Years after he attended Hamilton College, in upstate New York, Theodore Dwight Weld was still remembered as one of the school’s most able students. A brilliant speaker and gifted thinker, Weld was descended from Thomas Welde of Boston, one of the original trustees of Harvard College. He was steeped in the religious heritage of his family, which moved to New York from Connecticut in the early 1820s, bringing the storied history of the Welds with them. The Welds had been among the nation’s first “revolutionary Puritans,” ministers whose firebrand sermons had set the course for New England’s tradition of straitlaced rectitude. Religion was the central pillar of the family’s life. Weld’s mother, Elizabeth Clark, was a descendant of Jonathan Edwards; his father had followed a traditional path to the pulpit, from Andover Academy to Harvard and thence to a permanent appointment in a large and powerful church in Hampton, Connecticut.
Unfortunately for Theodore’s father, Ludovicus Weld, things in Hampton were not what they had once been. By the early 1820s, the two-hundred-year reign of unquestioned Puritan fealty was nearing its end in New England. Hampton was symbolic of this malaise. A steady increase in the number of Baptists had undermined the town’s Congregationalist monopoly, and a strong Unitarian movement threatened to dethrone Ludovicus from his position as Hampton’s most respected minister. Such developments would have been unheard of just a generation before, but church attendance had dropped since then, and swearing, immodest dress, adultery, and heresy were rife. Theodore’s father battled “Satan’s course” (as he called it) through a series of personal visits to his congregants, during which he pleaded with them to return to their church. He blamed Thomas Jefferson and other “Jacobeans” for the wholesale flight from Calvinism, but no amount of thunder could shift his congregation’s course. Eventually, plagued by ill health, he gave up entirely and moved the family west to Fabius Township, near Syracuse, New York.
Theodore attended Andover and then Hamilton College. While he planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the ministry, the two were quite different in temperament. During Theodore’s time at Andover, his volatile personality and his desire for adventure led him into a career as a lecturer on mnemonics, or the “art and science of memory.” While still only a teenager, he was a great success. For two years he traveled from town to town in New England and New York, perfecting his presentation. After a childhood under the obdurate rule of his father, who had shown him little affection, Theodore found that his intelligence, command of the language, and unique empathy for the plight of others gave him a power and popularity that his father had never been able to claim. Eventually, however, he turned from this rather frivolous course and began to think about entering the ministry. He returned to his family’s new home in New York and, though not actually enrolled at Hamilton (he wanted to take some time to reflect on what he should do next), took rooms at the school and attended a number of classes.
At Hamilton, Weld was a giant, a commanding speaker and a natural leader. His fellow students looked to him not only for intellectual guidance but also for religious counsel. He was captivated by religious questions and seemed to his peers to have an almost personal, intimate relationship with God, but he never wavered from his father’s faith. He advised others to ignore the “charlatans” and “false prophets” of the growing New York revival movement, scoffing at his sister, Elizabeth, when she extolled Charles Finney’s message after attending one of his sermons. He ignored the pleadings of some Hamilton students who had become Finneyites: “My father,” he said, “was a real minister of the Gospel, grave and courteous, and an honor to the profession. This man is not a minister, and I will never acknowledge him as such.”
Undeterred by this criticism, Theodore’s sister continued her campaign. “We had heard of the revival at Utica,” she wrote him in February 1826, “[and] hope our friends there will be sharers. We hope and pray too that our dear Theodore may not be left to witness, to wonder, and perish.” Perhaps inevitably, Weld agreed to attend a Finney sermon, if for no other reason than to show that he would not bend under the man’s power. Finney, who had heard of Weld’s influence among the students at Hamilton, looked forward to converting him. During his Utica sermon, Finney seemed to speak directly to Weld, fixing him with his intense gaze and striding toward him from the stage. “And yes!” he shouted at one point, his finger descending toward Weld, “You’ll go to college and use all your influence against the Lord’s work.” The next day, apparently unaffected by the sermon, Weld encountered Finney at a local store. This time he criticized the revivalist to his face, lecturing him for over an hour in public. A crowd gathered to witness the confrontation. Finally, after a long moment of silence, Finney spoke: “Mr. Weld,” he asked, “are you the son of a minister of Christ, and this is [sic] the way for you to behave?”
Weld would subsequently admit to being “so ashamed” by his behavior that he “could not live.” He fled the scene, leaving Finney standing on the sidewalk, but later he walked to the man’s home to apologize for his actions. When Finney came down the stairs, he spotted Weld waiting for him just inside his door and said, “Ah is it not enough? Have you followed a minister of the Lord Jesus to his own home to abuse him?” Weld was abject. “Mr. Finney,” he began, “I have come for a very different purpose . . . ,” but at this point Finney threw his arms around him and “dragged him into the parlor.” There they both fell on their knees “sobbing and praying, sobbing and praying.” It was an overpowering moment, filled with more religious emotion than Weld had ever before felt. But still he would not convert. That night he paced back and forth in his room, and the next morning, as he later testified, “an invisible force crushed me to the floor and a voice called upon me to repent.” That same evening, he stood in front of Finney’s congregation and confessed his sins. He pledged himself to Finney’s crusade. He was converted.
Throughout 1827, Theodore Weld traveled the back roads of New York as Charles Finney’s most trusted lieutenant. He brought to his ministry the same power and compassion he had once used to such great effect as a lecturer on mnemonics. As he spoke, he began to reshape Finney’s message, adding to his promise of salvation a call for crusading reform. Weld’s was an unusual approach, for he himself was not a born reformer. He rejected the notions of apocalyptic political revolutionaries as adamantly as he had once rejected Finney, and insisted that he did not want to remake the world; he wished only to save souls. But he also contended that the best way to do that was to mark out a new future for the nation, a future that would depend on religious devotion coupled with a strong commitment to good works.
