(1788-1863) abolitionists
Two of the most influential abolitionists in the antebellum United States, Arthur and Lewis Tappan were born in Northampton, Massachusetts. Growing up in a devoutly Calvinistic family, both were deeply influenced by their parents’ evangelical beliefs. The PANIC of 1837 caused the family’s dry-goods business to fail, but the brothers quickly started another venture, founding America’s first credit-rating service (later to be known as Dun & Bradstreet). The brothers accumulated enough wealth to found a newspaper, the New York Journal of Commerce, and to fund various humanitarian causes ranging from abolition to temperance.
The Tappans’ concern for the abolition of slavery dates from the early 1830s, a dangerous period for public expression of antislavery sentiment. At that time, the abolition movement had not made much progress because many businessmen saw it as a threat to law and order. This feeling repeatedly incited mob action against the abolitionists and free blacks in the Northeast and in the Midwest.
It took courage to speak out, but in 1833 Lewis and Arthur Tappan and Theodore Weld formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. That same year, the Tap-pan brothers founded Oberlin College, open to blacks and whites alike. Lewis Tappan financially backed the Emancipator, the most widely circulated antislavery journal. To his brother Benjamin, a U. S. senator from Ohio, Lewis wrote that slavery “was the worm at the tree of liberty. Unless killed, the tree will die.”
The Tappans’ public statements against slavery brought about public reaction on July 4, 1834, when a mob trashed Lewis’s home and burned his furniture in the street. Tap-pan wrote to Weld that he wanted his house to remain “this summer as it is, a silent anti-slavery preacher to the crowds who will see it.” The next year, a church built by the Tappans was set on fire when it was rumored that they intended to promote racial “amalgamation.”
Undeterred, the Tappans continued their efforts to bring about a peaceful end to slavery. Like many abolitionists, they proposed reforming the system from within and worked tirelessly to win over churches and missionary societies to their views. Lewis was more fully committed than his brother Arthur, who stopped short of associating with blacks. Lewis tried to eliminate the “black pew” in New York churches and caused a furor in upstate New York when he and his family sat in the pews reserved for black communicants. On another occasion, members of the American Anti-Slavery Association blocked his proposal to invite a black minister to speak to the association.
In the Amistad incident, Lewis Tappan recognized the opportunity not only to help the captured Africans but also to dramatize the evils of the slave trade. He had been handed a “Providential occurrence,” he admitted when the district court opened proceedings. Ultimately, he hoped to use the opportunity to strike at slavery itself, “the market that invites the supply,” he concluded, in suitably businesslike fashion.
He assumed major responsibility for mapping out the strategy for the court trials, raised money in “the voice of humanity and liberty,” visited the imprisoned Mendian captives, located Africans who could talk with them, and wrote letters to the New York Journal of Commerce presenting the Africans’ side of the mutiny. In company with Ellis Gray Loring, John Quincy Adams’s friend of many years, Tappan pleaded eloquently with Adams to join Roger Sherman Baldwin in arguing the case for the defense before the U. S. Supreme Court. Adams did so, and on hearing the Court’s decision, he wrote to Tappan, “The captives are free. . . ‘Not unto us, not unto us!’ but thanks, thanks, in the name of humanity and justice to you.”
In the year following the release of the Mendians, Lewis Tappan devoted his energy to arranging for their transportation home to Sierra Leone, and he very likely helped spirit away Antonio (the Amistad’s slave cabin boy) to freedom in Canada. Lewis Tappan’s participation in the Amistad case may be considered the high point of his career as an abolitionist. At Adams’s suggestion, he attended an antislavery convention in London in 1843, and in 1846 he was instrumental in merging the Amistad committee with other missionary groups to form the American Missionary Society (1846).
In the 1840s, the Tappan brothers split with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who wanted to branch off into other kinds of reform, including women’s STATUS AND RIGHTS. Arthur Tappan continued to work for abolition, helping to found the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (1840). With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, he declared himself now willing to disobey the law and actively supported the efforts of the underground railroad to help slaves escape to freedom. He lived long enough to witness the emancipation of slaves and died as the Civil War ended, in 1865. His brother Lewis had predeceased him by two years.
Further reading: Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (New Rochelle, N. Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1966).
Taylor, Zachary (1 784-1 850) 12th U. S. president Zachary Taylor, 12th president of the United States, was in office for little more than a year but proved to be influential at a pivotal moment in American history. In 1850 the crisis of the slavery issue was continuing to build. Taylor was a slaveholder but also a nationalist with western roots. With the possibility of civil war in the air, Taylor was determined to hold the Union together at all costs.
Zachary Taylor (Library of Congress)
Born in Virginia on November 24, 1784, Taylor was taken as an infant to Kentucky and raised on a plantation. By 1800, his family owned 10,000 acres in Kentucky and a number of slaves. In 1808, he received his first commission as an army officer, commanding the garrison at Fort Pickering, site of modern-day Memphis. Two years later, he married Margaret Mackall Smith of Calvert County, Maryland. As a captain in the War of 1812, Taylor won distinction in September 1812 for his defense of Fort Harrison in Indiana Territory against an Indian attack. For this achievement, the young officer became the first brevet major in the U. S. Army. In 1814, Taylor led U. S. troops against British and Indians at Credit Island in Illinois Territory. Outnumbered three to one, he scored temporary successes before withdrawing. In 1815, he was promoted to the lineal grade of major.
