Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,100

This is the grave of Theodore Weld.

Born in 1803 in Hampton, Connecticut, Weld came from old Puritan stock and had at least some money, with his father a pretty big landholder. His father wanted the kid to pay for his own education so he made Weld manage some land to put himself through Phillips Academy. But he didn’t get that much formal education. He had bad eyes, so he left in 1822. He was a smart kid and decided to become a lecturer, which was a profession at this time since entertainment options weren’t exactly that advanced. He believed himself an expert in mnemonics, or how to improve your memory, and people wanted these tricks. So he traveled the nation for the next three years lecturing. This got him to the South, where he saw slavery. That changed his life. He was horrified and disgusted.

It took Weld a little bit of time before taking his horror of slavery and turning it into acton. Something else had to happen and that was the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. By the late 1820s, Weld was taking some classes at Hamilton College in upstate New York, pushing the school to make manual labor part of the educational program, already a big thing among some reformers. Well, Charles Grandison Finney was nearby and preaching and Weld heard him and came under his spell of evangelism. But this was a very different kind of evangelicalism than what are used too today. Rather than damning everyone to Hell and waiting for Christ to come and smite your enemies, this was about perfecting humanity through reform. It was a tremendously optimistic movement and it attracted a lot of people who saw the massive changes of the early 19th century and saw them as the harbinger for something new and great.

This was the kind of world Weld could believe in. He soon applied it to slavery. He became one of the first major abolitionist speakers, right there with people such as William Lloyd Garrison. He soon married Angelina Grimké, who fell in love with him after seeing his powerful two hour speech “What is Slavery?” Unfortunately, after they married in 1838, she largely disappeared from the public eye. It’s not clear if Weld had a traditional view of marriage despite everything or if her health declined or if this was just by her choice.

Anyway, even before meeting Grimké, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, both also engaged heavily in the evangelical world that combined anti-slavery politics with a desire to renew ourselves through manual labor, hired Weld to go around speaking about these ideas. That meant a lot more time in the South and a lot more experience seeing slavery firsthand. Now, knowing Garrison and other abolitionists, he was able to channel his disgust into action. He helped found Lane Institution in Cincinnati, which brought some of these ideas into the light. Lane turned into a radical place in the middle of a very pro-slavery city, so it was really controversial, even if north of the Ohio River. He wasn’t associated with Lane for long, but he helped cement its reputation. In fact, he was fired because his radicalism, including socially integrated gatherings, threatened violence and was too far for even many other abolitionists.

So in 1834, Weld became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Among those he played a key role in converting to anti-slavery causes through his speeches and organizing are Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, and James G. Birney, whose third party anti-slavery campaign in 1844 threw the election to James Polk, who then proceeded to steal half of Mexico to expand slavery. So not always totally thought through here. Lyman Beecher, better known for co-founding the American Temperance Society than for anti-slavery work, said that Weld’s words were “logic on fire.” He has been called “the most mobbed man in America” because pro-slavery thugs would come to his talks and throw stuff at him–sometimes tomatoes or eggs, but sometimes rocks.

In 1836, Weld’s voice gave out. I can only imagine how hard it was to speak to large crowds without amplification. It never seems to have fully recovered, or at least enough to give lectures. So Weld went into writing about slavery. He and the Grimké sisters got a house in New Jersey and did the research to write American Slavery as It Is in 1839, which was effectively a compilation of news stories about slavery to describe to readers what slavery was really like.

This was important. Very few Americans traveled at this time so not many northerners had actually seen what slavery is. It’s like hearing about the horrible violence Israelis commit in Palestine and you are like, wow that’s bad, but then you see a speaker from Palestine who says, no you don’t understand, let me describe what’s really going on in detail. It’s a whole other level of powerful to put it in your face like that, moving it from abstract to something more concrete, even if you still haven’t been there. I make this comparison because I recently saw a Palestinian speaker on campus talking about reproductive choices in Palestine and what this is really like now. I was watching this and thinking, OK, this is what seeing an abolitionist speaker like Weld would have been like in the 1840s.

When we think about Grimké disappearing from the public eye and wonder why one of the great women in American history got quiet after marriage, it’s worth noting that Weld started getting quiet with her. He remained a reasonably public figure in the 1840s, though mostly working behind the scenes. In fact, he seems to have preferred this, generally avoiding the spotlight, often not signing his writings, and this sort of thing. He assisted John Quincy Adams in fighting the gag rule around anti-slavery petitions in Congress. He worked with Birney on Liberty Party political campaigns. But by 1853, when Weld was offered a position running a school in New Jersey, he was happy to take it. Grimké helped him here and they ran schools there and then later in Massachusetts into the late 1860s.

Weld remained quite unknown later in his life. He lived forever, dying only in 1895, at the age of 91.

Theodore Weld is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Boston, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other abolitionists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Seems like just yesterday that this series hit 2,000 posts and now we are at 2,100. A good one to note another minor milestone. Still a lot of major Americans out there to profile, so feel free to help keep this series going! David Ruggles is in Norwich, Connecticut and Harriet Forten Purvis is in Philadelphia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.