Arthur Tappan in Abolitionists
Arthur Tappan (1786-1865) was an American abolitionist from Northampton, Massachusetts. He became very wealthy from the dry goods business that he ran with his brother and partner, Lewis, in New York City.
Abolition became one of Tappan's chief causes, and his courage and generosity often made him the target of hostile Northern anti-abolitionist mobs. But his commitment to the cause remained steadfast. When he supported white pastor Simeon S. Jocelyn's proposal for a Black college in New Haven, Connecticut in 1831, local residents stoned his house on Temple Street to demonstrate their opposition to the plan.
In 1832, Tappan even financed William Lloyd Garrison's Thoughts on African Colonization, an attack on the American Colonization Society. With Tappan's support, the pamphlet gained a wide circulation, reaching as far west as Ohio.
He also organized the first state Anti-Slavery Society in New York and was then elected the first president of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, the first national abolitionist organization.
When the AAS mailed out some 385,000 inflammatory pamphlets to the South in 1835, Southern governments put a price on Tappan's head. In East Feliciana, Louisiana, and Mount Meigs, Alabama, he was worth $50,000, while New Orleans offered $100,000 for his delivery.
Yikes.
He split with William Lloyd Garrison in 1840 and helped organize the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, where he also served as president. The rupture came because Garrison's followers were more radical than the Tappans; Garrisonians wanted a new government that forbade slavery from the start, and they considered the United States Constitution to be a proslavery document that was also illegal because it denied African Americans their freedom.
The Tappans pursued a more moderate route that led to the emergence of the Liberty Party, which they founded along with Theodore Dwight Weld, in 1840. Garrison scorned this sort of political action as futile, but the Tappans believed it could work. The Liberty Party lasted eight years and influenced many local elections where legislators were persuaded to adopt antislavery platforms. When it dissolved in 1848, many of the former members joined up with the Free Soil Party, which was then absorbed into the Republican Party in 1854.