Theodore Dwight Weld
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Theodore Dwight Weld (November 23, 1803 – February 3, 1895), the author of American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, was an evangelical American abolitionist.
He was born on 23rd November, 1803 at Hampton, Connecticut, where he lived until 1825 when his family moved to Pompey, New York. He is the son of Ludovicus Weld and Elizabeth Clark, and the brother of Ezra Greenleaf Weld, a famous daguerreotype photographer.
He entered Hamilton College, where he became the disciple of Charles Finney, a famous evangelist. Weld was influenced by Charles Stuart, a retired British army officer who urged Weld to enlist in the cause of black emancipation. While studying for the ministry at the Oneida Institute he traveled about lecturing on the virtues of manual labor, temperance, and moral reform. While a student at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Weld became a leader of the "Lane Rebels." This group of students held a series of slavery debates over 18 days in 1834 that divided the community. When the school's board of directors, including president Lyman Beecher, tried to prohibit the students from supporting abolitionism, Weld and a group of students left the seminary and were accepted by Oberlin College.
After 1830 he became one of the leaders of the antislavery movement working with Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan, New York philanthropists, James G. Birney, Gamaliel Bailey, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké.
He married Angelina Emily Grimké in 1838. From 1836 to 1840, Weld worked as the editor of the Emancipator. He also directed the national campaign for sending antislavery petitions to Congress and assisted John Quincy Adams when Congress tried Adams for reading petitions in violation of the gag rule. In 1839, he co-wrote with Angelina and her sister, abolitionist Sarah Moore Grimké American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, on which Harriet Beecher Stowe partly based Uncle Tom's Cabin. Weld used pen names for all of his writings, which many scholars believe to be the reason that he is not as well known as other abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison or Arthur Tappan.
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- Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke and Sarah Grimke, 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.
- Robert K. Nelson, "'The forgetfulness of sex': Devotion and Desire in the Courtship Letters of Angelina Grimké and Theodore Dwight Weld," Journal of Social History 37 (Spring 2004): 663-679.