In the winter of 1827, in pursuit of this program, Weld met in Boston with Lyman Beecher, the most respected religious voice of his era. Beecher, Weld knew, was far more than America’s preeminent preacher; he seemed also to embody all of the nation’s moral ideals, in representing the established clergy, who looked to him for leadership. Weld hoped to forge an alliance between Finney and Beecher and thereby to create a single entity—a whole that would couple Finney’s charisma to Beecher’s credibility even as it linked the impetus of the new movement with the traditional power of the American clergy. While the meeting would not result in a firm reconciliation between the “Eastern” Beecherites and the “Western” Finneyite revivalists, the two camps would start cooperating in building a religious movement that would not destroy itself over questions of ritual and doctrine. Weld insisted to Beecher that he and Finney had much in common, including a zealous desire to remake America. Beecher listened closely and agreed that he shared that goal. He reluctantly acknowledged that he, too, saw that Finney’s religious movement might be transformed to address society’s problems. Weld was pleased by the meeting, and when he left Boston, he felt confident that he would meet Beecher again.
For Weld, the challenge was to transform the zeal of Finney’s call for religious devotion into a push for spiritual freedom that would have a discernible impact on American life. In Weld’s mind, the two—religious devotion and spiritual freedom—were inseparable. Americans, he believed, were not so much lacking in religious fealty (a problem best addressed by a liberal dose of devout prayer) as enslaved by their undisciplined desires. Accepting Finney’s new Christian message meant not only engaging in a personal dialogue with God, but also freeing one’s soul from the feast of temptation, from Satan’s grip. Weld was convinced that the towns in which he preached were battlegrounds where God and Satan faced each other every day, in constant combat for the soul of America. Weld’s message fit neatly into Finney’s conception of a new and more moral church, but Weld went much further than his mentor was willing to go. In battling orthodoxy, Finney’s disciples attempted to build new “modes and norms” of worship, following his belief that by bringing his ministry into America’s streets, he could drive Americans back to their churches, where they belonged. Weld reversed this formula: he wanted to drive Finney’s newly devout converts out of the churches and revival tents and into the streets, where their commitment to human perfectibility would spur social change.
Finney’s critic Lyman Beecher agreed with this view. He was pleased to hear that Weld understood the connection between Finney’s criticism of orthodoxy and the establishment of broad-based social reform activities. Beecher himself was working quietly to bring his own message of salvation into America’s nascent reform movements. He had preached on the evils of alcohol for many years, even to the point of taking his message into mission houses in New York and Boston. That was where the Finneyites had to go, he argued, for what could they accomplish by pushing for church reform? That had been done many times before, and it had failed. The point, Beecher thought, was to remake human souls, and thereby transform America.
Staid, conservative, disciplined, and upright Lyman Beecher was something of a revivalist himself. He believed that America could become a “Republic of God,” and while he faithfully adhered to his nation’s first (unstated) political commandment—dictating the strict separation of church and state—he told his congregants that the “great commotions and distress of nations” that the world was then seeing would unquestionably lead to the “spiritual, universal reign of Christ on earth.” Beecher believed that a time of troubles and blood would precede America’s national salvation, much as the Passion had preceded Christ’s ascent into Heaven. God’s triumph was inevitable, but it would be bloody. America’s soul would be seared by the coming conflict.
Beecher’s pulpit-thumping sermons on America’s destiny and his quiet but pointed temperance crusade had a profound effect on Theodore Weld. Just four years after his conversion, Weld was known as one of the most powerful temperance speakers in the nation. There were others, but none tied sobriety, spiritual development, and national pride into a single message. Weld’s temperance campaign helped keep Finney’s revival alive. That was a concern, for as Weld admitted, the hotter the fires of a revival burned, the more quickly they seemed to burn themselves out. By 1830, the flames of the Finney revival were cooling; even in upstate New York, Weld noticed a dampening of the religious fervor that Finney’s crusade had stoked. “The state of feeling in Oneida County is dreadfully low,” he wrote to Finney at one point. “Christians have talked themselves to death.” The problem, as Weld saw it, was that the Finney crusade was becoming more of a business than a holy calling. He even criticized Finney personally, saying that he ran revivals as “a sort of trade, to be worked at so many hours every day and then laid aside.” Weld wanted more. He wanted what Beecher wanted: a “Republic of God.”
After much soul searching, Weld decided that the best way to keep the revival going was to renew the effort to build a relationship between Finney’s religious movement and Beecher’s call for social reform, with an emphasis, this time, on combining religious education with practical work. His purpose was to draw a distinction between Finney’s followers and the ill, old, and infirm leaders of orthodoxy. Under Weld’s guidance, marrying manual labor to education became something of an obsession for Finney’s followers, and the idea took hold, as well, of the public’s imagination. Study, exercise, religious devotion, and hard work, it was thought, cleared the mind and made straight the path to God. When Hamilton College rejected Weld’s proposal to establish a manual labor program, Finney’s followers left the school to join the newly formed Oneida Institute, which offered a curriculum of divinity studies supplemented by a strict daily regimen of manual labor.
Oneida was literally built from the ground up: its students laid its bricks and mortar and landscaped its walks and parks. For Oneida’s students, the institute symbolized a revolutionary shift in religious practice, combining piety with a robust engagement in the world. The purpose of the work institute was not simply to prepare young men for the ministry, but to prepare them to spread the word of the revival among the unconverted—the shopkeepers, merchants, seamen, and farmers of America—who needed the Word of God most. How could ministers reach such people if they themselves had never planted or harvested crops, if their backs had never been bent by loads, their fingers never callused by constant work? Oneida was built almost overnight, with Weld as its spiritual leader. But almost as soon as the work was begun, he began to look for new challenges.
In 1831, after turning down several offers of leadership positions from local congregations, he accepted philanthropist Lewis Tappan’s invitation to become the general agent for the newly formed Society for the Promotion of Manual Labor in Literary Institutions. The job would take him south and west, into Pennsylvania and Ohio, and keep him in touch with Tappan and his brother Arthur, the richest and most progressive philanthropists in America. The Tappans were known for supporting crusaders and causes, having given money to everything from the temperance movement to a home for “wayward” women. Convinced Christians, like Weld, they were firm believers in Finney’s message and advocates of the labor and education movement symbolized by the “Oneida Revival.” As part of their mandate to Weld, they asked that he find a suitable school where the ideals of Oneida might be planted in a new National Manual Labor Institution in the “wilderness.” After months of traveling, Weld sent the Tappans his final, meticulously written report. He said that the small Lane Seminary, in Cincinnati, would be the ideal location for the Tappans to carry on the mission begun at Oneida.
