Lewis Tappan

Background

Lewis Tappanwas born in Northampton, Massachussets, in 1788. He grew up in the devout household presided over by his father, Benjamin, and his mother, Sarah (Homes) Tappan.

Education

He was educated in the town school.

Career

At the age of sixteen became an apprenticed clerk to a dry-goods importing firm in Boston. Here he sat for a time under the preaching of William Ellery Channing, and in 1825, to the distress of his Calvinistic family, served as treasurer of the American Unitarian Association. Soon, however, he returned to Orthodox views, and by 1828 was writing pamphlets upholding Evangelical convictions against Unitarianism. The family Calvinism also appears in his Memoir of Mrs. Sarah Tappan (1834).

Meanwhile, assisted by his employers, he had endeavored to set up a business of his own, but in 1828 he entered into partnership with his brother Arthur as a silk jobber in New York. In the same year he took over from Arthur the New York Journal of Commerce, but in 1831 sold it to David Hale and Gerard Hallock. As credit manager of Arthur Tappan & Company he was an important factor in the prosperity of the firm in the years preceding the panic of 1837. Shortly thereafter he withdrew from the partnership, and in 1841, under the firm name of Lewis Tappan & Company, established "The Mercantile Agency, " the first commercial-credit rating agency in the country. He conducted this enterprise with great success until 1849, when he retired to devote himself to the humanitarian labors which had become his chief concern. In deliberately planning to draw upon his accumulated capital for his support for the rest of his life he was acting upon theories regarding the use of wealth which he later set forth in a pamphlet entitled Is It Right to Be Rich? (1869).

Like his brother Arthur, Lewis Tappan from the time of his first business success was a supporter of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the American Bible Society. He was a promoter of the free church movement in New York, and with Arthur was instrumental in leasing the Chatham Street Theatre and building the Broadway Tabernacle for the revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, and subsequently in sending Finney as professor of theology to Oberlin College.

He was one of the founders of the New York Antislavery Society and the American Antislavery Society in 1833, and by his activities in behalf of abolition drew upon himself hate and obloquy; in July 1834 his house was wrecked by a mob, and his furniture burned. In 1839-41 he was the outstanding member of the committee which undertook to secure the freedom of the Amistad captives, successfully defended before the Supreme Court by John Quincy Adams. Although at first both Tappans worked with William Lloyd Garrison, Lewis, like Arthur, repudiated Garrison when the latter proposed to attach other reforms to the cause of abolition, and with the resulting schism in the American Antislavery Society in 1840, he took a leading part in forming the American and Foreign Antislavery Society, of which he was the first treasurer. He was especially conscious of the international aspect of the American struggle and for this reason maintained a wide and frequent correspondence with sympathetic interests in England, especially with the British and Foreign Antislavery Society. At the suggestion of John Quincy Adams, he attended the international antislavery convention in London in 1843. Realizing that the attitude of Great Britain could have an almost decisive bearing on the outcome of the struggle in the United States, he discussed with his English friends such matters as the annexation of Texas, the position of the negro in the United States, Canada, and Liberia, the coastwise slave trade, and the attitude of the churches.

Believing that slavery could be abolished within the Union, he worked to win the cooperation of churches and missionary societies. When the older foundations which he had supported, notably the American Board, declined to enlist in the fight for abolition, he helped to found and became treasurer of the American Missionary Association (1846), explicitly committed to the cause of the negro. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, he became a supporter of the work of Alexander M. Ross, who traveled through the South helping slaves to escape by the Underground Railroad. As the struggle in America reached its crisis, Tappan gradually adopted the view that slavery was illegal everywhere and could be abolished by the federal government in all the slave states under the terms of the Constitution. He thus came to favor a more radical method of action than that sponsored by the American and Foreign Antislavery Society, and in 1855 resigned as corresponding secretary of that body to accept office in a new organizatione Abolition Society. By now, however, age was beginning to limit his activity. As the need for antislavery agitation lessened, he gave more attention to the constructive work for negroes being undertaken by the American Missionary Association.

In 1870 he published The Life of Arthur Tappan, and suffered a paralytic stroke just as the book went to press. Three years later he died, as the result of another stroke, at the age of eighty-five.

Achievements

• He is remembered for his work to achieve the freedom of the illegally enslaved Africans of the Amistad.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Letter From a Gentleman in Boston to an Unitarian Clergyman of That City (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Letter From a Gentleman in Boston to an Unit...)

  • Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South, on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

  • Immediate Emancipation: The Only Wise and Safe Mode

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • American slavery: to the editor of the British banner.

    (This volume is produced from digital images from the Corn...)

  • The Life of Arthur Tappan

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Religion

From 1856 Tappan was a member of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn.

Views

Quotations: "There is too much theology in the Church now, and too little of the Gospel. "

"If you wish to draw off the people from a bad or wicked custom, you must beat up for a march; you must make an excitement, do something that everybody will notice. "

"If any fall by the hand of violence, others will continue the blessed work. "

"These meetings all have excited great attention, and have been of an exceedingly interesting character. "

"Most of the prisoners told the interpreter that they are from Mandingo. "

Membership

He was one of the founders of the New York Antislavery Society and the American Antislavery Society in 1833.

Tappan was also among the founders of the American Missionary Association in 1846.

Connections

He was married twice: first, September 7, 1813, to Susanna Aspinwall, by whom he had six children, and second, in 1854, to Mrs. Sarah J. Davis. The youngest of his five daughters married Henry Chandler Bowen.

Father:

Benjamin Tappan

Mother:

Sarah (Homes) Tappan

Spouse:

Sarah J. Davis

Spouse:

Susanna Aspinwall

Brother:

Arthur Tappan

He was an American abolitionist.

Brother:

Benjamin Tappan

He was an Ohio judge and Democratic politician who served in the Ohio State Senate and the United States Senate.

References

• Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery