Ohio History Journal

VERNON L. VOLPE

 

Theodore Dwight Weld's

Antislavery Mission in Ohio

 

Since the pioneering work of Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L.

Dumond, Theodore Dwight Weld has been a favorite subject of study

for historians interested in the religious roots of the antislavery

movement. Son of a Connecticut Congregational minister, Weld was

finally converted to evangelical reform in 1826 by the great New York

evangelist, Charles Grandison Finney, whose controversial "new

measures" provoked so much debate among Yankee Presbyterians and

Congregationalists. The evangelical commitment moved many to help

uplift the slave, but Finney sought souls more than converts to

abolitionism, thereby leaving inspiration for the antislavery crusade to

Weld, considered by Barnes and Dumond the movement's "man of

power, the greatest individual factor in its triumph."1

Weld has been given particular credit for the expansion of evangel-

ical abolitionism to the antebellum midwest. After instigating the

famous dispute at Lane Seminary over the discussion of immediate

abolition, Weld and his handpicked disciples tramped Ohio in 1834-36

to spread God's antislavery word. Indeed, Weld and his band of

followers preached the antislavery gospel so well that Barnes and

Dumond went so far as to claim that the area of Weld's antislavery

agency in Ohio, western Pennsylvania and New York, "and the

regional chart of antislavery societies in the West of 1837 coincide."²

Written in the Barnes and Dumond tradition, Benjamin Thomas's

biography of Weld further suggests that by 1836 the antislavery agent's

 

 

 

 

Vernon L. Volpe is Assistant Professor of History at Kearney State College.

 

1. Barnes and Dumond, eds. Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke

Weld and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844, vol. 1 (American Historical Association, 1934;

reprint edition, Gloucester, Mass., 1965), xix. Theodore Smith had mentioned Weld's

role in The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest (New York, 1897), 11-13, 16,

23.

2. Barnes and Dumond, Weld Letters, 1, xvii-xviii. See also Gilbert Hobbs Barnes,

The Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (American Historical Association, 1833; reprint

edition, New York, 1964).

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6                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

efforts helped give Ohio the largest number of antislavery societies in

the nation.³

Theodore Weld was partly responsible for the conversion to his

brand of immediatism of Liberty party presidential candidate James G.

Birney, antislavery Whig Congressman Joshua Giddings, many of the

students and faculty of Lane Seminary, and uncounted others. Weld's

antislavery tracts The Bible Against Slavery and American Slavery As

It Is helped inspire many other critics of the Southern system of labor,

including Harriet Beecher Stowe.⁴ Such an amazing and productive life

certainly deserves the scholarly attention it has attracted.

Weld's impressive achievements notwithstanding, too much empha-

sis can be placed on his individual contributions. Recently Robert

Abzug has written a remarkable biography of Weld, but he tells a story

primarily of one man's lifelong search for personal fulfillment through

a reform career, one that was often affected by Weld's sometimes

strained relations with his remote father.⁵ Yet Weld moved in a cultural

environment rich in religious and reform activity. Even Gilbert Barnes,

after relating Weld's heroic story, finally admitted that the antislavery

crusade was "a movement of communities rather than of individuals."6

Despite the tendency to envision Weld's antislavery mission in Ohio

as the dramatic high point of his reform career, scholars have not really

studied his journeys in detail and have likewise failed to analyze the

longer-range consequences of his mission. Closer examination of

Weld's Ohio travels reveals more important considerations than his

own preeminence as an antislavery revivalist. Special attention should

be devoted to Weld's startling yet sometimes divisive impact on the

Ohio communities he visited. Rather than merely awakening the

consciences of pious individuals, the young evangelist stirred the

hearts and convictions of entire communities of believers to the new

doctrines. Not surprisingly, this occurred most often in communities

where hostility to slavery was already present and where those of New

England origins were ready to receive the evangelical message. Even

as he stimulated antislavery sentiment, however, Weld's penetrating

lectures often undermined the deceptive calm prevailing in many Ohio

 

 

 

3. Theodore Weld: Crusader for Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ, 1950), 111.

4. For Weld's influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe see Stowe's A Key to Uncle

Tom's Cabin (reprint edition, Port Washington, NY, 1968). Weld's The Bible and Slavery

was first published in 1837 and his American Slavery as It Is in 1839 by the American

Anti-Slavery Society.

5. Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New

York, 1980).

