Henry Clarke Wright

• Henry Clarke Wright
• Born: August 29, 1797
• Died: August 16, 1870

Clergyman, pacifist, abolitionist, and advocate of women’s rights and marriage reform, was born in Sharon, Connecticut, the tenth of eleven children and the sixth son of Seth Wright, a farmer, house carpenter, and veteran of the Revolution, and Miriam (Wright) Wright. Both parents came from families that had emigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. Descent from the Puritans was considered by many a high distinction, but throughout his life Wright struggled against his Calvinist origins.

When Wright was four years old, the family moved to Hartwick in the unsettled “Western country” of New York State. Wright’s mother died when he was six, and his confessional autobiography Human Life (1849) reveals that the loss was hard to overcome. His father did not wait long before remarrying; the family circle expanded to include three half-sisters. Because of the demand for house-carpentry skills as trees fell and houses went up in western New York State, the family was fairly prosperous. The eldest brother remained on the farm, while each of the other sons, after a common-school education, was apprenticed to someone who could teach a useful trade. Henry Wright was taken to Norwich, New York, in 1814 to learn to be a hatter in the home of David Bright. Bright’s wife helped guide him through the tortures and pleasures of conversion during a religious revival in the winter of 1816-17. But the American hatting trade hit bad times as wartime embargoes against British goods were lifted, and it was necessary for Wright to go home and seek a different vocation.

Having become an omnivorous reader during his residence in Norwich, Wright contemplated a career as a writer and in 1817 went back to school for four months of literary studies. His father and brothers, however, prevailed on him to prepare for the ministry. With their backing, he studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew with a teacher in Hartwick while residing with a local minister and making his first acquaintance with pastoral duties and theological disputes. In 1819 he entered Andover Seminary in Massachusetts. How he paid for his three years at this formidable institution is unknown; perhaps he was aided by one of the benevolent societies through which local churches sought to train a generation of missionaries.

Wright was among the poorest and most rustic students at Andover—the only one lacking collegiate preparation—and he experienced searing moments of religious doubt. Still, in 1823 he returned to Hartwick to be ordained as a Presbyterian minister. After several temporary ministries in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, he was settled as a Congregational minister in West Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1826.

Wright had interrupted his Andover studies for one year to serve as a schoolmaster in nearby Newburyport, where he met Elizabeth LeBreton Stickney, the well-to-do widow of a prominent merchant. They were married in June 1823. She was seventeen years older than he and presented him with four stepchildren. Elizabeth Wright had several important effects on his ministry. Her wealth allowed him an elegant life; her prominence shielded him from criticism of some of his doctrines; and her interest in reform and missionary work broadened his conception of Christianity. The couple had no children of their own, a circumstance that Wright mentioned with bitterness in his diaries.

As his stepchildren grew older, Wright’s home life meant less and less to him, and he took increasing interest in the possibility of a missionary assignment that would take him away for long periods. Neither he nor his wife sought a divorce; he spent several weeks with her each year and always gave her address as his own, even after she moved to Philadelphia in 1837. Elizabeth Wright and her children, moreover, took a keen interest in his career in reform. The itinerancy of that career was, nevertheless, based on the cooling of his affection for her and on her ability to live without his support or presence.

In 1832 Wright took a brief leave from his West Newbury ministry to work as a fund-raiser for Amherst College. The next year he said farewell to his parish altogether and worked briefly for the American Home Missionary Society and the American Sunday School Union. From 1834 to 1836 he was employed by the combined Presbyterian and Congregational churches of Boston as a minister to the city’s children, setting up Sunday schools and admonishing mothers with regard to their responsibilities.

During these years, evangelical ministers and lay people, however fervently they supported movements to uplift the poor or civilize the heathen, were disturbed by the quite different approach to reform taken by William Lloyd Garrison and other radical abolitionists. At first Wright shared the view that Garrison was too vituperative toward good southern Christians and too impatient to overthrow the institution of slavery. In 1835, however, Wright passed through a conversion to the antislavery movement that resembled his earlier passage through religious conversion; afterward he began to distance himself from his former orthodox colleagues, adopting views so radical that he was said to “out-Garrison” Garrison. There were anticlerical overtones to all his subsequent work, in which the established church appeared as the great obstacle to progress.

