3][5] In New York City, Smith was a member and trustee of the anti-slavery Manumission Society, which ran a school for the children of slaves.
His home became the headquarters of the Friendly Club, a New York literary society of young Federalist intellectuals.
[6] He was a friend and correspondent of many leading intellectuals of the era, including Noah Webster, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Rush, Uriah Tracy, Samuel Latham Mitchill, Charles Brockden Brown, James Kent, and William Dunlap.