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Stamped With Glory: Lewis Tappan And The Africans Of The Amistad, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

Abolitionism came relatively late to Lewis Tappan. Devotional, benevolent and hardworking are all words that describe Tappan in his twenties and thirties. Social reformer he was not. In 1818, Tappan abandoned the Calvinism of his mother for Unitarianism, then fashionable for a socially ambitious merchant. For the next eight years, Tappan enjoyed the typical life of an upper-middle-class New England merchant. He took his new faith seriously, however, editing a Unitarian journal, and becoming the first treasurer of the American Unitarian Association. In the mid-1820's, America experienced The Great Second Awakening, a widespread revival of religion and religious debate and …