6. Barnes, Anti-Slavery Impulse, 83.

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Weld's Anti-Slavery Mission in Ohio                       7

communities, thereby stirring up intense opposition while also sowing division among those church communities he sought to awaken to abolitionism. An experienced traveling lecturer who had already won converts to the benefits of good memory, manual labor, and temperance, Weld did not simply wander from town to town seeking scattered converts. His letters and instructions to other antislavery agents indicate that he planned his mission well; he would have been a poor Finney student had he not devised more effective ways to win converts to the cause. Barnes and Dumond stressed the antiabolitionist violence Weld faced as the "most mobbed man in the United States," but even Weld was not foolhardy enough to enter areas where he might face more than brickbats and taunts. The antislavery preacher selected those places where the abolition cause had at least a few "friends" who could protect him from antiabolitionist fury. In fact, Weld's instructions directed him to search out friends of the cause and to seek help from ministers, the "hinges of community."7 Weld later advised Birney that if he could not establish his antislavery press in Cincinnati, he should in the Hillsboro area whose "strong Abolition Influence" would act as     7. Barnes and Dumond, Weld Letters, I, xxiii; American Anti-Slavery Society to Weld, February 20, 1834; Weld to J. F. Robinson, May 1, 1836, in ibid., 124-28, 295-98.

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8                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

his "body guard."⁸ Often, in the familiar manner of itinerant evange-

lists, Weld sought the pulpit of a supportive local preacher. The

antislavery messenger consequently took care to trace his journey

through those areas where friends of the slave were already well

established.

Late in 1834 Weld began his Ohio campaign appropriately enough in

the Ohio River town of Ripley, the home of the Reverend John Rankin.

An old friend of the slave who had fled the South, Rankin had

continued his assault on slavery from his Presbyterian pulpit, penning

an influential early antislavery work, Letters on American Slavery, and

offering his help to black fugitives from across the river.⁹ Leaving

Ripley, Weld continued on to West Union, where the Reverend Dyer

Burgess had long been preaching and writing for the cause of the slave.

Weld described Burgess as "the oldest Abolitionist and Anti

Colonizationist of whom I have any knowledge." Although Robert

Abzug notes that Weld considered West Union "one of the most

hopeless places for anti-slavery effort," actually this was one of several

southern Ohio communities where antislavery societies had already

been founded. 10

From West Union Weld proceeded north to Greenfield, the home of

Samuel Crothers, another antislavery Presbyterian minister. Now

within the vicinity of the Paint Valley Antislavery Society, the largest

and one of the oldest societies in the northwest, Weld admitted he saw

no reason to form new antislavery meetings in this well-tilled field.

Weld sometimes spoke to already existing antislavery societies and did

not place a high priority on forming new ones, preferring that local

citizens take the initiative.11

 

 

 

8. Weld to Birney, September 26, August 19, 1835, in Dwight L. Dumond, Letters of

James Gillespie Birney, 1831-1857, vol. I (American Historical Association, 1938:

reprint edition, Gloucester, Mass., 1966), 239-40, 246-49.

9. John Rankin, Letters on American Slavery, Addressed to Mr. Thomas Rankin,

Merchant at Middlebrook, Augusta Co., Va. (Newburyport 1824; reprint edition,

Westport, CT, 1970); Review of the Statement of the Faculty of Lane Seminary, In

Relation to the Recent Difficulties in that Institution (Ripley, Ohio, 1835); An Address to

the Churches; In Relation to Slavery (Medina, Ohio, 1836).

10. Weld to Birney, December 11, 1834; Weld to Birney, February 16, 1835, in

Dumond, Birney Letters, 1, 153-56, 180-82 James A. Thome to Weld, December 15,

1834; Weld to Elizur Wright, Jr., March 2, 1835, in Barnes and Dumond, Weld Letters,

1, 180-81, 205-08; Abzug, Weld, 124; Alice Dana Adams, The Neglected Period of

Anti-Slavery in America, 1808-1831 (Boston, 1908), 265-66.

11. Robert Price, "The Ohio Anti-Slavery Convention of 1836," Ohio State Archae-

ological and Historical Quarterly, 45 (April, 1936), 173-88, incorrectly lists the Paint

Valley Society in the northern Ohio county of Portage, thus diminishing the importance

of antislavery in southern Ohio.

• 4
 

Weld's Anti-Slavery Mission in Ohio                                  9

 

For the first third of his journey Weld had been within the bounds of

the Chillicothe Presbytery, the only ecclesiastical organization in Ohio

that had formally denounced the "sin" of slavery. (After Weld's

mission the Synod of Western Reserve in 1835 would also condemn the

"sin" of slavery.)¹² Rankin, Burgess, and Crothers were the leading

antislavery spirits within this presbytery and in years to come contin-

ued to serve the antislavery religious sentiments of their flock. While

they welcomed Weld's abolitionism, however, these Presbyterians of

primarily Southern stock did not embrace his new school theology;

many remained conservative in theology even while far ahead of others

in abolitionism.¹³ Weld might have expected to encounter violent

antiabolitionism in Ohio's southern colonies; instead his carefully

selected route brought him to the doors of other antislavery pioneers

where community sentiment was not completely hostile to the unfa-

miliar evangelical preacher.

Along the National Road in eastern Ohio, Weld again traveled a

well-blazed antislavery path. At Mount Pleasant and St. Clairsville,

Charles Osborn and Benjamin Lundy had led a Quaker movement

against slavery since before 1820. Here Osborn had published his

Philanthropist and Lundy for a time his Genius of Universal Emanci-

pation; they had also formed the Antislavery Union Humane Society.14

As with the Presbyterians of southwestern Ohio, Weld succeeded in

reawakening the long dormant antislavery sentiment of these pious

Quakers. The evangelist also found some response among those of

New England origins who had settled in the bustling towns along the

National Road. ¹⁵

As Robert Abzug has shown, at this point in his career Weld sought

to cultivate an image as a "backwoodsman," though he had been born

to an historically prominent New England family.¹⁶ Preferring to labor

 

12. Victor B. Howard, "The Antislavery Movement in the Presbyterian Church"

(Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1961), 15, 53-54.

13. Edward B. Welsh, "Chillicothe: A Distinguished Rural Presbytery," Journal of

the Presbyterian Historical Society, 23 (September, 1945), 137-42; Welsh, "Wrestling

with Human Values: The Slavery Years," in They Seek a Country: The American

Presbyterians, Some Aspects, ed. Gaius Jackson Slosser (New York 1955), 210-33;

Richard F. O'Dell, "The Early Anti-Slavery Movement in Ohio" (Ph.D. dissertation,

University of Michigan, 1948), 371.

14. Merton L. Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (Urbana,

111., 1966), 17-23, 45-47; Ruth Anna Nuermberger, Charles Osborn in the Anti-Slavery

Movement (Columbus 1937); Adams, Neglected Period, 24-28, 46, 58-62, 83, 250.

15. Weld to Birney, August 4, 1835, in Dumond, Birney Letters, I, 227-29.

16. Abzug, Weld, 3-4, 124. Weld might be considered one of David Donald's Yankee

reformers suffering "status anxiety" with the growth of the new capitalist elite. Yet Weld

did manage to surpass the success of his troubled father Ludivocus, thus fulfilling one of

the complaints of Donald's critics, that the sons' careers often surpassed that of their

• 5
 

10                                                      OHIO HISTORY

 

in towns and villages, Weld shunned the cities and doubted their

promise as fertile ground for antislavery action. He advised his

followers to "let the great cities alone, they must be burned down by

back fires."17 Weld thus shared the discomfort many nineteenth-

century reformers felt toward the burgeoning urban communities of

modern America.

Partly as a self-fulfilling prophecy, then, northwestern abolitionism

would be strongest in rural villages and crossroads towns. When the

abolition gospel came to the growing commercial centers it was

typically carried by preachers or agents who usually plowed country

fields, and who found support among the transplanted sons of rural

New England or the northwest. For those southern Ohio communities

founded by antislavery emigrants from the slave South, the abolitionist

commitment reaffirmed the community bond that was based on

opposition to slavery. For Yankee colonies in the West it established an

emotional link with the mother region and helped distinguish trans-

planted New Englanders from other cultural groups streaming into the

northwest.

Because Weld deliberately avoided the cities and concentrated on

the smaller towns, his mission consequently carried that much more

impact for the communities he visited. Since Weld also selected

communities where the cause had at least some friends, he was assured

a measure of success. Still primarily personally oriented communities,

the towns Weld visited were also much more likely to suffer bitter

personal disputes as a result of abolitionism's new measures and

message that some found disturbing.

