Elizur Wright

• Elizur Wright
• Born: February 12, 1804
• Died: November 21, 1885

• Elizur Wright
• Born: February 12, 1804
• Died: November 21, 1885

Abolitionist and insurance reformer, was born in South Canaan, Connecticut, the eldest of five children (two sons and three daughters) of Elizur Wright and Clarissa (Richards) Wright. The elder Elizur Wright, a mathemetician, farmer, and Calvinist deacon, came from a family that had settled in colonial Wethersfield, Connecticut; he had five children by an earlier marriage. Clarissa Wright came from a long line of privateers; her father, James Richards, served in the navy in the American Revolution. The family migrated in 1810 to Tallmadge, in the Western Reserve section of Connecticut (now Ohio), where Deacon Wright founded an academy. After attending this school, the younger Elizur Wright entered Yale; he concentrated on mathematics and was graduated with distinction in 1826. He then taught at Groton Academy and in September 1829 married Susan Clark, who had been one of his students. They had eighteen children, of whom twelve lived beyond infancy.

In the early 1830s Wright became professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the new Western Reserve College at Hudson, Ohio. There, under the influence of the writings of William Lloyd Garrison, he discarded his advocacy of the proposed African colonization of American slaves. The abolitionist Theodore Weld, visiting the college, was also influential in getting Wright and his colleague Beriah Green to collaborate in the antislavery movement. The school became a center for the free discussion of all public questions, particularly slavery. The hostility aroused by these activities, however, led Wright to resign and join with Weld in the formation of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, of which he became secretary.

In 1833 Wright, who had experienced mob violence against abolition in New York, issued the call for a national antislavery convention, at which the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed. Until 1837 Wright was the society’s corresponding secretary, editing its tracts and periodicals (the Anti-Slavery Record and the Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine), writing reports, raising funds, and recruiting and supervising agents. He split from Garrison in 1839 to edit the Massachusetts Abolitionist, but his ardent advocacy of an abolitionist political party caused his ouster.

Although Wright faced great financial difficulties, he managed to support his family by selling door-to-door his translation of Fables of La Fontaine (2 vols., 1841). In 1846, in Boston, he began a newspaper, the Weekly Chronotype, favoring free trade, abolition, and life-insurance reform. In 1850 the paper was purchased by the Weekly Commonwealth, the Free Soil party organ, which retained Wright as editor. Too individualistic, he was forced to leave in 1852. At that time he was a defendant in the Shadrach case, a fugitive-slave trial.

Acknowledging Wright’s criticisms of their practices, a number of life-insurance companies hired him to set up tables indicating the reserves needed for safe operations. But Wright was wary of the profiteering tendency among these companies and in 1853 he began lobbying the Massachusetts legislature for a law making the necessary reserves mandatory. His one-man battle, which succeeded in 1858, forced reform on many large companies.

Appointed state commissioner of insurance, Wright wrote annual reports exposing dishonesty and questionable practices. Policyholders, he felt, justly had claim to the reserves of life-insurance companies. He fought for the nonforfeiture law of 1861, which prevented the appropriation of reserves by the companies themselves. After hostility to his reforms brought about his ouster as commissioner in 1866, he became an actuary for several companies. His efforts to aid victims of unfair policies proved successful in 1880, when the legislature required insurance companies to pay cash in full to holders whose policies had lapsed. This and other reforms brought about by Wright affected not only Massachusetts companies but all companies doing business with Massachusetts citizens.

In addition to his insurance work, Wright promoted conservation efforts and was instrumental in the creation of Boston parkland. He died at the age of eighty-one.

Wright’s books include Myron Holley; and What He Did for Liberty and True Religion (1882). For biographical material, see P. G. Wright and E. Q. Wright, Elizur Wright: Father of Life Insurance (1937); F. P. Stearns, Cambridge Sketches (1905); D. L. Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (1961); F. B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, vol. 4 (1907) E. Wright, Daughter of Abolitionists (1964); and B. J. Hendrick, “The Story of Life Insurance,” McClure’s, June 1906. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936). Obituaries appeared in the Boston Transcript, November 23 and 24, 1885.