Confidence and Pertinacity in Evangelical Abolitionism: Lewis Tappan's Circle

Abstract

IN HIS 1933 STUDY, The Antislavery Impulse, GILBERT HOBBS Barnes demonstrated for first time that not all antebellum American abolitionists were radical Garrisonians. There were also conservative abolitionists like Theodore Weld and James Birney who drew upon reformist aspects of Finneyite Great Revivals of 1820s and 1830s. Their aim was not social revolution; instead, they simply sought to make nation's religious and political institutions unambiguously antislavery. In more recent years, scholars have noted that all conservative abolitionists were not same. Although all conservatives were sympathetic with Liberty Party during 1840s, a number remained more concerned with reforming evangelical Protestant denominations than building an antislavery political movement. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's 1969 biography, Lewis Tappan and Evangelical War against Slavery, has been most sophisticated effort at characterizing these evangelical church-oriented conservatives. Wyatt-Brown's achievements were two-fold. Differing with Barnes, he demonstrated that evangelical conservatives did not restrict their activities to Midwest; various groups also operated throughout Northeast. Second, Wyatt-Brown showed how the evangelicals of [Lewis] Tappan's immediate circle formed most influential group of church-centered abolitionists through their dominant role on American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, American Missionary Association, and New York City Abolition Society, as well as through their funding of Oberlin and Oneida Institutes-the principal training grounds for evangelical antislavery clergy. But because Wyatt-Brown's focus was biographical, he was unable to provide detailed analysis of values and interactions within Tappan's immediate circle.