The climax of Weld's Ohio agency came on the Western Reserve, an

area of northeastern Ohio whose New England offspring had not yet

arisen to the evils of slavery. A cultural region resembling New York's

"burned-over" district, the Reserve also knew repeated waves of

religious excitement and thus many of its transplanted Yankees wel-

 

fathers. Donald, "Toward a Reconsideration of Abolitionists," in Lincoln Reconsidered:

Essays on the Civil War Era (New York, 1956). For criticism of Donald's approach see

Robert A. Skotheim, "A Note on Historical Method: David Donald's 'Toward a

Reconsideration of Abolitionists'," Journal of Southern History, 25 (August, 1959),

356-65.

17. Weld to Lewis Tappan, April 5, 1836, in Barnes and Dumond, Weld Letters, I,

286-89. For the rural origins of evangelical religion and abolitionism, see David M.

Ludlum, Social Ferment in Vermont, 1791-1859 (New York, 1939), 146: Whitney R.

Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic

Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (New York, 1950), 65-75; Charles C. Cole, Jr.,

The Social Ideas of the Northern Evangelists, 1826-1860 (New York, 1954), 80, 195. For

urban middle-class evangelism see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeepers' Millennium: Society

and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York, 1978).

• 6
 

Weld's Anti-Slavery Mission in Ohio                                  11

 

corned Weld's antislavery message.18 Yet Barnes may have exagger-

ated Weld's impact on the Reserve; it is not entirely clear whether

Weld converted the Reserve, or the Reserve converted Weld. Encour-

aged partly by William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, Charles Storrs,

Beriah Green, and Elizur Wright, Jr., professors at Western Reserve

College in Hudson, as well as much of the student body, began to

discuss the evils of slavery before Weld's antislavery agency.19 Indeed,

Weld's visit to the college in October 1832 may have deepened his own

antislavery commitment, though he had already begun to consider

slavery's evils (helped along by his friend Charles Stuart) and the

evangelist was ripe for still another conversion to embrace a new

reform mission. The debate among the students, faculty, and trustees

at the college thus may have forced Weld finally to embrace immediate

abolition.²⁰

At the same time that Western Reserve College completed Weld's

conversion to immediatism, Storrs, Green, and Wright no doubt

intensified their own convictions in response to the earnest Weld.

These pioneer Reserve abolitionists helped form the Western Reserve

Anti-Slavery Society at Hudson in 1833, after Weld's initial visit but

one year before the advent of his antislavery mission.21 Moreover,

Weld's exposure to the dispute at Western Reserve College may have

influenced his strategy during the ensuing debate at Lane Seminary

that effectively launched his antislavery career.

Although some at Hudson had accepted the abolitionist message

before Weld's mission, the remainder of the Reserve nonetheless still

needed to be converted. Weld began to make inroads in that direction;

at Oberlin he spoke for twenty successive nights and won a large part

of the community to abolitionism.²² Frequently, however, Weld divert-

 

 

18. A. O. Fuller, "Early Annals of the Austinburg Church," Papers of the Ohio

Church History Society, 10 (1895), 63-79.

19. Elizur Wright, Jr. to Weld, December 7, 1832, in Barnes and Dumond, Weld

Letters, 94-97. Thomas, Weld, 36, notes Barnes' mistake in exaggerating Weld's part in

founding Reserve abolitionism. See also Abzug, Weld, 87, 318, and David French,

"Elizur Wright, Jr., and the Emergence of Anti-Colonization Sentiments of the Con-

necticut Western Reserve," Ohio History, 85 (Winter, 1976), 49-66.

20. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical

History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, CT, 1972), 221, notes that Weld was one

of the Western Reserve faculty's "earliest converts." Milton C. Sernett, Abolition's

Axe: Beriah Green, Oneida Institute, and the Black Freedom Struggle (Syracuse, NY,

1986), 21, also maintains that Weld was converted at Hudson. Anthony J. Barker,

Captain Charles Stuart: Anglo-American Abolitionist (Baton Rouge, 1986), 65-66,

argues that Stuart's influence on Weld should be seen as "primary," but concedes that

other factors played a role.

21. Wright to Weld, September 5, 1833, in Barnes and Dumond, Weld Letters, I,

114-17.

