Theodore Dwight Weld

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Theodore Dwight Weld
American Slavery as It Is
Spouse	Angelina Grimké ​ ​ (m. 1838; died 1879)​
Children	3
Signature

Theodore Dwight Weld (November 23, 1803 – February 3, 1895) was one of the architects of the American

According to Lyman Beecher, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Weld was "as eloquent as an angel, and as powerful as thunder."^[2]: 323 His words were "logic on fire".^[3]

In 1950, Weld was described as being "totally unknown to most Americans".^[4]: v

His obscurity was of his own choosing. Weld would never accept an office of authority or honor in any antislavery organization. He refused to speak at antislavery conventions or anniversaries, or even to attend them if he could avoid it. He shunned the cities, and chose to labor in the country districts, where newspapers were few, and his activities were seldom reported except by abolition journals. His writings were published anonymously, and he would seldom allow the content of his speeches or his letters from the field to appear in print at all.^[4]: vi

Early life

Weld was born in

In the winter of 1827, he and his brother Charles worked on a whaling vessel in Labrador.^[4]: 16

Later in 1827, abandoning Hamilton on Stuart's recommendation, he enrolled in the new

Weld was described thus by James Fairchild, who knew him from when they were students together at Oberlin (of which Fairchild would later be President):

Among these students was Theodore D. Weld, a young man of surpassing eloquence and logical powers, and of a personal influence even more fascinating than his eloquence. I state the impression which I had of him as a boy, and it may seem extravagant, but I have seen crowds of bearded men held spell-bound by his power for hours together, and for twenty evenings in succession.^[16]: 321

In an editorial comment in The Liberator, presumably by its editor Garrison, "Weld is destined to be one of the great men not of America merely, but of the world. His mind is full of strength, proportion, beauty, and majesty. ...[In his writing] there is indubitable evidence of intellectual grandeur and moral power."^[17]

In his reminiscences of that period Dr. Beecher observed:

Weld was a genius. ...In the estimation of the class, he was president. He took the lead of the whole institution. The young men had, many of them, been under his care, and they thought he was a god. We never quarreled, however.^[16]: 321

In a completely different forum, William Garrison said that in a convention of antislavery "agents", who travelled from town to town giving abolitionist lectures and setting up new local anti-slavery societies, "Weld was the central luminary around which they all revolved".^[18]: 23

His future wife Angelina Grimké said in 1836, when she first laid eyes on him and heard him speak for two hours on "What is slavery?", that "I never heard so grand & beautiful an exposition of the dignity & nobility of man in my life".^[18]: 83

Manual labor and education agent

His reputation as a speaker had reached New York, and in 1831, at the age of 28, Weld was called there by the philanthropists Lewis and Arthur Tappan. He declined their offer of a ministerial position, saying he felt himself unprepared. Since he was "a living, breathing, and eloquently-speaking exhibit of the results of manual-labor-with-study,"^[19]: 42 the brothers then created, so as to employ Weld, the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions [non-religious schools], which promptly hired him as its "general agent" and sent him on a factfinding and speaking tour.^[4]: 25 (The Society never carried out any activities except hiring Weld, hosting some of his lectures, and publishing his report.)

Weld carried out this commission during the calendar year 1832. His 100-page report on his activities, accompanied by 20 pages of letters received, is dated January 10, 1833.^[20]: 100 It received a review of 21 pages in the Quarterly Christian Spectator,^[21] and an abridgement was soon published.^[22]

In it he states that "In prosecuting the business of my agency, I have traveled during the year four thousand five hundred and seventy-five miles [7,364 km]; in public conveyances [boat and stagecoach], 2,630 [4,230 km]; on horseback, 1,800 [2,900 km]; on foot, 145 [233 km]. I have made two hundred and thirty-six public addresses."^[20]: 10 He was nearly killed when a high river swept away the coach he was in.^{[20]: vi [15][4]: 3–5}

Weld had also been commissioned to find a site for a great national manual labor institution where training for the western ministry could be provided for poor but earnest young men who had dedicated their lives to the home missionary cause in the "vast valley of the Mississippi." Such an institution would undoubtedly attract many of Weld's associates who had been disappointed in the failure to establish theological instruction at the Oneida Institute. Cincinnati was the logical location. Cincinnati was the focal center of population and commerce in the Ohio valley.^[19]: 43

During his year as a manual labor agent, Weld scouted land, found the location for, and recruited the faculty for the

Some of his travel was in slave states. What he saw there, together with what he read in Garrison's newspaper The Liberator (1831) and book Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), turned him into a committed abolitionist. He first worked, in 1833, at convincing the other students at Lane that immediatism, ending slavery completely and immediately, was the only solution and what God wanted. Successful, he next, with the Tappans' connivance, sought to bring immediatism to a larger audience. He announced that the public was invited to a series of public debates, over 18 evenings in February 1834, on abolition versus colonization. In fact, the debates were not debates at all, as no one spoke in favor of colonization. They were instead presentations of the horrors of American slavery, together with an exposé of the inadequacy of the American Colonization Society's project of helping free black people migrate to Africa and its intent to protect, rather than eliminate, slavery. At the end, the audience's views were highly supportive of immediate abolition.^{[citation needed]}

