Arthur Tappan

Portrait of Arthur Tappan from The Life of Arthur Tappan, by Lewis Tappan, New York, Hurd and Houghton, 1870.

Arthur Tappan (May 22, 1786 – July 23, 1865) was an American businessman, philanthropist and abolitionist. He was the brother of Ohio Senator Benjamin Tappan and abolitionist Lewis Tappan, and nephew of Harvard Divinity School theologian Rev. David Tappan. Tappan moved to Boston at the age of 15. In 1807 he established a dry goods business in Portland, Maine.

After his death, Arthur was described thus by his friend and educational collaborator Theodore Dwight Weld, who called him one of humanity's "great benefactors":

In 1826, a year after the Erie Canal was completed, Arthur and his brother Lewis moved to New York City, the new national center of business and retail trade, where they established a silk importing business. In 1827 the brothers founded the New York Journal of Commerce with Samuel Morse.

Arthur and Lewis Tappan were successful businessmen, but commerce was never their foremost interest. They viewed making money as less important than saving souls. They made the Journal of Commerce a publication free of "immoral advertisements." Arthur Tappan's summer home in New Haven, Connecticut, was destroyed by a mob in 1831 (along with a black hotel and a black home) after his support for a surprisingly unpopular (New Haven Excitement) proposal of a college for African Americans in that city. (See Simeon Jocelyn.)

Both men suffered in the anti-abolitionist riots of 1834, in which mobs attacked their property. Arthur Tappan was one of two signatories who issued a disclaimer on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was president, in the aftermath of the riots, emphasising its dedication to abolishing slavery within the existing laws of the United States.

"In the great commercial crisis of 1837 he suffered immense losses; and not long after turned his attention to other and more retired occupations, by which he obtained a comfortable subsistence for his family, and the ability still to contribute, though on a greatly diminished scale, throughout his protracted life." Arthur served as its first president, and there was in 1835 a reward of $20,000 for his capture and delivery to New Orleans.

He resigned in 1840 because of his opposition to the society's new support of women's suffrage and feminism. Their early support for Oberlin College, a center of abolitionist activity, included $10,000 to build Tappan Hall. Oberlin's green Tappan Square now occupies the site.

Continuing their support for abolition, Arthur and his brother founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 and the American Missionary Association in 1846. After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was passed, Tappan refused to comply with the new law and donated money to the Underground Railroad. The brothers' positions on the slavery issue were not universally popular. In early July 1834, Lewis Tappan's New York home was sacked by a mob, who threw his furniture into the street and burned it.

The Tappans and the Journal of Commerce attracted bitter criticism for their campaign to free the Africans who had taken over the slave ship Amistad in 1839. James Gordon Bennett, Sr.’s rival New York Morning Herald denounced “"the humbug doctrines of the abolitionists and the miserable fanatics who propagate them," particularly Lewis Tappan and the Journal of Commerce.

Arthur Tappan died in 1865, Lewis in 1873. Both men lived long enough to see the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment eliminate slavery in the United States, granting freedom to millions of African Americans. Arthur is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven.

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