22. Weld to Lewis Tappan, November 17, 1835, in ibid., 242-45.

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12                                                       OHIO HISTORY

 

ed his attention to other matters, such as attending the 1835 Presbyte-

rian General Assembly in Pittsburgh. Much of the actual work of

converting the Reserve was thus left to Weld's disciples, especially

James A. Thome, Sereno Streeter, John W. Alvord, and Charles

Stuart. Once Oberlin College received the remainder of the Lane

Rebels (with Weld's blessing) the Lorain County community became

the fountainhead of abolitionism on the Western Reserve, making the

Reserve the most important area of antislavery sentiment in the entire

northwest.²³

In northern Ohio, however, the importance of Weld's mission went

beyond the beginning of antislavery organization. Even before Weld

arrived, religious upheaval and new doctrines had begun to unsettle the

Western Reserve churches.²⁴ As another agent of eastern religious

doctrines, Weld heightened the turmoil among those who always

understood that along with his abolitionism went the new measures and

outlook of the Finney school of revivalism. In fact, Finney himself

soon arrived on the Reserve to promote revivals and lecture on

theology at Oberlin College.²⁵

Southerners and theological conservatives certainly recognized the

connection between the revival and abolitionist sentiment. In 1837 the

"old school" majority in the Presbyterian church abrogated the Plan of

Union and exscinded the Synod of Western Reserve along with three

western New York synods where Finney's revival and Weld's aboli-

tionism were strongest. The Synod of Western Reserve promptly

joined the New School Presbyterian organization founded after the

resulting schism. At this point Reserve abolitionists united in embrac-

ing the position inspired by Weld that "slavery is a sin and ... the

pulpit is the proper place to say so.^"26

 

 

23. Weld to Birney, December 19, 1835, in Dumond, Birney Letters, 1, 283-86; Stuart

to Weld, November 24, 1834; Weld to Wright, October 6, 1835; Thome and Alvord to

Weld, February 9, 1836; Streeter to Weld, March 15, July 20, 1836; Thome to Weld,

March 31, May 2, July 16, 1836, in Barnes and Dumond, Weld Letters, 1, 176-77, 236-40,

256-62. 277-79, 281-86, 298-302, 312-17.

24. Albert G. Riddle, "The Rise of Antislavery Sentiment on the Western Reserve,"

Magazine of Western History, 6 (1887), 152-53; James H. Fairchild, "The Story of

Congregationalism on the Western Reserve," Ohio Church History Society Papers, 5

(Oberlin, 1894), 11-12; William S. Kennedy, The Plan of Union: or, A History of the

Presbyterian and Congregational Churches in the Western Reserve (Hudson, Ohio,

1856), 187, 230.

25. For Finney and his theology see Charles G. Finney, Charles G. Finney: An

Autobiography (Old Tappan, NJ, 1876); James E. Johnson, "Charles G. Finney and a

Theology of Revivalism," Church History, 38 (September, 1969), 338-58.

26. Ohio Observer, July 20, 1837. For the Presbyterian division see Bruce C. Staiger,

"Abolitionism and the Presbyterian Schism of 1837-38," Mississippi Valley Historical

Review, 36 (December, 1949), 391-414; George M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and

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Weld's Anti-Slavery Mission in Ohio                           13

 

Although the strong opposition the abolitionist lecturer encountered

has become an essential part of the Weld legend, scholars sometimes

have slighted the consequences of the fact that Weld's antislavery

mission also generated bitter hostility from antiabolition enemies. Weld

did not consciously court martyrdom; he often faced unruly, angry

mobs at great personal risk, but due to prior planning, experience, and

firm resolution he escaped serious injury at the hands of antiabolition

mobs (although he had a close brush with danger in Troy, New York).

Other antislavery agents were not so lucky; one Western Reserve mob

left Marius Robinson, a Weld lieutenant, for dead after a severe beating

that included tar and feathers. Seldom cowed by the vocal and

sometimes violent reaction, Weld insisted his opponents "mobbed up

the cause vastly more than I could have lectured it up."²⁷

Antiabolitionist violence no doubt did win the antislavery cause new

supporters concerned by threats to the civil liberties of Northern

citizens. The public response to Weld's agency nonetheless was not

always entirely beneficial to the antislavery cause. Many communities

reacted to Weld's lectures by organizing well-attended antiabolition

meetings usually arranged by prominent local leaders, termed by

abolitionists "gentlemen of property and standing." Typically these

meetings denounced the abolitionists as "misguided and fanatical

men" who advocated doctrines dangerous to "the peace and harmony

of the community."²⁸ Such public displays of antiabolitionism un-

doubtedly convinced many citizens left untouched by Weld to oppose

with equal conviction any efforts to elevate blacks, slave or free.

