Lewis Tappan

• Arthur Tappan
• Born: May 22, 1786
• Died: July 23, 1865

• Lewis Tappan
• Born: May 23, 1788
• Died: June 21, 1873

Abolitionists and philanthropists, were born in Northampton, Massachusetts, the youngest of Benjamin Tappan and Sarah (Homes) Tappan’s seven sons and eleven children (ten of whom reached maturity). An ancestor Abraham Toppan (the spelling was later changed) came to Massachusetts in 1637. Like most of his forefathers, their father was a small merchant, selling first jewelry and then dry goods, but refraining from the usual practice of selling liquor as well. Their mother, a grand-niece of Benjamin Franklin, was raised as an Irish Presbyterian by her father, William Homes, who took her to the fiery evangelical prayer meetings conducted by the itinerant English preacher George Whitefield.

With their brother Benjamin, who became an antislavery senator from Ohio, Arthur and Lewis Tappan were brought up in a strict religious atmosphere by their parents, who were firm about disobedience in all areas of life. Furthermore, Northampton still felt the influence of the controversies of the 1740s stirred up by the intellectual and clerical activities of the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards. Religion became an obvious influence on the abolitionism of the two brothers.

The town school was chaotic, not conducive to serious learning. When Arthur and Lewis left home, each in their mid-teens, they entered the dry-goods business as clerks to dealers in Boston. Arthur established his own import business when he was twenty-one, moving it to Maine and then to Montreal; there he married Frances Antill in 1810. They had two sons, one of whom died in infancy, and six daughters. In 1813 Lewis married Susanna Aspinwall; they had one son and five daughters.

The brothers’ business careers proceeded with innovation, success, and interconnection, as when Lewis lent Arthur $12,000 to start a New York City import firm in 1815. During 1826 Arthur started a silk-jobbing firm in New York, which Lewis joined as a partner two years later. In 1828 Lewis took over Arthur’s New York Journal of Commerce, which he sold shortly thereafter. The jobbing business prospered, despite some temporary reverses in the 1837 financial panic; Arthur ascribed this success to the then unusual practice of having one fixed price for each item. Lewis served as credit manager and in 1841 established the Mercantile Agency, the first commercial-credit rating agency in the country.

As their business careers began to flourish, their moral convictions and political activities matured. As youths in Boston, both had been influenced by William Ellery Channing, and Lewis briefly became a Unitarian, breaking with family tradition. Shortly, however, Lewis resigned from his post as treasurer of the American Unitarian Association, and both brothers intensely sought out religious orthodoxy in a variety of ways. Lewis’s Memoir of Mrs. Sarah Tappan (1834) indicates his concern with ancestral Calvinist doctrine. Both brothers donated large amounts of money to religious causes and gave substantial amounts of time to them as well. Arthur supported the American Sunday School Union, the American Tract Society, the American Education Society, and the American Home Missionary Society. Both brothers supported the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and they backed the American Bible Society diligently. Arthur encouraged attempts to wipe out vice in New York City and fought for stricter Sabbath observance, temperance, as well as restrictions upon use of tobacco. Both brothers aided creation of the Broadway Tabernacle for revivalist Charles Grandison Finney and helped to send Finney to Oberlin College as professor of theology. Arthur contributed to the divinity school of Yale University and helped establish such clerical institutions as Kenyon College and Lane Theological Seminary. Consistent with the Calvinist ethic that expressed itself in a dedication both to work and spirit, the brothers supported the manual labor system practiced by John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community in upstate New York, which was based upon the belief that all kinds of labor are equally honorable and should be shared alike by all.

But perhaps the ideas of a work ethic, transmuted by some abolitionists into the idea of free labor, and of Calvinism in general reached expression most fully in the antislavery efforts of the brothers. The presence of a family tradition in their abolition work suggests itself by their tendency to agree and to work together during that antebellum period in which abolitionism was constantly divided by personal differences and political factionalism. They were drawn to abolitionism in the early 1830s, when both became friendly with William Lloyd Garrison. Arthur had at first been a member of the American Colonization Society, which attempted to transport freed slaves to Africa, but he soon left the society to join the antislavery movement. Both brothers talked of the “sin of slavery”; their inner religious orientation was evident. Arthur supported Garrison’s The Liberator; helped found the Emancipator in New York City during March 1833; and, with his brother, founded the New York City Anti-Slavery Society as well as the American Anti-Slavery Society in the same year. Arthur was president of both. In 1834 Lewis’s house was attacked by a mob that burned his furniture in an outburst of antiabolitionist hostility.

Both brothers believed that the antislavery movement should be a religiously pure one and felt suspicious of Garrison, particularly after the latter’s association with the anti-institutionalism of John Humphrey Noyes in the late 1830s. The Tappans parted company from Garrison during 1840 in protest against the linking of abolition with other reform issues (such as feminism). They founded the new American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (Arthur became president and Lewis treasurer). Arthur also created a journal, The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter and helped establish an abolitionist weekly The National Era in Washington, D.C.

Lewis was especially concerned with the internationalization of the antislavery struggle and maintained correspondence with abolitionists abroad, particularly in England. Partly at the suggestion of former President John Quincy Adams, he visited England in 1843 to attend an international antislavery conference. While there he discussed the impending annexation of Texas, which abolitionists opposed because it would strengthen slavery within the Union. Striving to gain support on this issue, he in turn was persuaded by Chartist reformers—and others—to rely on political action. Upon Lewis’s return, both Tappans gave full support to the presidential candidacy of James G. Birney on the abolitionist Liberty party ticket in 1844. The Tappans tried particularly to line up Whigs behind Birney.

In the 1840s the Tappans suffered business reverses but continued their abolitionist efforts. Greatly disappointed by the failure of many of their favorite religious groups—like the American Tract Society—to support black freedom and education, they formed the American Missionary Association in 1846, explicitly for the purpose of furthering abolition. In 1848 the Tap-pans were friendly to the organization of the Free-Soil party, but critical of its nominating Martin Van Buren over the old abolitionist standard-bearer Birney. Lewis finally voted for the abolitionist split-off candidate Gerrit Smith.

Both brothers strongly opposed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and gave indirect aid to those resisting it. Lewis supported the work of Alexander M. Ross, who traveled in the South helping slaves escape by means of the Underground Railroad. Convinced that the Constitution provided a legal basis for outlawing slavery, he began to feel by the mid-1850s that more radical steps were necessary than the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society advocated, and he helped form the Abolition Society in 1855. By this time his health was impaired, his brother was semiretired in New Haven, and his own political activities were restricted. Both Tappans kept some political distance from the abolitionist side in the Kansas slavery struggle of the 1850s, deploring violence on both sides. They also kept their distance from Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in 1860—Lewis voted for the dissident Gerrit Smith.

The brothers had formed a religious and reform team throughout their adult years. When Arthur lay dying in New Haven on July 21, 1865, Lewis took his hand and said, “Do you know me?” Arthur replied “I think I ought to.” In 1870 Lewis published The Life of Arthur Tap-pan but was paralyzed by a stroke as the book went to press. Lewis, after the death of his first wife, had married Sarah J. Davis in 1854. He was a member of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and when he died his funeral sermon was preached by Beecher.

Both Tappans exemplified the enormous power of religious tradition in energizing reform, particularly abolitionism, and in defining and organizing its expression. For years Arthur and Lewis represented the most activist type of religiopolitical expression and in the antislavery movement itself. They were prototypes of the abolitionist figures: from rural New England, Congregationalists and Federalists, compelled to speak with equal fervor to their consciences and to the need for practical (financial) advancement—serving both the cause of morality and the world of the countinghouse.

B. Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (1969), a modern biography, contains a great amount of material on Arthur Tappan as well. Other sources include D. L. Tappan, Tappan-Toppan Genealogy (1915); A. H. Abel and F. J. Klingberg, A Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations 1839-1858, Furnished by the Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and Others with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (1927); C. W. Bowen, Arthur and Lewis Tappan (1883); J. A. Scoville (“Walter Barrett”), The Old Merchants of New York City, vol. 1 (1863); E. N. Vose, Seventy-five Years of The Mercantile Agency, R.G. Dun & Co., 1841-1916 (1916); G. H. Barnes, The Anti-Slavery Impulse (1933); W. P. Garrison and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879, 4 vols. (1885-89); G.H. Barnes and D. L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844, 2 vols. (1934); J. Sturge, A Visit to the U.S. in 1841 (1842); D. L. Leonard, The Story of Oberlin (1898); The New York Herald, July 25, 1865; Harper’s Weekly, July 12, 1873; The New York Times, June 23, 1873. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936).