Originally founded by two New Orleans businessmen, the Lane Seminary provided a traditional education to the young men of southern Ohio. In 1832, when Weld visited the campus, Lane was run by F. Y. Vail, a soft-spoken and talented teacher who spent more time raising money for his school than actually teaching. Lane desperately needed the infusion of funds and new students that Weld, and the Tappans, were offering. Recasting the Lane curriculum to include a manual labor component was a small price to pay to ensure the school’s survival. For Vail, the appearance of Theodore Weld was a godsend. For Weld, in turn, Cincinnati seemed the perfect setting for a new manual labor crusade; here, he could prove his belief that the future of the revival movement lay in the new lands of Ohio and the West. Overjoyed by his discovery of Lane, he urged Finney and three dozen of his Oneida disciples to join him. He viewed the place as the cradle of a new crusade that would finally banish the devil from the soul of the nation. “Satan’s seat,” he told Finney, could be conquered only in the West—not by “working the lever” in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. “Kindle back fires, back fires, back fires far and wide, let them stretch over the interior then while you are engaged there the cities are preparing fast; when ripe—at the favorable nick of time—give the word—rally your forces and in the twinkling of an eye make a plunge—and they are a wreck,” he promised.
The twentieth century’s peasant-based national liberation movements, its cultural revolutions and messianic calls for the remaking of humanity, would have fared well under Weld’s leadership. His pronouncements to Finney were nearly revolutionary, and slowly he began to infuse his religious rhetoric with an increasingly specific political message. If the revivalists could win the countryside, he argued, then the cities (“Satan’s domain”) would surely follow. The conquest would be complete. Steeled by the harsh realities of the frontier, strengthened by working on the land, and purified by the West’s wilderness paradise, Lane’s seminarians would rekindle the fading fires of Finney’s revival—and remake America. But much to Weld’s disappointment, Finney said he preferred to stay in the East. Saddened, even disillusioned by this response, Weld immediately asked Finney’s former antagonist and constant critic Lyman Beecher if he would come to Cincinnati to lead the school. It seemed a natural choice. By now Beecher was almost fully reconciled with the Finneyites and, having made his name in New England, was looking for a new pulpit and cause to expand his already considerable reputation.
Fired by the same vision as Theodore Weld, Beecher welcomed the challenge of leading a new school that would take a novel approach to both education and religion. After visiting Cincinnati, he set about the task of restructuring Lane’s curriculum, hiring new teachers, and, most important of all, raising badly needed funds to keep the school’s doors open. Even with the addition of Weld’s Oneida disciples, Beecher knew that the work would tax his every resource. Self-certain and, to a measure, self-absorbed (he never questioned his own rectitude), Beecher was nevertheless a formidable figure. He was every bit the minister, with an imperious presence, bushy eyebrows, and a hearty and stolid greeting. People knew when Lyman Beecher entered a room, for his voice commanded attention. Only a man of his stature and convictions could make Lane successful. Beecher was perfect for the job: not only did he have an enormous network of supporters and potential founders, but he also shared with Weld the belief that the final struggle with Satan would be waged in the nation’s new frontier lands. “If we gain the West,” he told his congregation upon his departure, “all is safe; if we lose it, all is lost.”
Catherine Beecher, one of Lyman Beecher’s talented daughters, agreed with her father, asserting that Ohio’s fertile lands symbolized its potential. With just a little labor, the revivalists could “bring forth an hundredfold more” there than they could in the “fixed, steady unexcitable soil of New England,” she said. Catherine Beecher was thrilled at the prospect of her father’s challenge in the West. An educator herself, and the head of a seminary for young women in Connecticut, she could see the fast-forming outlines of a national reform movement. She maintained friendships with a number of Philadelphia Quakers who might help—young women who, when called upon, could energize the support (and the potential funds) of their community. One of these Quakers was Angelina Grimké, with whom Catherine had a pleasant and increasingly intimate correspondence. Angelina came to visit her Hartford Seminary and returned to Philadelphia convinced that she could take part in this new movement as a teacher at Catherine’s side. She was impressed with Catherine Beecher, viewing her as a woman with a distinct sense of religious devotion who was also committed to putting her religious beliefs into practice. Before such efforts, Angelina thought, the devil himself might shrink in cowardice.
Weld and his group of Oneida disciples traveled west to Cincinnati in time for the fall term of 1832, prepared to begin the great experiment of bringing God to the wilderness. Lyman Beecher, as the head of the new seminary, welcomed the students and began the actual work of teaching, which had to succeed before anything else. Beecher took pride in his position, but the real spiritual leader of the student body was twenty-nine-year-old Theodore Dwight Weld. The new core of Oneida men mixed well with the Lane seminarians, but there was never any question as to who was in charge: a new faculty was chosen by the students, who were careful to pick only those who believed in the worth of combining education with labor. The students kept their ranks undiluted by skeptical outsiders, fearing that Lane, like Oneida, might be diverted by an infusion of what they saw as the staid and traditional educational practices of the East. Their sense of purpose was reinforced by letters from those they had left behind in New York: “Oneida has lost the spirit which she once possessed,” one such student wrote dejectedly. “Her soul has gone.”
In late 1832, Weld traveled to Hudson, Ohio, to lecture on temperance at Western Reserve College. He drew good crowds wherever he went, but he was especially welcome in Hudson, where some of the nation’s most outspoken abolitionists, including a trio of Western Reserve professors—Charles Storrs, Elizur Wright, and Beriah Green—had created a hotbed of antislavery sentiment. Storrs, Wright, and Green were supporters of William Lloyd Garrison’s doctrine of “immediatism,” and they descended on the charismatic Weld, hoping to win him to their cause. His enormous influence, his volatile speaking style, and his brilliant organizing techniques would be a boon to the abolitionist cause, they believed. Their message to him was straightforward, but powerful: slavery was a sin. Satan, they said, was being loosed on a prayerful nation, but not merely through the temptations of desire and alcohol. Men and women in chains were a blight on the soul of America. The Republic, they argued, could never hope to win salvation, could never truly save its own soul, without emancipation.