By winning converts from the colonization societies, Weld's visits

often divided the social leadership of communities. The emerging

economic and political elites found such dissension within their ranks

disturbing, and antiabolitionists, usually encouraged by supporters of

colonization, frequently took deliberate steps to stifle abolitionist

discussion. In one important episode the city fathers of Painesville,

Ohio, officially petitioned Weld to discontinue his abolition lectures in

the town. Weld naturally refused and continued to win new converts to

abolitionism in the surrounding Reserve communities. The incident

 

 

the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in

Nineteenth Century America (New Haven, 1970); William Warren Sweet, ed., Religion

on the American Frontier, vol. 2: The Presbyterians, 1783-1840 (New York, 1936).

27. Weld to Birney, September 26, October 30, 1835, in Dumond, Birney Letters, 1,

246-49, 251-54.

28. Ashtabula Sentinel, July 11, October 10, 1835; Ohio Observer, September 17,

1835; Ohio State Journal, October 9, 30, 1835. See also Leonard L. Richards,

"Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America

(New York, 1970).

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14                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

nevertheless provoked bitter memories that lasted for several years,

finally contributing to antislavery Whig Benjamin Wade's defeat for

reelection to the state senate in 1839.29

Weld's mission thus was not without problems for the abolitionist

crusade; indeed, for over a decade following his travels antislavery

sentiment on the Reserve would remain divided. This division became

especially evident once political abolitionists organized the Liberty

party in the wake of the 1840 presidential campaign. The formation of

the abolitionist third party placed Weld in an awkward position; his

marriage to Angelina Grimke in 1838 made it difficult for him to side

with those moderates who sought to restrict women's participation in

the antislavery movement. Weld thus could not endorse the Liberty

party although many of his disciples in Ohio eventually did.³⁰ John

Rankin, many of the Lane Rebels, Dr. Gamaliel Bailey (who took part

in the debates), and a majority of the Oberlin community eventually

embraced the third party cause.

By then, however, antislavery concerns had become confused in

religious controversy, making it nearly impossible to separate denom-

inational disputes from corresponding debates over appropriate aboli-

tionist activity. These sectarian differences were particularly upsetting

to the Western Reserve churches. Those of Congregational tradition,

who typically had been motivated by Weld or his Oberlin offspring,

recognized the slavery issue as an effective way to distinguish them-

selves from those of Presbyterian origins, who usually favored the

historic Plan of Union uniting the two denominations west of the

Hudson. Many who embraced Finney's theology and Weld's abolition-

ism regretted the New School organization's reluctance to renounce

the "sin" of slavery, and they thus took to organizing Congregational

churches, thereby undermining the Plan of Union establishment on the

Reserve.³¹ Scholars should consequently take care in stressing too

much the interdenominational spirit of the abolitionist revival.

Upset by Congregational independence, Presbyterians denounced

Oberlin followers as "apostles of disunion" and blamed them for

raising "the standard of revolt" in the Ohio churches. The pastor of the

 

29. Vernon L. Volpe, "Benjamin Wade's Strange Defeat," Ohio History, 97 (Summer-

Autumn, 1988), 122-32. See also Weld to Wright, October 6, 1835, in Barnes and

Dumond, Weld Letters, 1, 236-40; Eber D. Howe, Autobiography and Recollections of

a Pioneer Printer (Painesville, Ohio, 1878), 49-50; Abzug, Weld, 136-37.

30. Weld to Lewis Tappan, December 14, 1841,in Barnes and Dumond, Weld Letters,

II, 879-82; Weld to Birney, January 22, May 23, 1842, in Dumond, Birney Letters, 11,

662-63, 692-94; Abzug, Weld, 217-19, 234, 263, 271.

31. For the formation of Congregational churches see "Chronological List of the

Congregational Churches of Ohio," Papers of the Ohio Church History Society, 9 (1898),

68-70.