After a year as a civilian, Taylor reentered the army in 1816. At various times, he served in the states or future states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Commissioned a colonel in 1832, he fought in the Black Hawk War that year, participating in the climactic Battle of Bad Axe River. Taylor acquired his nickname, “Old Rough and Ready,” while fighting the Seminole Indians in Florida Territory from 1837 to 1840. His victory at the Battle of Okeechobee in 1837 was the single most successful U. S. effort of the protracted Second Seminole War. Breveted a brigadier general in 1838, he commanded all U. S. troops in Florida. He emerged from the struggle with the reputation of a determined, resourceful leader.
From 1840 to 1845, Taylor remained in the army but also gave careful attention to his plantation in Mississippi. The annexation of Texas, however, enabled him to receive his most important military assignment. In August 1845 he was in command of a small army of regulars near the mouth of the Nueces River at Corpus Christi, Texas. Both the United States and Mexico claimed the region between this river and the Rio Grande, and because Mexican military activity was rumored, Taylor augmented his troops and awaited specific instructions before moving through the disputed region. President James K. Polk ordered Taylor and his troops into the contested area. After winning two decisive encounters, Taylor triumphed against overwhelming odds in a battle with the Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna at Buena Vista. When the smoke cleared, Taylor’s army of 6,000 had defeated a Mexican force of 20,000, and Zachary Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready,” was a national hero.
Taylor was reluctant to enter politics. Initially, he did not publicly commit himself to any political party, although, because he was a slaveholder, the South hoped he would promote the expansion of slavery. Because of his military record, the North claimed him as a man of the Union. Taylor had problems with the two major political parties: He disagreed with the Whig Party on the issue of strong protective tariffs, and he opposed the Democratic Party plank of extending slavery in western territories and the concept of a strong national bank. He eventually joined the Whig Party. At the 1848 convention, the Whigs nominated Taylor to run against the Democratic Party candidate, Lewis Cass, who favored popular sovereignty, allowing the residents of territories to decide for themselves whether they supported the extension of slavery. Millard Fillmore, comptroller of New York, was chosen as his running mate.
Northerners who opposed the extension of slavery formed the Free-Soil Party and nominated Martin Van Buren. In a close election, the Free-Soilers pulled enough votes away from Cass to elect Taylor. Taylor won eight southern states and seven northern states, giving him 163 electoral votes to Cass’s 127. Taylor did not win a majority of the popular votes. He had 1,360,099, compared to 1,220,544 for Cass and 291,263 for Van Buren. However, because Van Buren took Democratic votes away from Cass in New York, all of that state’s 36 electoral votes went to Taylor, who thereby won the election.
As president, Zachary Taylor adopted the spoils system, awarding offices to party loyalists. As a result, much of his time and many of his problems concerned the demands of unemployed Whig politicians. His administration was marked, however, by his personal honesty and courage, especially in the handling of the delicate question of slavery.
The expansion of slavery in the new territories gained in the Mexican War had been the major concern of Congress since the introduction in 1846 of the Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery there. The demands of two such territories, Calieornia and New Mexico, for statehood brought the issue to a head, because both territories wanted to be admitted to the federal Union as free states.
President Taylor’s position on this issue surprised both his supporters and his opponents. He considered the solution simple. Because California wanted statehood, it should be granted promptly. The president also felt that if the people of California wanted to prohibit slavery, they and not Congress had the right to make that decision. Therefore, compromises and concessions were unnecessary. Taylor’s stand drew the support of the Free-Soilers and the antislavery, or “conscience,” Whigs, who were led by Senator William H. Seward of New York.
On the other extreme was a small but vocal faction of Southerners who would accept no changes to the arrangements of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in which Congress had drawn a line at 36°30' north latitude as the northern limit of slave territory. This line bisected California and would have put Los Angeles and San Diego in slave territory. These so-called diehards, led by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, talked of seceding from the Union if Taylor’s plan was followed. Taylor responded with tough talk of his own. He personally pledged that he would lead an army against any state that attempted secession.
In the middle was a group of moderate Whigs and Democrats who were trying to find a compromise. Its leaders were Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Henry Clay, who had brokered the Missouri Compromise 30 years earlier. As long as Taylor was in office, the moderates’ cause was hopeless. However, when Vice President Fillmore succeeded to the presidency in 1850, the moderates got his support for compromise. On July 4, 1850, Taylor stood in the hot sun at the site of the Washington Monument in Washington, D. C., listening to patriotic speeches celebrating Independence Day. That night he had an attack of cholera morbus, or acute indigestion, and he died five days later. His last words were, “I regret nothing, but I am sorry to leave my friends.”
Further reading: K. Jack Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planner, Statesman of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988).
Tecumseh See Volume III.
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