Background
He was born at Northampton, Massachussets, in 1786, the eighth of eleven children of Benjamin and Sarah (Homes) Tappan. Benjamin and Lewis Tappan were his brothers.
He was born at Northampton, Massachussets, in 1786, the eighth of eleven children of Benjamin and Sarah (Homes) Tappan. Benjamin and Lewis Tappan were his brothers.
He attended the town school until the age of fifteen.
After finishing schook, he was given a clerkship with Sewall & Salisbury, hardware and dry-goods dealers in Boston. Here for a time he sat under the preaching of William Ellery Channing.
He entered business for himself as a dry-goods importer at the age of twenty-one, establishing the firm of Tappan & Sewall in Portland, Me. , with a nephew of one of his former employers. Some two years later he moved his business to Montreal.
Returning to the United States after the outbreak of the War of 1812, Tappan struggled against difficulties for several years before, in 1826, he started his most successful enterprise--a silk jobbing firm in New York in which he was joined two years later by his brother Lewis. Although he met with various reverses, he came to be esteemed a wealthy man. He attributed his success to the fact that he charged a fixed uniform price for articles, a practice not then customary. "I had but one price, " he said, "and sold for cash or short credit".
Heavily overstocked in a period of falling prices, the firm of Arthur Tappan & Company was forced to close its doors during the panic of 1837, but in eighteen months its creditors had all been paid. As soon as he began to accumulate wealth Tappan began "to reflect seriously upon his obligations as a STEWARD of the Lord". He gave generously of his substance and of his time, strength, and executive ability, to a multitude of religious and humanitarian causes. He was a supporter of the American Sunday School Union, the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, the American Education Society, and the American Home Missionary Society, and held office in most of these organizations. He was concerned in the movement for stricter Sabbath observance, the temperance crusade, and the fight against tobacco.
In 1827 he founded the New York Journal of Commerce to provide the city with a daily newspaper free from "immoral advertisements" and regardful of the Sabbath, but it did not prove the moral force he had desired, and after a year he turned it over to his brother Lewis. He supported the effort made to suppress licentiousness and vice in New York and in 1831 was president of the New York Magdalen Society, which sponsored a sensational report exposing conditions in that city. Though for some years a member successively of the Presbyterian congregations of John Mitchell Mason and Samuel Hanson Cox, he was an active promoter of the free church movement in New York, and with his brother was instrumental in leasing the Chatham Street Theatre and subsequently building the Broadway Tabernacle for Charles Grandison Finney.
He gave a scholarship to Andover Theological Seminary and paid the tuition of a large number of divinity students at Yale. He contributed toward the establishment of Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, of Auburn Theological Seminary, of Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati; and in 1835, after the withdrawal of most of the Lane students because of restrictions upon the discussion of slavery, gave $10, 000 and made a private pledge of his entire income in order to secure the establishment of Oberlin College.
Moved by concern for the welfare of the negroes, he joined the American Colonization Society, but becoming convinced that its policy was wrong withdrew and united with those who were agitating for the abolition of slavery. He first became associated with William Lloyd Garrison in 1830 by paying a fine to free Garrison from prison in Baltimore, and subsequently helped support the publication of the Liberator.
About 1831 he promoted an unsuccessful project to establish a college for negroes in New Haven. In March 1833 he took an active part in launching the Emancipator in New York; in October of the same year he helped form the New York City Antislavery Society, and in December, the American Antislavery Society, being chosen the first president of each. In 1835 he volunteered assistance to Prudence Crandall, arrested for opening a school for negro girls at Canterbury, Connecticut, and in this connection financed the establishment in Windham County of the antislavery Unionist, under the editorship of C. C. Burleigh. In 1840, believing that Garrison would weaken the cause of abolition by his action in associating with it other movements, such as that for women's rights, Tappan with others withdrew from the American Antislavery Society, formed a new organization--the American and Foreign Antislavery Society, of which he was elected president--and founded a new journal, the American and Foreign Antislavery Reporter. Convinced that slavery could be destroyed under the Constitution by political action, he supported the Liberty Party and its presidential candidate, James G. Birney, and was instrumental in establishing in Washington the antislavery weekly, the National Era. Meanwhile, in 1846, distressed by the refusal of several of the missionary organizations he had aided to espouse the cause of abolition, he took part in founding the American Missionary Association, and remained a member of its executive committee until his death. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 he declared his determination "in the fear of God" to disobey it, and continued to give all the aid within his power to escaping fugitives.
As a champion of unpopular movements, through most of his career he was subjected to violent criticism; his business was endangered; and he himself was threatened with kidnapping, assault, and assassination. Abuse and threats, however, for the most part he heard calmly and ignored. He had a certain rigidity in maintaining his principles, owing partly to his natural austerity of thought and partly to the position of eminence he attained as the financial backer of many reform movements. Though his money gifts were somewhat curtailed--to his great distress--by his failure about 1842 through ill-advised speculation in real estate, he kept up his active interest in reform until his death. In 1849 he purchased an interest in "The Mercantile Agency" established by his brother, but retired from all business some five or six years later and took up his residence in New Haven, where he died.
Tappan was never of strong constitution and throughout his mature years suffered from constant headache. He had no humor and was stern and severe, with himself as well as others.
He married Frances Antill, September 18, 1810. To them were born two sons, one of whom died in infancy, and six daughters.
He was a New York abolitionist who worked to achieve the freedom of the illegally enslaved Africans of the Amistad.
He was an Ohio judge and Democratic politician who served in the Ohio State Senate and the United States Senate.
