Benjamin P. Thomas (1902–1956)

The connection of Oneida County, where I live, to abolitionism has fascinated me. This region, now considered (unfairly) as rather unremarkable, was in the mid-19th century a hotbed of social and cultural reform. Rev. George Washington Gale, who preached at our little village church, was the nation's instigator of the Manual Labor educational movement that provided higher education for students who could not afford tuition in exchange for their labor that offset costs of education. Gale founded the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry, a pioneering model of the Manual Labor method that flourished; it became one of the first to admit blacks in the student body. Gale went on to Illinois where he and others from Oneida County founded Knox College. Gale also introduced the famous evangelist Charles Grandison Finney to the upstate NY region from which Finney's renown spread far and wide.

Theodore Dwight Weld became an acolyte of Finney's He was educated at the Oneida Institute under Beriah Greene who had replaced Gale. Weld took up the charge of spreading the message of the Manual Labor model across the country with the support of the Tappan brothers' "Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions". He traveled thousands of miles across the country extolling the merits of Manual Labor. Later, he moved on to the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati with other students of the Oneida Institute where, after a contentious fight with the seminary's trustees over promoting abolitionism, Weld and his fellow students departed Lane for the newly formed Oberlin College.

Weld became a leading light in the mid-century's abolition movement, one of the "immediatists" who lit the fires of fervent abolitionism throughout the nation. Weld was inexhaustible in orating and writing and is squarely in the pantheon of leading lights of the era's causes. While working in Washington, he became a close ally and aide to John Quincy Adams, the scourge of the "Southern Slave Power" in Congress.

For Weld, freedom for the slave was not the only desired end, that full civil and social equality of Blacks was a paramount goal. Weld, in productive collaboration with his wife, Angelina Grimke Weld, and sister-in-law Sarah Grimke recognized the importance of women's rights in a just society. Weld is also well-known for his campaigns for the temperance movement.

This out-of-print book published in 1950 provides a well-researched and thoughtful analysis of this giant of the abolitionist and social justice movement of the 19th century.… (mais)