The debates were then local events. However, during the Seminary's summer vacation of 1834, some of the students started teaching classes for, and in other ways working to help, the 1500 free African Americans of Cincinnati, with whom the students mixed freely. Given the pro-slavery sentiment in Cincinnati, many found his behavior unacceptable. After rumored threats of violence against the Seminary, the trustees passed rules abolishing the seminary's colonization and abolition societies and forbidding any further discussion of slavery, even at mealtimes. Weld was threatened with expulsion. A professor was fired. What happened was the mass resignation of almost all of Lane's student body, along with a sympathetic trustee,

Anti-slavery activity

Starting in 1834, Weld was an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, recruiting and training people to work for the cause, making converts of James G. Birney, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry Ward Beecher. Weld became one of the leaders of the antislavery movement, working with the Tappan brothers, New York philanthropists James G. Birney and Gamaliel Bailey, and the Grimké sisters. "Public awareness of abolition [in New York State] reached its peak with the activities of Theodore Weld from February to early July, 1836."^[13]: 151

In 1836, Weld discontinued lecturing when he lost his voice, and was appointed editor of its books and pamphlets by the American Anti-Slavery Society.^[23] Among the books he edited was James Thome and J. Horace Kimball's Emancipation in the West Indies : a six months' tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the year 1837.^[26]: 261

In 1838, Weld married Angelina Grimké. He was a strong abolitionist and women's rights advocate; at the marriage there were two ministers, one white and one black. He renounced any power or legal authority over his wife, other than that produced by love. Two former slaves of the Grimkés' father were among the guests.^{[18]: 317–318} Weld and Grimké would go on to have three children: Charles, Theodore, and Sarah.

Their first home as newlyweds was in

Weld was the son of Ludovicus Weld and Elizabeth (Clark) Weld. His brother Ezra Greenleaf Weld, a famous daguerreotype photographer, was also involved with the abolitionist movement (see Fugitive Slave Convention).

A member of the Weld family of New England, Weld shares a common ancestry with Bill Weld, Tuesday Weld, and others. This branch of the family never achieved the wealth of their Boston-based kin.^[28][29]

Weld died at his home in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, aged 91, on February 3, 1895.^[7][30]

Writings

• Weld, Theodore D. (1833). First annual report of the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, including the report of their general agent, Theodore D. Weld. January 28, 1833. New York: S. W. Benedict & Co.
• Weld, Theodore D. (June 14, 1834). "Discussion at Lane Seminary [letter to James Hall]".
  newspapers.com
  .
• Weld, Theodore D. (1837). "5". The Bible Against Slavery. An inquiry into the Patriarchal and Mosaic systems on the subject of Human Rights (3rd, revised ed.). New York:
  American Anti-slavery Society. Weld received a published reply.^[31]
• Weld, Theodore D. (1838). The Power of Congress over the District of Columbia. New York.
• American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (with the Grimké sisters; 1839)
• Weld, Theodore D. (1840). Persons held to service, fugitive slaves, &c. Boston: New England Anti-Slavery Tract Association. An excerpt, "Slavery a System of Inherent Cruelty", appeared on pp. 127–140 of the Boston, 1850, edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth : a northern slave, emancipated from bodily servitude by the state of New York, in 1828 : with a portrait.
• [Weld, Theodore D.] (1841). Slavery and the internal slave trade in the United States of North America; being replies to questions transmitted by the committee of the British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society, for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade throughout the world. Presented to the General Anti-slavery Convention, held in London, June 1840. London: British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society.
• Weld, Theodore D. (1885). In Memory: Angelina Grimké Weld. Boston.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

Further reading

• Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844: Vols. 1 & 2.
  ISBN 0-8446-1055-0
  .
• Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld & the Dilemma of Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
  ISBN 0-19-503061-3
  .
• Gilbert Hobbs Barnes. The Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830–1844. With an Introduction by William G. McLoughlin. New York: Harcourt, 1964.
• Nelson, Robert K. (Spring 2004). "'The forgetfulness of sex': Devotion and Desire in the Courtship Letters of Angelina Grimké and Theodore Dwight Weld".
  S2CID 144261184
  .

External links

• Media related to Theodore Dwight Weld at Wikimedia Commons
• Works by or about Theodore Dwight Weld at Wikisource

Wikiquote has quotations related to Theodore Dwight Weld.

• Columbia 2003 Encyclopedia Article
• Theodore Weld: Crusader for Freedom (without footnotes)