• 10
 

Weld's Anti-Slavery Mission in Ohio                           15

Litchfield church, for example, complained bitterly that Oberlin was responsible for the division of his congregation. In reply, Oberlin Congregationalists led by the Reverend John Keep (a convert of Weld) denied they were "schismatics," insisting instead that the Reserve churches were originally congregational in form ("after the purest form of the Puritan fathers"), and thus Presbyterians were the "real intruders." Presbyterian frustrations were certainly understandable; growing abolition sentiment encouraged church members to organize additional independent Congregational churches. One result of this religious controversy was a sharp decline in Reserve Presbyterian churches, from 146 churches in 1840 to 127 in 1850.32 A further consequence of this religious division was growing support for the abolitionist Liberty party. Abolitionists urged their church       32. Oberlin Evangelist, September 11, December 4, 1844; Watchman of the Valley, August 12, 1841; Western Citizen, November 23, 1843; Ohio American, November 18,1846; John Keep, Congregationalism and Church Action, With the Principles of Christian Union (New York, 1845), 10-19. 43-48, 67-78: Kennedy, Plan of Union, 130-31.

• 11
 

16                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

communities to sever all remaining ties with the "sin" of slavery; the

Liberty party was the only political organization without slaveholding

members. Religiously-oriented Liberty voters especially criticized

those church organizations, including the New School Presbyterian

Church, that continued to tolerate slavery and its supporters.

Not surprisingly, then, Reserve communities with Congregational

churches, especially those served by Oberlin graduates, were far more

likely to support the antislavery third party than those who remained

loyal to the Presbyterian connection.³³ Personified in the career of

antislavery Whig Congressman Joshua Giddings, Reserve Presbyteri-

ans rejected calls for separating from the New School organization and

also remained allied with the Whig party establishment that ruled the

Reserve. While the Oberlin Evangelist endorsed the separatist Liberty

party, the Presbyterian Observer did its best to avoid the subject.

Insisting that churches and individuals must renounce all connections

to the "sin" of slavery, Oberlin supporters constantly rejected Pres-

byterian complaints about the Congregationalists' "unorthodox" views

on theology and abolitionism.³⁴ The Liberty party faithful were espe-

cially adamant about refusing to support slaveholding presidential

candidates; in 1844 Giddings and other Reserve Whigs endorsed the

eminent slaveholder from Kentucky, Henry Clay. Only in 1848 would

Liberty party Congregationalists and Whig Presbyterians finally re-

unite in political terms by supporting the new Free Soil party,

organized on the Reserve by New School Presbyterian Joshua Giddings.

Weld's chief contributions to Ohio abolitionism, then, were to

revitalize the antislavery convictions of those who had traditionally

opposed the South's system of bondage, and to serve as the messenger

of the abolitionist gospel to much of the Western Reserve. The Ohio

Anti-Slavery Society Convention of 1836 marked the coming together

of the older Southern Presbyterian and Quaker antislavery traditions

with the relatively recent Yankee abolitionism sparked by Weld. To

many contemporaries and later historians this "modern abolitionism"

seemed radically different from the "gradualism" of earlier antislavery

advocates. Surely there was greater urgency in the appeals of Theodore

Weld and William Lloyd Garrison, but the dividing line between

"gradual" and "immediate" abolitionism can be drawn too boldly.³⁵

 

 

33. 1 analyze the relationship between the Western Reserve churches and Liberty

party votes in Forlorn Hope of Freedom: The Liberty Party in the Old Northwest,

1838-1848 (Kent State University Press, 1990).

34. Oberlin Evangelist, July 31, 1839, July 29, 1840, July 5, 1843, July 3, 1844, July 8,

1846; Ohio Observer, June 7, July 19, October 18, 1848, July 25, September 26, 1849;

Liberty Herald, September 9, 1845.

35. For the doctrine of immediatism, David Brion Davis, "The Emergence of

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Weld's Anti-Slavery Mission in Ohio                                  17

 

The distinction between old and new certainly escaped John Rankin,

whose antislavery career bridged both eras. In 1839 Rankin told a

convention of his peers in the American Anti-Slavery Society:

 

... The doctrine of immediate emancipation is said to be new, but societies

were formed all over the country twenty years ago, and many members of these

societies advocated the same doctrine.