The meeting in Hudson shook Weld’s faith in his seminary’s simple goals. Combining education, godliness, and work was a revolutionary idea, but it needed a purpose; harvesting new souls was essential to begin the work of building a godly republic, but it had to be for some cause. Weld isolated himself from the other Lane students to think about these issues, and then, within a month of his visit to Hudson, he pledged himself to the abolitionist cause. Weld realized that abolitionism provided a fertile battleground on which to deploy his new revivalist soldiers. “I hardly know how to contain myself,” he wrote to Elizur Wright in January 1833. “If I was not positively pledged for two or three years to come, and if I had finished my education, I would devote myself to the holy work, come life or death.” To William Lloyd Garrison, who invited him to attend the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) in December 1833, Weld explained that he supported immediate emancipation because of his belief in the “great bottom law of human right, that nothing but crime can forfeit liberty.” While Weld had to decline Garrison’s invitation, he told him he would be there in spirit. In the meantime, he said, he would attempt to open a new front for the abolitionists in southern Ohio by candidly discussing the topic at the Lane Seminary. He wrote to the abolitionist Amos Phelps that he believed the “proximity of Cincinnati and the whole eastern line of Ohio to slaveholding states has thus far muzzled men both in public and private upon the subject of slavery.” Weld promised he would soon change that, and pledged that Phelps could “expect to hear from this Institution—a more favorable Report.” He had a plan, he said, that would make Phelps proud of Lane’s commitment to abolitionism.
Weld’s plan was a modest one: he proposed that Lane’s seminarians simply begin to talk openly about slavery, in informal meetings. These discussions, he believed, would soon take on a life of their own. But they needed to be organized around a single issue. So Weld posed a question to his fellow students that he said they should consider. It seemed simple enough: the question was whether slavery should be abolished gradually, through a return of the slaves to a new homeland in Africa (the alternative supported by an overwhelming number of Weld’s fellow seminarians), or all at once, immediately. Having planted these first seeds, which were meant to capture the attention of his fellow students without causing controversy, Weld suggested that a public discussion be held on the topic. He was hoping that the question could be debated before the end of 1833 in a formal setting, but at the insistence of the school’s colonization advocates, he agreed to postpone any public debate until at least the beginning of 1834. This would give the two sides time to prepare their arguments, and the advocates of colonization a chance to clarify their position. In the meantime, Weld and a small group of his followers (a growing contingent of Lane students) continued their own, more personal, crusade: “We early began to inculcate our views by conversation, upon our fellow-students,” he later wrote. “Those of us who sympathized together in our abhorrence of slavery selected each his man to instruct, convince and enlist in the cause. Thus we carried on one after another, and, before ever we came to public debate, knew pretty well where we stood.”
As Weld summarized it, Lane’s students would focus on two questions in their public debate. First, “Ought the people of the Slaveholding States [to] abolish Slavery immediately?” and then, “Are the doctrine, tendencies and measures of the American Colonization Society, and the influence of its principle [sic] supporters, such as [to] render it worthy of the patronage of the Christian public?” Weld negotiated with the colonization faction on the time and place of the debates. The two sides concluded that they would take place at the seminary for two and a half hours on successive evenings over a period of nine days, to begin in February of 1834. In fact, the debates would last for eighteen days, with some sessions going on for many hours. The public began to take notice as word of the “Lane Debates” spread through Cincinnati and the rest of Ohio. Reports of the proceedings were followed closely by the newspapers and the religious community.
Weld began the debates with a long disquisition on the nature of slavery, and from then on he dominated the discussions, building his case for immediate emancipation point by point and responding, when necessary, to the arguments of the pro-colonization faction, the overwhelming majority of whose members were from the South. In his presentations, he drew on Scripture and religious practice to shame the Southern seminarians. But in the end it was not Weld’s overpowering presence that transformed the debates or drew increasing public attention; rather, it was the conversion of Lane’s Southern students. By the last day, every student present had been converted to immediatism, and under Weld’s leadership, the formation of a Lane Anti-Slavery Society was announced.
The Lane Debates were electrifying and controversial. That some of the nation’s leading divinity students (and the chief lieutenant of its most famous revivalist) should have concluded that slavery was a sin, and that in the eyes of God, black men and women were equal to whites, was shocking. The conversion of the Southern divinity students, too, was dramatic and unprecedented. And even more stunning was the outright condemnation of colonization plans, without reservation. The majority of Americans who opposed slavery, even those who appeared to take a radical position on the issue, simply did not believe that immediate emancipation was possible; even to suggest that it was, they knew, was to court trouble. People wanted a change, but a comfortable one, a slow and gradual shift away from the practice of keeping others in chains. The truth was that in 1834, most antislavery activists believed that the continuation of slavery was actually preferable to immediate emancipation—that if slavery could not be eliminated gradually, through the resettlement of black Americans, then it should not be eliminated at all. Weld attempted to answer this argument, and to counter the fears it was based on, by writing a constitution for the Lane Anti-Slavery Society that moderated the doctrine of “immediatism.” Slaves would not be turned loose on the nation “to roam as vagabonds and aliens” and would not be “invested with all political rights and privileges” enjoyed by whites. Emancipation would not mean the end of white political dominance, Weld promised. But it would mean the extirpation of the nation’s greatest sin. Emancipation would cleanse America’s soul.
Weld’s calming words had little effect, for the controversy generated by the simple fact that a debate on slavery had taken place was still reverberating through the North. Nor could Weld have stopped the movement he had begun, even if he had wanted to do so. After forming their antislavery society, Weld and his fellow students promoted black learning and dispatched abolitionist activists into Cincinnati’s black community. “We believe that faith without works is dead,” Weld wrote to Tappan, in typical Finney fashion. “We have formed a large and efficient organization for elevating the colored people in Cincinnati—have established a Lyceum among them, and lecture three or four evenings a week, on grammar, geography, arithmetic, natural philosophy, etc.” Even in promoting this work, Weld was not typical of his fellow abolitionists, many of whom espoused openly racist views: emancipation was a good political cause and an effective organizing tool to revive the waning power of the Finney revival, they believed, but that was all—it had nothing to do with equality. For many diehard abolitionists, black inferiority was a given. But for Weld, the belief in black inferiority was as bad as slavery itself; it was in fact its root cause.
The Lane Debates drew a great deal of public comment, most of it negative. Weld was widely condemned, and Lane’s students were suspected of being radicals. Even in Cincinnati, there was a backlash. The people of the city prided themselves on their tolerance and Western values, and they felt Weld had gone too far; he was not one of them. For Cincinnatians, the sight of Lane students working in the black community was scandalous, intolerable.