Resigning his ministry with Boston’s children, he became in 1836 an agent of the American Peace Society, joining a faction of absolute pacifists who were critical of the society’s moderate stance on issues concerning war and violence. When the overseers of the society reprimanded him, he resigned from his post and was supported by his wife for a brief period until he found employment with the American Anti-Slavery Society. In this new position he developed antislavery societies for children, and he worked closely with the southern abolitionist sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké in their highly controversial New England lecture tour in the summer of 1837. As before, Wright found himself at odds with the members of a conservative board of managers, who felt that his radical opinions on peace and women’s rights, which he refused to keep to himself, were damaging to the cause; in September 1837 he was dismissed.

In 1838 radicals from both the peace and antislavery movements formed the New England Non-Resistance Society, and Wright was given the position of “voluntary, unhired agent” to carry on the work of revolutionizing the world’s attitudes toward the use of force. He traveled constantly to lecture and debate, living off donations. Wright and his friends relished the meekness and earnestness with which he faced the angry charges of his opponents, who feared that his teachings would destroy the basis of law and government. During this period he wrote his first book, A Kiss for a Blow (1842), a collection of pacifist stories for children that stayed in print for most of the century.

In 1843 American advocates of nonresistance sent Wright to England to lay plans for a world convention of peaceful humanity. These plans were soon forgotten, as Wright ventured into controversies over the Free Church of Scotland and its relations with churches of the American South. Furthermore, he nearly died of consumption, though he turned his convalescence to professional purpose in Six Months at Graefenberg (1845), an account of the famous water-cure establishment in Silesia to which British friends had sent him.

By the time Wright returned to the United States in 1847, his interests had changed. He emerged as an expert on health, physiology, sexuality, marriage, and child rearing. No longer the employee of any reform association, he traveled the lecture circuit with an annual series of talks on progressive subjects. He was a special favorite at water-cure spas and at spiritualist conventions where married couples received guidance. He advised that loving couples could avoid excessive sexual intercourse, enjoy greater spiritual intimacy, and produce more perfect babies. “Progress, not pleasure, is our aim,” says an ideal husband to his wife in Wright’s most influential book, Marriage and Parentage; or, The Reproductive Element in Man, as a Means to His Elevation and Happiness (1854). Meanwhile, Wright himself endured an unhappy marriage and a series of frustrating liaisons.

Wright’s audiences invariably held antislavery sympathies, and he wrote almost weekly dispatches to Garrison’s The Liberator on the great crises of the 1850s and the rising opposition to slavery. The enthusiasm with which he now welcomed violence puzzled some who adhered to nonresistance, but few doubted his understanding of the direction of the times. During the Civil War he traveled indefatigably in support of Abraham Lincoln and had no tolerance for other abolitionists’ criticisms of the president. Having lectured extensively in the Midwest, he was well aware of widespread antiblack prejudices and other limits on presidential initiative. Thus he helped keep abolitionists from losing contact with political reality during the war—an ironic achievement in view of his radical, disruptive part in the early years of abolitionism.

Wright did not figure prominently in postwar controversies over Reconstruction. Except for occasional lectures at conventions of spiritualists, he no longer took much interest in public life. He died at the age of seventy-two in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he was buried in Swan Point Cemetery. In choosing Wright’s resting place, Garrison received directions, via two different spiritualist mediums, from what he said was Wright’s own spirit—the first instance, in Garrison’s words, “of a departed spirit signifying the precise spot where he desired his earthly tenement to be deposited.” The last evidence of Wright’s lonely career was a long, unpublished collection of dialogues between himself and an ideal wife, whose identity merged with that of his mother.

Wright’s vast collection of diaries is divided between Harvard College Library and Boston Public Library. There is much information on Wright in W. P. Garrison and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879, 4 vols. (1885-89). Besides those mentioned in the text, Wright’s principal works include Defensive War Proved to Be a Denial of Christianity and of the Government of God (1846); Anthropology; or, The Science of Man (1850); The Errors of the Bible (1857); and The Self-Abregationist, or, The True King and Queen (1863). For a perceptive sketch of Wright, see P. F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition (1978), and for a full-length study of his life, with complete bibliography, see L. Perry, Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Clarke Wright, 1797-1870 (1980).