 

Benjamin Lundy, mentor to William Lloyd Garrison, also resented the

strict distinction being made between "gradual" and "modern" abo-

lition, suggesting that considerable continuity indeed existed between

the older antislavery movement and the abolitionist crusade of the

1830s. John G. Whittier, for example, recalled that his abolitionist

devotion and that of other Quakers was in part inspired by the earlier

labors of antislavery Friends Anthony Benezet and John Woolman.³⁶

Defenders of Garrison and proponents of Weld have in this case

joined forces to make the early 1830s a virtual fault line between the

doctrine of immediatism and the gradualism of earlier years. But

William Birney (who naturally protected his father's claims) insisted

"modern abolition" was created neither by Garrison or Weld, but had

evolved over a longer period of time with vital Southern roots.³⁷

Considering the long history of antislavery in southern Ohio, the work

of such pioneers as Benjamin Lundy and Charles Osborn, and the role

of Southerners such as John Rankin and James Birney, this is the best

way to view the development of northwestern abolitionism. There is

also no reason to doubt, however, that the doctrine of immediatism and

the "new measures" practiced by Weld brought a new vigor to the

western antislavery movement and helped propel it down a path of

political protest as well.

A final lesson suggested by Weld's Ohio mission is that historians

should resist the temptation to denigrate the Southern antislavery

 

 

Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought," Mississippi Valley Histor-

ical Review, 49 (September, 1962), 209-30; Anne C. Loveland, "Evangelicalism and

'Immediate Emancipation' in American Antislavery Throught," Journal of Southern

History, 32 (May, 1966), 172-88. Dillon, Lundy 64-68, generally follows the Davis article.

36. William Birney, James G. Birney and His Times: The Genesis of the Republican

Party with Some Account of Abolition Movements in the South Before 1828 (D. Appleton

and Company; reprint edition, New York, 1969), 169-70; Genius of Universal Emanci-

pation, March 29, 1839; John G. Whittier, "The Antislavery Convention of 1833,"

Atlantic Monthly, 33 (February, 1874), 166-68; James Brewer Stewart, "Evangelicalism

and the Radical Strain in Southern Antislavery Thought During the 1820s," Journal of

Southern History, 39 (August, 1973), 379-97.

37. Birney, Birney, 162-72, 431-35; O'Dell, "Antislavery in Ohio", 390-94. See also

Adams, Neglected Period, 250; James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American

Evangelicals against Slavery, 1770-1808 (Philadelphia, 1982).

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18                                                      OHIO HISTORY

 

tradition through unfavorable comparisons to the Yankee abolitionism

of Garrison, or Weld for that matter. Recall that Weld had encouraged

Southern-born students to take a prominent part in the Lane Debates,

urged Birney to establish his antislavery press in Kentucky, prodded

Southern masters to free their slaves, and counted on the support of the

Southern-bred ministers in the Chillicothe Presbytery. Weld's faith in

Southerners was not entirely misplaced; he understood that unlike

Northern opponents of slavery, those of Southern roots had great

obstacles to overcome and took great risks in criticizing the Southern

institution. Slavery was more than simply an abstract issue to those

disciplined by their church or forced by hostile public pressure to flee

their homeland. Immediate abolitionists of the 1830s were quite willing

to admit their debts to antislavery pioneers such as Rankin and Lundy,

while even Garrison gave some credit to George Bourne, the English-

born Virginia Presbyterian minister whose The Book and Slavery

Irreconcilable impressed many subsequent abolitionists.³⁸ Indeed, the

early abolitionist movement sought a familiar goal, that of persuading

slaveowners themselves to recognize and repent of their guilt for the

"sin" of slavery. Antislavery revivalists led by Theodore Weld may

have been delivering a new message, but in the southern half of Ohio

at least, he preached these "new doctrines" to an old audience,

prepared by earlier protests against slavery to welcome the new

messenger further clarifying God's word.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

38. Liberator, March 17, 1832. John W. Christie and Dwight L. Dumond contend that

Garrison owed a larger debt to Bourne than Garrison was willing to admit. George

Bourne and "The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable" (Wilmington, Del., 1969), vii, 75-98.

The Reverend David Rice of Kentucky had published his Slavery Inconsistent with

Justice and Good Policy in 1792. Mary Stoughton Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, From

the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade, 1619-1808

(Boston, 1901), 90, 117-18; David T. Bailey, Shadow on the Church: Southwestern

Evangelical Religion and the Issue of Slavery, 1783-1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 43-49.

Samuel May recognized Rankin's and Lundy's contributions, while emphasizing Garri-

son's importance. Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston, 1869), 10-15,

17-19, 30-32.

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