In the national press, which followed the Lane Debates in great detail, Weld was accused of “folly,” “madness,” “vanity,” “ambition,” “self-complacency,” and “total contempt of law and public sentiment.” The great fear that his movement occasioned was contained in one word, amalgamation, which was code for the mixing of the races. The concern was that black men might someday be able to court and marry white women and “pollute them” with “their seed.” Lyman Beecher, ever the prudent and patient graying eminence of America’s religious orthodoxy, counseled patience and restraint and attempted to dampen Weld’s enthusiasm for immediatism. He admired Weld and looked on him almost as a son, but he could not endorse his views on this matter; privately, Beecher feared that the abolitionist crusade would overshadow his own religious work and divert the students from their main course of studies. Unable to stop the Lane Debates, Beecher instead dedicated himself to publicly shrugging off their ultimate impact. The debates simply showed that young people, he seemed to say, thought they could change the world by wishing it so; they were impetuous, as they should be. But this strategy—of treating the debates as so much hubbub in a seminary dedicated to serious study—did not work. Faced with a rising public clamor, Beecher decided that Lane needed to act quickly to put the controversy in the past. When the school’s board of trustees attempted to contain the fury over Weld’s activism by barring any further debate on abolitionism at Lane and then censuring him for his actions, Beecher supported the measures. The school itself, he believed, was more important than the issue of slavery, and certainly more important than Weld.
The board’s action, designed to end the controversy caused by the debates, was a terrible miscalculation; it transformed the debate over slavery into a debate over the right to free speech. It energized Lane’s new abolitionists and turned them against the school. In response to the board’s decision, the new antislavery crusaders openly, proudly, and ostentatiously walked the streets of Cincinnati with free blacks, their families, and their own wives, mothers, and daughters—in obvious defiance of the seminary’s leadership. Beecher met with the students, pleaded with them to act reasonably, and urged them to take into account what effect their actions might have on Lane’s future. “If you want to teach [in] colored schools,” he told them, “I can fill your pockets with money; but if you will visit in colored families, and walk with them in the streets, you will be overwhelmed.” Weld ignored Beecher’s warning and encouraged the students to increase their activities in the black community. It was not only a test of his leadership but an experiment in political action, for in defying the Lane authorities, Weld was developing an entirely new and attractive vocation that had not existed in the nation since the days of the American Revolution: mass political organizing around a single reform ideal. Lane’s trustees responded by threatening Weld with expulsion, but he was not intimidated. He circulated a manifesto urging support for his position and defiance of the board:
Is research to be hoodwinked, and debate struck dumb, and scrutiny sabotaged, and freedom of speech measured by the gag-law, and vision darkened, and sympathy made contraband, and vigilance drugged into slumber, and conscience death-struck in the act of resurrection, and moral combination against damning wrong to be forestalled by invocations of popular fury? . . . What! think to put down discussion in eighteen hundred and thirty-four! and that, too, by the dictum of self-clothed authority! Go, stop the stars in their courses, and puff out the sun with an infant’s breath. . . . Slavery with its robbery of body and soul from birth to death, its exactions of toil unrecompensed, its sunderings of kindred, its frantic orgies of lust, its intellect leveled with the dust, its baptisms of blood, and its legacy of damning horrors to the eternity of the spirit—Slavery, in this land of liberty, and light, and revivals of millennial glory—its days are numbered and well-nigh finished. . . . The nation is shaking off its slumber.
On August 20, 1834, the executive committee of the board of Trustees of Lane Seminary recommended that all student societies be banned, that students be required to submit all public statements for review before their release, and that the faculty and administration exercise their powers to approve the immediate expulsion of any student violating these rules. Traveling in the East, Beecher wrote to ask the executive committee to modify its statement, which was bound, he thought, to exacerbate the division between the students and the administration. He then reassured Lewis Tappan that all would be well as soon as he could get back to Cincinnati and calm everyone down. Tappan was not mollified, nor did he respond in exactly the manner that Beecher had expected: the philanthropist was not worried about his investment, but rather concerned about temporizing with evil. “If you, doctor, were a thorough Anti-Slavery man, how easy it would be for you and Mr. Weld to go on harmoniously,” he hinted. Beecher objected to Tappan’s criticism, insisting that he was a strong abolitionist, and that he, like Weld, “wished to have the colored people raised here.” But, he said, he refused to second the position that “they shall be elevated here.” Beecher’s son-in-law, Calvin Stowe, agreed and sided with the faculty in endorsing Lane’s new regulations, then went home to argue his position with his wife, Lyman’s daughter Harriet. An admirer of Weld, she was less convinced.
In October of 1834, Weld and his followers decided to leave Lane in protest rather than submit to the board’s rules. As a parting barrage, they published “A Statement of the Reasons Which Induced the Students of Lane Seminary to Dissolve Their Connection with That Institution.” The dramatic walkout occurred just after the first week of October. It stunned the community and all but destroyed the seminary. Most of the students, all followers of Weld, enrolled at a small and unknown college in nearby Oberlin, Ohio, where Charles Grandison Finney (who, in the midst of the hubbub, had decided that he should come west after all) served as the head of the theology department. Oberlin invited Weld to join its faculty; he rejected the offer. “The Providence of God has for some time made it plain to me that the Abolition of Slavery and the elevation of the free colored race have intrinsic demands upon me superior to every other cause,” he wrote to the Oberlin trustees.
At the end of 1834, Weld accepted a position as the antislavery agent in Ohio for the American Anti-Slavery Society. His newest friend, former Kentucky and Alabama slaveholder James G. Birney (whom Weld had convinced to free his slaves and become an abolitionist activist), heard of the appointment and silently and privately celebrated Weld’s addition to the movement: “I give him one year to abolitionize all of Ohio,” he wrote in his diary. All through that winter, Weld traveled the back roads of Ohio, crusading on the slavery issue. Wherever he went, he drew large crowds of people intent on meeting the now-famous man and hearing his message. Other former Lane seminarians followed his example, preaching the new “Gospel of Emancipation” in New York and Pennsylvania. Spring came early in 1835 to the Ohio Valley, and still the public turned out in overwhelming numbers to hear Weld speak. Thousands flocked to the abolitionist banner. Weld believed that if recruiting continued a such a rate, the antislavery movement could not fail. All it needed to succeed was one more push, one more season of meetings and organizing.
