Letter of Theodore Dwight Weld, 15 January 1880

Writer, editor, and abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld was born in Connecticut in 1803, the son of Ludovicus Weld and Elizabeth Clark Weld. His father was a Congregational minister and a farmer. He embarked on a lecture tour on mnemonics in 1822, traveling throughout the United States and witnessing slavery first-hand in the South. In 1825, he and his family moved to Pompey, in New York state and he studied first at Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York, and then at the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry. He continued lecturing, now on abolition, temperance, moral reform, and the virtue of manual labor and became well known for his charisma and eloquence. He became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, recruiting Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, to the cause of abolition. In 1838 he married fellow abolitionist and women's rights activist Angelina Grimké, in a ceremony involving two ministers, one black and one white. The couple had three children. In 1839, he, his wife, and her sister Sarah Grimké wrote American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, an inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Weld and others formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 and from 1841 to 1843, he worked in Washington DC, directing the Society's campaign for sending anti-slavery petitions to Congress. Following this, he and Grimké relocated first to New Jersey and then to Massachusetts, with Weld helping to establish schools which accepted students of all races and sexes in both states. Grimké died in 1879 and Weld died in 1895.