Theodore Dwight Weld. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society

Transcription

1 Theodore Dwight Weld Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society Theodore Dwight Weld was one of the most active and influential abolitionists. Weld was born November 23, 1803 in Hampton, Connecticut to a Congregational minister. In 1824, his family moved to the burned-over district where Weld was deeply influenced by the region s religious revivals. He originally supported colonization but by the 1830s had begun to question its morality. In 1834 he organized the Lane Theological Seminary Debates, where students met to discuss slavery. Transformed by the debates, Weld began traveling through Ohio and New York to convince others of abolition s importance. His efforts brought in hundreds of newly converted abolitionists to New York s Anti-Slavery Societies. After the Civil War he lectured politicians to give federal rights to African Americans. 1

2 Theodore Dwight Weld was born November 23, 1803 in Hampton, Connecticut to a prominent Congregational minister, Ludovicus. Like his father, Weld began his studies at Andover Academy with the expectation that he would become a minister. He started at the school in 1819 but was forced to leave a year later when his eyesight began to severely limit his ability to read. A teacher at Andover taught him mnemonics (the art of memorization), a skill that would not only help him manage his vision loss but also become an itinerant speaker on the subject. Weld traveled throughout the Northeastern United States as a teenage lecturer, traveling as far away as Niagara, New York (Abzug 25). The decision to become a lecturer proved foundational to his evolution into a key member of the American Anti-Slavery Association. Weld honed his oratory skills and learned how to capture the attention of an unfamiliar audience, even refashioning his outward appearance. Weld s extended family was rather well-to-do; as an itinerant speaker, however, young Theodore downplayed his class status and portrayed himself as a roughly hewn backwoodsman (Abzug 4). Ludovicus retired in 1824 and moved his family westward to a farm in Fabius Township, New York in the heart of the burned-over district, the westward stretch of towns in upstate New York created by the revivals of the 1820s and 1830s. The new homestead was approximately forty miles south of Utica and Hamilton College, key evangelical communities that would deeply impact Weld s view of Christianity and his personal life mission. Initially, Weld was skeptical of the evangelical, millennial message preached by ministers such as Charles Finney, and even confronted them directly about their beliefs (Abzug 48). Weld s resistance faded, however, and he soon adopted the idea that he could be saved, becoming Finney s most talented and trusted lieutenant (Abzug 50). He poured himself into the efforts of the reform movement, which emphasized transformations in the body as much as it did the mind. It was at about this time that he entered Oneida Manual Labor Institute in Whitesboro, New York, which emphasized traditional religious education and the morally redeeming value of physical labor (Abzug 62). The school was integrated; several early black abolitionists and foundational Pan-African thinkers received their education at the school, including Henry Highland Garnett, Alexander Crummell, Jermain Loguen, and William D. Forten (Sernett, passim). During this time, Weld began to more deeply consider slavery as a moral issue and whether it could be solved through colonization, the obligatory emigration of black Americans from the United States. By 1831 the same year of Nat Turner s rebellion Weld began corresponding with British abolitionist Charles Stuart. Although Weld had supported colonization as a means to solve the slavery issue, by 1833 he began to turn against the project. In 1834, he helped organize a two-and-ahalf-week long series of debates and discussions about the merits of immediate abolition and colonization at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. His efforts helped launch his career as major anti-slavery organizer. After days of open discussion and personal stories told by southerners and former slaves alike, student participants voted for immediate abolition and against colonization. They subsequently formed their own anti-slavery society that aimed to raise money, start 2

3 a library, form reading groups, and establish schools for Cincinnati s African American residents. The Lane Theological Debates, as they came to be known, infuriated the conservative trustees of the school as well as local white Cincinnatians who objected to black education and interracial cooperation. The trustees responded by issuing new rules that provided them with the power to censor student activities and speech; students challenged the measure. Weld penned a letter signed by fifty-one of his peers objecting to their censorship, but nothing changed and the students later called the Lane Rebels decided to leave the school, many of them eventually enrolling with Asa Mahan at Oberlin College in 1835 (Hagedorn 71-72). Weld, radicalized by his experience, launched a yearlong speaking tour of Ohio advocating abolition. Weld became an antislavery legend as he dressed in his John the Baptist attire going from town to town seeking out people who would find a public space for him to lecture (Abzug 124). White pro-slavery and anti-black crowds threatened him as he traveled. In Circleville, Ohio, mobs pelted him with stones through the open windows (Abzug 125). After accomplishing abolitionist conversions in Ohio, Weld focused on upstate New York. By February of 1836, Weld had brought between six and seven hundred new members into the Utica Anti-Slavery Society and by the following March had several hundred new members in Rochester (Abzug 147). Weld s successes in Ohio and New York captured the attention of American Anti- Slavery Society leaders Lewis Tappan and Elizur Wright at a time when the organization was rethinking its strategy for spreading the anti-slavery message. Realizing that the organization s national success hinged on the local presence of agents like Weld, they asked him to lead a training convention aimed at creating seventy new speakers (Myers ). Later known as the Seventy, the agents were trained in New York from November 8 th through the 27 th of 1836, with three intense 2-hour sessions daily (Thomas 119). Weld exhausted himself, and destroyed his speaking voice during the trainings. As one agent remarked, He was the master spirit, the principal speaker in that assembly, his labors were intense I have heard him speak 8 or 10 hours in a day at three sessions of the Convention, notwithstanding he had a severe cold (Thomas ). It was in New York that Weld met Quaker reformers Angelina and Sarah Grimké. The Grimké sisters came from a slave owning family in South Carolina but moved to Philadelphia to commit to antislavery activism. After a rocky courtship, Weld married Angelina Grimké in May of The wedding guests included abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Abby Kelley, Gerrit Smith, Lewis Tappan, and poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Two ministers, one black and one white, officiated the unconventional ceremony (Abzug ). Weld had published The Bible Against Slavery in 1837, an influential book that refuted Southern religious defenses for slavery. The Grimké sisters were essential in compiling much of the information for his next book, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. Together they gathered dozens of testimonies, 3

4 advertisements for runaway slaves, government speeches, and court cases to create a compendium on the issue of slavery. The American Anti-Slavery Society published the volume in May of It quickly became one of the most important texts of the abolitionist cause. Weld continued to do anti-slavery work even after he lost his voice due to years of speaking tours. After moving briefly to Washington D.C. in late 1841, he decided to open a utopian school with the Grimké sisters. Eagleswood, located at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, combined traditional courses with classes in the arts and physical exercise. The school also served as a retreat for the widow of John Brown after Harper s Ferry, and two of Brown s comrades were buried at Eagleswood Cemetery (Abzug ). After the Civil War, Weld and the Grimkés lectured for federal laws to give freedmen equal rights (Abzug ). Weld was extremely proud of his final two major accomplishments: helping to found the Hyde Park Free Public Library and Hyde Park s Second Congregational Church (Abzug 290). Weld died in 1895 at the age of ninety-one. 4

5 Works Cited & Further Reading Abzug, Robert H. Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, Hagedorn, Ann. Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad. New York: Simon & Schuster, Myers, John L. American Antislavery Society Agents and the Free Negro, The Journal of Negro History 52, no. 3 (1967): Thomas, Benjamin P. Theodore Weld: Crusader for Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,