The great abolition summer of 1835 was to have been the high-water mark of the antislavery movement, but instead it marked the beginning of an antiabolitionist backlash, a reaction not only to fears raised by the “Lane Rebels,” but also to the American Anti-Slavery Society’s mailing program—a political appeal against slavery combined with a fund-raising circular, carefully aimed at one million Americans, including prominent Southerners. The Tappans met with Garrison at the beginning of the year to map out the campaign, which would cost thirty thousand dollars (at the time, an amazing sum for such an enterprise) and be the first of its kind in American history. If successful, the mailing would raise public consciousness about the evils of slavery, swell the society’s national coffers, and bring in thousands of new members, extending the organization’s political reach into grass-roots America. The Lane Debates, the AAS mail campaign, the continuing popularity of antislavery speakers (who seemed to appear out of nowhere to take the pulpit in any small town), and, of course, rumors that Weld, Garrison, and their followers wanted to “amalgamate” blacks and whites all combined to fuel the fires of racial hatred.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Amos Dresser, a participant in the Lane Debates, was chased down, captured, tied up, and given twenty lashes in a public market. Even New England, the heartland of the abolitionist movement, saw its share of hatred and violence. In Canaan, New Hampshire, townsmen hitched one hundred oxen to the interracial Noyes Academy and dragged the building from the town. In Boston, after British abolitionist George Thompson spoke before a large antislavery audience at Julian Hall as a culmination of his American speaking tour, he needed to be protected from a violent lynch mob that had gathered outside. Another crowd disrupted a speech by abolitionist Samuel J. May by throwing eggs at him. Several days later, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier was mistaken for George Thompson and chased with brickbats through the streets of Concord (causing Garrison to decry the town as that “misnamed place”). One week later, Garrison arrived at work in downtown Boston to find that a gallows had been erected on the street outside his office; there was a note attached from “Judge Lynch.” In New York City, rumors spread that assassins had been dispatched from New Orleans to murder Lewis and Arthur Tappan, the brothers whose largesse had helped to spark the abolitionist movement.
In Southern ports, mail sacks were seized and antislavery literature was publicly burned. In Charleston, an antiabolitionist mob (led by Grimké family friend and leading Charleston lawyer Robert Y. Hayne) hanged Garrison and the Tappans in effigy; three thousand Charlestonians cheered the mob on, then danced in lines around the bonfire. In Virginia, Senator (and future President) John Tyler rechristened the greatest abolitionists “Somebody” Garrison and “Mr. Foreigner” Thompson and accused them of “patting the greasy little fellows on their cheeks and giving them most lovely kisses.” The federal government, stunned by the public backlash against the abolitionists, reacted by declaring that abolitionist literature would not be delivered in defiance of “community standards.” President Andrew Jackson called the abolitionists’ tracts “unconstitutional and wicked.”
New England’s well-organized abolitionist community struck back. At the end of the summer, Garrison and his closest colleagues announced that George Thompson would address the first-anniversary meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, to be held on October 14. The city responded by closing its doors: no church or meeting hall could be found to host the event. In desperation, Thompson’s appearance was postponed by one week and moved to the smaller AAS headquarters, on Washington Street, not far from the office of The Liberator, the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper, which Garrison founded and edited. The antiabolitionist mob was ready, its numbers swelled by a handbill circulated through the streets of Boston:
That infamous foreign scoundrel, THOMPSON, will hold forth this afternoon at the Liberator office, No. 48 Washington street. The present is a fair opportunity for the friends of the Union to snake Thompson out! It will be a contest between the Abolitionists and the friends of the Union. A purse of $100 has been raised by a number of patriotic citizens to reward the individual who shall first lay violent hands on Thompson, so that he may be brought to the tar-kettle before dark. Friends of the Union, be vigilant!
Although the street address provided was wrong, the sentiment expressed in the broadside was unmistakable. But the meeting went forward in spite of this threat. On the afternoon of October 21, a crowd formed outside the AAS offices, and a group of antiabolitionists blocked the doors to the organization’s auditorium, which was festooned with abolitionist banners. Mary Parker, president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, with Garrison at her side, opened the meeting with a reading from Scripture, followed by a prayer. As the secretary of the society rose to read her report, Boston’s mayor ran into the hall and urged the women to go home, warning that he could not be responsible for their safety if they stayed. “If you go now, I will protect you,” he announced, raising his voice so it could be heard over the noise of the crowd. The room was cleared, and the abolitionists spilled out into the street, where a cordon of police greeted them.
As the women were escorted up Washington Street by a phalanx of Boston’s constables, Garrison remained in the building, apparently unaware of the danger he faced. His attention was finally caught by the shouts of the mob that had gathered outside the building. Some called for him to be lynched, while others urged their fellows to “turn him a right nigger color with tar.” Garrison decided to make his escape by climbing out a window and onto the roof of a nearby shed. As the mayor was attempting to calm the crowd in the street, someone spotted Garrison, who jumped down from the roof and fled into an alley, chased by an antiabolitionist gang of stevedores, shopkeepers, and sailors from the nearby docks. He ducked into a carpenter’s shop and hid in an upstairs room, behind a door barred by a piece of wood, but it was no barrier against the mob.
Captured, finally, by a group of ruffians, Garrison was tied up with rope and dropped from a window, sacklike, into the arms of the waiting crowd, a humiliating and frightening moment for the proud editor. The police could do little to help him. Fortunately for Garrison, two sympathetic workmen below shielded him from the rain of blows and hustled him back up the alley toward Boston Common and City Hall, where they found a covey of police officers as well as the mayor, Theodore Lyman. Garrison was escorted into Lyman’s office while the police attempted to quiet the growing and angry crowd. Fearing that the officers would be overwhelmed by what was now a lynch mob, Lyman suggested that Garrison be smuggled from his office in disguise. Dressed “in a borrowed coat and pantaloons,” as Garrison’s biographer Henry Meyer would dryly note, Garrison was taken from the building and deposited for his own safety in the Leveritt Street Jail, just a few blocks from his home on Washington Street. He was finally safe, if utterly shaken by his brush with death.
