Theodore Dwight Weld

• Theodore Dwight Weld
• Born: November 23, 1803
• Died: February 3, 1895

Abolitionist and educator, was born in Hampton, Connecticut, the fourth son of Ludovicus Weld and Elizabeth (Clark) Weld, moderately well-to-do descendants of the first Puritans. Ludovicus Weld, a Congregational minister, began his son’s education, which was continued in the local school and at Phillips Academy (now Phillips Andover) in Andover, Massachusetts. Poor health forced Weld to leave Phillips, but he soon undertook his first lecture tour, speaking on mnemonics (memory improvement).

After his family moved to Fabius, New York, in 1824, Weld attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and the new Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York, a school with an emphasis on the character-building properties of manual labor. Persuaded by the Presbyterian evangelist Charles G. Finney to devote himself to revivalism and reform, he lectured on temperance and soon became an agent of the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions. It was at this time that he was converted from the movement to establish a colony of freed slaves in Africa to outright abolitionism. He became a student at the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, presumably to continue his goal of entering the ministry. There, in 1834, he led and participated in the so-called Lane Debates on slavery—an eighteen-day “teach-in” on the subject. Silenced by the trustees, he led many of his fellow students to the newly formed and progressive Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

Weld’s formal education ended at Lane, and he became an active abolitionist, lecturing and organizing in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York as agent of the new American Anti-Slavery Society. Shy and retiring—”a Backwoodsman,” he called himself—he was, however, an orator of great power and intensity, often preaching with evangelical fervor to hostile audiences and earning himself a reputation as “the most-mobbed man in the United States.” His lecturing came to an end in 1836, when his voice gave out.

For several years Weld was attached to the headquarters of the American Anti-Slavery Society, where he trained a very effective group of agents known as the Seventy and continued to agitate for immediate emancipation. The consolidation of the antislavery movement in the North and its establishment in the West was almost entirely due to Weld and his recruits. His major publications, published anonymously, were the pamphlets The Bible Against Slavery (1837) and American Slavery As It Is (1839), a collection of newspaper articles on the appalling treatment of slaves. The book was a major influence on Charles Dickens, who incorporated parts of it into his American Notes (1842) without acknowledgment, and on Harriet Beecher Stowe, who said that during the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) she “slept with Slavery As It Is under her pillow until its facts crystallized into Uncle Tom.”

Among Weld’s Seventy were Angelina and Sarah Grimké, the Quaker abolitionists and women’s-rights advocates from South Carolina. He and Angelina were married in Philadelphia in May 1838, and Sarah became a member of their household. The Welds lived in New Jersey, first at Fort Lee, then on a farm at Belleville, and then at Eagleswood, a school in Perth Amboy set up by a utopian group. They had three children: Charles Stuart (born in 1839), a successful writer; Theodore Grimké (born in 1841), whose tragic life ended in his commitment to a mental institution; and Sarah Grimké (born in 1844).

After his marriage, Weld continued his work as an antislavery editor and trainer of agents. From 1841 to 1843 he acted as a researcher and adviser for a group of antislavery congressmen led by John Quincy Adams in their successful fight to repeal the gag rule, which required the automatic tabling by the House of Representatives of all slavery petitions. His activist career ended with the split in the national antislavery organization and the entry of abolitionists into politics, but his lobbying organization continued under the direction of the philanthropist Lewis Tappan, whom Weld had converted to the cause. Among the other prominent individuals he recruited were Henry Ward Beecher, Henry B. Stanton, and James G. Birney, the presidential candidate of the abolitionist Liberty party in 1840.

Weld had moved far from the religious training of his youth. From Congregationalism through a long period of soul-searching, he came to accept a form of personal pietism free of religious institutions. He told a colleague that he had withdrawn from reform work because “he had been laboring to destroy evil in the same spirit as his antagonists.” During the 1840s, at Belleville and Eagleswood, he and his wife directed schools that emphasized a combination of intellectual and physical training; many of their students were the children of former associates in the abolition movement. In 1862 he moved to Fairmount (later Hyde Park), near Boston, and taught at a girls’ school run by the medical reformer Dr. Diocletian Lewis until the school was destroyed by fire.

Although he was attracted to the principles of nonresistance, Weld welcomed the Civil War. He failed to obtain an inspectorship in the U.S. Sanitary Commission, but wrote and lectured. After the war he lived in Hyde Park, where he was active in community service, including the founding of the Hyde Park Public Library, and in promoting the cause of women’s rights, which he had earlier insisted must take second place to abolition. Angelina Grimké Weld died in 1879. Weld spoke at the funeral of William Lloyd Garrison in 1879 and enjoyed milestone birthday celebrations attended by old friends in 1883 and 1893. He had mellowed noticeably since the crusading days of the 1830s and 1840s and, distinguished by his white beard, had become something of a patriarchal figure. He died in his sleep in Hyde Park at the age of ninety-one.

Manuscripts relating to Weld exist in numerous collections, the most important of which are the Weld and Grimké manuscripts in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan. Other important manuscripts are in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. Invaluable is the collection of Weld-Grimké letters edited by G. H. Barnes and D. L. Dumond, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822−1844, 2 vols. (1934). Besides the works mentioned in the text, Weld wrote Persons Held to Service, Fugitive Slaves, etc. (n.d.); In Memory of Angelina Grimké Weld (1880); and. with J. A. Thome, the essentially statistical Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the United States (1841). There are two major biographies of Weld, R. H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (1980), and B. P. Thomas, Theodore Weld: Crusader for Freedom (1950). The former is comprehensive and analytical and seeks to probe into the roots of Weld’s behavior; the latter is more conventional but sound. C. F. Robinson, Weld Collections (1938), is useful for Weld’s genealogy. A pathbreaking study of abolitionism is G. H. Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (1933). In addition, see M. L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (1974); D. L. Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (1959) and Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (1939); L. Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860 (1960); A. Kraditor. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy, 1834-1850 (1969); L. Perry and M. Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (1979); and R. G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (1976).