In jail, Garrison took stock of the day’s events. What he had witnessed on the streets of Boston filled him with fear, but he also took pride in knowing that he had succeeded in his goal. Having begun with modest resources and few hopes just four years before, Garrison had become an icon of the abolitionist cause, and his newspaper, The Liberator, was the leading voice of the movement. Garrison now imagined himself at the center of the great crusade, as its great martyred leader. With an eye to posterity, he wrote the following inscription on the jailhouse wall:
William Lloyd Garrison was put into this cell on Wednesday afternoon, October 21, 1835, to save him from the violence of a “respectable and influential” mob, who sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that “all men are created equal” and that all oppression is odious in the sight of God. Hail Columbia! . . .
Everywhere, it seemed, the abolitionist crusade was facing new challenges. Abolitionists had once been viewed as marginal and harmless radicals, but as their influence grew, so did antipathy toward their program. If the revulsion of Northerners was inspired by racial fears, stronger forces were at work in the South. There, not only abolitionists (who were actually very few in number) were suspect; so, too, was anyone viewed as compromising with Northerners, including Angelina and Sarah Grimké’s brother Thomas.
In September 1834, Thomas Grimké went to see his sisters in Philadelphia. His visit was much anticipated. Both Sarah and Angelina had exchanged numerous letters with him; they had fond memories of Thomas from their childhood, and as adults they admired his honesty and intellect. There was indeed much in him to admire. Thomas Smith Grimké was a nationally known politician; unfortunately, he was infamous in the South, where many of his political colleagues looked on him as a traitor. As the state senator representing Charleston, Grimké had stood alone in the South Carolina legislature when, in 1832, it voted to call a statewide convention to consider nullifying the federal “tariff of abominations,” a tax on cotton goods imported into the United States—which hurt Southern cotton growers. South Carolina planters saw the tariff as a Northern attempt to drive down cotton prices and put them out of business. When the delegates of the special convention voted to forbid the collection of duties in the state, Grimké wrote a letter to U.S. Senator John Calhoun, asking him to shift his position and stand with the Union. The letter was reprinted in South Carolina’s leading newspapers and nearly cost Grimké his life.
One night, almost immediately after the publication of his letter to Calhoun, a mob descended on Grimké’s home to call him to account. He appeared, unarmed, on his front porch and proclaimed himself willing to die for the Union. He looked out at the crowd defiantly. During the debate that followed, the would-be lynchers dispersed—not because they were persuaded by Grimké’s arguments, but because they did not have the stomach to hang one of the state’s most prominent politicians. Thomas Grimké remained defiant, and one of the state’s leading Unionists. Hearing of the incident, Angelina wrote to reassure him that though he was in the midst of danger, she was “comforted in believing that my kingdom is not of this world, nor thine either, I trust, beloved brother.” Sarah was more circumspect and more frightened: “My fears respecting you are often prevalent, but I endeavor not to be too anxious,” she confided in a postscript to Angelina’s letter. “The Lord is omnipotent, and although I fear His sword is unsheathed against America, I believe He will remember his own elect, and shield them.”
Thomas calmed his sisters’ fears, telling them that their family’s friends and his own trust in the future would save him from danger. While Charlestonians might disagree on political matters, he said, the ties that bound South Carolinians together could never be broken. The mob that had approached him in the night was not to be feared but rather educated; that was his responsibility, and he took it seriously. Surely, he said, the state would understand the value of compromise and find a way to temper its views. Events proved him right. President Andrew Jackson condemned South Carolina and dispatched warships to enforce the tariff, but at the worst moment of the crisis, Henry Clay intervened and proposed a compromise: the tariff would stay in place for the time being, but it would slowly be reduced until it was eliminated entirely. Clay’s compromise satisfied South Carolina’s secessionists; the crisis passed, and the controversy over Thomas Grimké’s defense of the Union faded.
Thomas stayed with his sisters in Philadelphia for several days. He talked about his involvement in the American Colonization Society and his belief in pacifism. He brought them greetings from the rest of the family and asked about their commitment to their new religion. He took an interest in everything about their lives. Sarah and Angelina approved of his pacifism, but they were blunt in their condemnation of his leadership role in the colonization society. They argued strenuously for immediate and complete emancipation; only that, they said, could wipe away the stain of slavery. Before leaving for Ohio to visit his brother Benjamin, Thomas promised his sisters that he would study the issue. In early October 1834 he traveled west and on his arrival delivered a speech at the Ohio College of Teachers. That same evening, he fell ill with cholera. His condition worsened the next day, and Benjamin was summoned to his bedside. Thomas Grimké died on the morning of October 12, 1834, far from home, just like his father before him. Sarah and Angelina were nearly inconsolable. They wrote a memorial to him and sent it south to be read at his funeral.
It was a season of death for the Grimké sisters. Just weeks before their brother Thomas died, Angelina had suffered the loss of Edward Bettles, a man she believed she was destined to marry. Bettles had been introduced to Angelina shortly after she first arrived in Philadelphia, and he had begun to call on her in 1831. His interest was obvious and reciprocated by her. Their relationship grew, though it was interrupted over the years by a number of disagreements. After Angelina visited Catherine Beecher’s seminary in Hartford, Edward stopped calling on her, apparently disapproving of her plans to leave Philadelphia. In January 1832, however, he resumed his visits, to her great joy. In May 1834, trying to find a way to be close to him, she had agreed to nurse his cousin, who had fallen victim to Philadelphia’s second cholera outbreak in five years. The Quakers were very active in nursing the sick, often placing themselves in great danger. Eventually the epidemic would run its course, but not before taking the lives of more than nine hundred people in the city. Among these was Edward Bettles, who fell ill on September 23, 1834, and died less than a week later.
Bettles’s death had a profound effect on Angelina. Like Sarah, she was now convinced that she would live out her life as a spinster. She stopped writing in her diary and never again mentioned Edward’s name. Sarah did the same with her brother Thomas after he died in Ohio. The future must have seemed like a wasteland to both of them. In late 1834, both women (Sarah was now forty-two, Angelina twenty-nine) were unmarried and estranged from their family, and to make matters worse, both were weary of the obligations that the Fourth and Arch Street Meeting placed on their lives, and angered by the Quakers’ isolation from the rest of the nation. When Angelina asked a member of the Quaker meeting about the religion’s views on slavery, she was told to bring her concerns before the Committee on Suffering. Dissatisfied with that answer, Angelina began to attend abolitionist meetings and to subscribe to anti-slavery publications, including William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. On March 3, 1835, she attended abolitionist George Thompson’s lecture on slavery at Philadelphia’s Presbyterian Church.
Thompson’s speech inspired Angelina, who soon became obsessed with the abolitionist movement. It was an exciting and feverish political time; the whole nation seemed suddenly to be talking about slavery. For Angelina, the Quakers’ position on the issue—or, as she saw it, their silence on the issue—was stifling. She now doubted that her chosen religion was as dedicated to reform as she had once believed. To rid herself of these doubts, and to give herself some time to recover from the death of Edward Bettles, Angelina decided to spend the summer of 1835 with a close friend, Margaret Parker, in Shrewsbury, on the New Jersey shore. Shrewsbury provided a needed respite for her, a place where she could gather her thoughts, plan out her future, and talk things over with a trusted friend.
Angelina continued to read antislavery publications and spoke of the issue often with Margaret Parker. She tried to interest her sister in it as well, but that was a difficult proposition: while Sarah fervently opposed slavery, she was concerned that the elders of the Fourth and Arch Street Meeting would disapprove of Angelina’s views. Angelina did not want to disappoint Sarah, and she, too, feared the reaction of other Quakers to her new interest in the abolitionist movement. But she wanted to join the national crusade. She believed passionately in the abolitionist cause and admired men who, like Garrison and her brother Thomas, stood against mobs and spoke against public convention on behalf of what was right. Only Sarah, and her concern for Sarah, kept Angelina silent. Still, she railed against her prison of conscience in the pages of her diary: “What to do? What to do?” she asked herself over and over.
In the pages of The Liberator, Angelina read of the antiabolitionist riots sweeping the North and of the burning of abolitionist literature in Charleston and across the South. Even before nearly losing his life in “The Boston Riot” (as he would later officially name it), Garrison penned an editorial in The Liberator condemning mob violence. He pleaded that George Thompson be allowed a fair hearing; he appealed for public calm and urged the people of Boston, where the fires of liberty in America had first been lit, to defend a man’s right to speak in public.
Angelina was overcome by Garrison’s eloquence; she had to do something, she felt, to show her support. A private letter from her might help the cause, she believed, and it could be sent without jeopardizing her position with the Philadelphia Quakers. She immediately sat down to write out her views. Addressing her letter to Garrison himself, she summed up her background and experiences as a daughter of respectable slaveholders and urged him on in his crusade. She supported the abolitionists, she said, because slavery was evil, a sin. She condemned violence and praised the courage of the abolitionists. She had never done anything like this before, but now, fired by conviction, she poured out her feelings. Hailing Garrison as “Respected Friend,” she wrote:
I can hardly express to thee the deep and solemn interest with which I have viewed the violent proceedings of the last few weeks. Although I expected opposition, I was not prepared for it so soon—it took me by surprise—and I greatly feared abolitionists would be driven back in the first outset, and thrown into confusion. Under these feelings I was urged to read thy Appeal to the citizens of Boston. Judge then, what were my feelings on finding that my fears were utterly groundless, and that thou stood firm in the midst of storm, determined to suffer and to die, rather than yield one inch. . . . The ground on which you stand is holy ground; never, never surrender it. If you surrender it, the hope of the slave is extinguished. . . . If persecution is the means which God has ordained for the accomplishment of this great end, EMANCIPATION; then . . . I feel as if I could say, LET IT COME; for it is my deep, solemn deliberate conviction, that this is a cause worth dying for. . . .
Garrison was overwhelmed by Angelina’s letter and published it in the August 30 issue of The Liberator. In a short prefatory essay, he introduced its author as the sister of “the late Thomas Smith Grimké of Charleston.” He predicted that it would be reprinted and passed from hand to hand. Several weeks later, a friend told Angelina that her status as a Quaker was in danger and that she must immediately repudiate the letter and reject the teachings of Garrison; The Liberator’s editor was a disreputable fanatic, her Quaker friend insisted. Angelina refused to take either action and looked to her sister for support. But even Sarah seemed to turn against her, telling her that the letter had been ill conceived and would bring her nothing but grief. Seeing the trouble she had caused, Angelina despaired. “To have the name of Grimké associated with that of the despised Garrison seemed like bringing disgrace upon my family, not myself alone,” she would later write. “I cannot describe the anguish of my soul. Nevertheless, I could not blame the publication of the letter, nor would I have recalled it if I could.”
Angelina did not know it then, but even as she suffered public condemnation, other forces were at work. Within the month, several religious publications reprinted her letter, including the influential New York Evangelist. The outpouring of support was obvious in successive issues of The Liberator, where letters from the abolitionist community praised Angelina’s courage and called her the new light of the movement. One reader maintained that her letter had done more for the cause of abolitionism than all the speeches of the movement’s leaders combined, and indeed, its impact was considerable. In the North, Angelina Grimké’s letter was read and reread as testimony to slavery’s brutality and as a sign of hope that other Southerners might one day, like her, come to their senses. In mid-October, Garrison published the letter in a volume with his own article on the Boston Riot and an abolitionist poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. He called the compilation Slavery and the Boston Riot.
Angelina Grimké was now famous: against her will, she had been thrust to the forefront of the abolitionist cause. But she welcomed the attention. Six years before, while still in Charleston, she had written one of her most telling and most uncomfortably personal diary entries about her hopes for her life. It was on the same day that she witnessed a slave woman threatened by two young white men:
. . . It seemed as though the very exercises I was suffering under were preparing me for future usefulness to them [South Carolina’s slaves]; and this,—hope, I can scarcely call it, for my very soul trembled at the solemn thought of such a work being placed in my feeble and unworthy hands,—this idea was the means of reconciling me to suffer, and causing me to feel something of a willingness to pass through any trials, if I could only be the means of exposing the cruelty and injustice which was practiced in the institution of oppression, and of bringing to light the hidden things of darkness, of revealing the secrets of iniquity and abolishing its present regulations. . . .
After the publication of her letter, Angelina defended herself to Sarah. “I remember how often, in deep and solemn prayer, I had told my Heavenly Father I was willing to suffer anything if I could only aid the great cause of emancipation.” Now, in the waning months of 1835—in an environment where abolitionists were being dragged from their homes and beaten, where their literature was being burned, and where the lives and homes of free blacks were being threatened with destruction—her prayers were answered.