Dr. Peter Toppan

Other Events and Attributes:

• Alternate death: 3 Nov 1701, Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts

Peter married Jane Batt on 3 Apr 1661 in Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts. Jane (daughter of Christopher Batt and Anne Baynton) was born before 18 Dec 1631; was christened on 18 Dec 1631 in St. Edmund's, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England; died on 1 Jan 1710 in Newburyport, Essex, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Samuel married Abigail Wigglesworth on 23 Dec 1700 in Malden, Middlesex, Massachusetts. Abigail (daughter of Rev. Michael Wigglesworth and Martha Mudge) was born on 20 Mar 1681 in Malden, Middlesex, Massachusetts; died on 28 Jan 1771 in Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Alternate birth: 28 Feb 1720, Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts

Notes:

Also spelled Toppan. Graduated Harvard in 1742, taught school in Haverhill, and was ordained and installed as pastor over the Congregational Church in Manchester in December of 1745, a position he held until his death forty-five years later.

Benjamin married Elizabeth Marsh on 5 Oct 1746. Elizabeth (daughter of David Marsh and Mary Moody) was born on 29 Jun 1723 in Haverhill, Essex, Massachusetts; died on 24 Sep 1807 in Manchester, Essex, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Alternate birth: 21 Oct 1747, Manchester, Essex, Massachusetts

Notes:

He was a goldsmith and a storekeeper. According to Tappan-Toppan Genealogy (citation details below), he marched with other volunteers from Northampton to meet the forces of Burgoyne at Saratoga.

Benjamin married Sarah Holmes on 22 Oct 1770 in Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts. Sarah (daughter of William Homes and Rebecca Dawes) was born on 2 Jan 1748 in Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts; died on 21 Mar 1826 in Northampton, Hampshire, Massachusetts; was buried in Bridge Street Cemetery, Northampton, Hampshire, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

"[A]n Ohio judge and Democratic politician who served in the Ohio State Senate and the United States Senate. He was an early settler of the Connecticut Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio and was one of the first settlers in Portage County and the founder of the city of Ravenna, Ohio." [Wikipedia]

"TAPPAN, Benjamin, a Senator from Ohio; born in Northampton, Mass., May 25, 1773; attended the public schools; apprenticed as printer and engraver; traveled to the West Indies; studied painting with Gilbert Stuart; studied law; admitted to the bar in Hartford, Conn., and commenced practice in Ravenna, Ohio, in 1799; member, State senate 1803-1805; moved to Steubenville, Ohio, in 1809 and continued the practice of law; served in the War of 1812; held several local offices; county judge; judge of the fifth Ohio Circuit Court of Common Pleas 1816-1823; presidential elector on the Democratic ticket in 1832; United States district judge of Ohio 1833; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1839, to March 3, 1845; chairman, Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses (Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth Congresses), Committee on the Library (Twenty-seventh Congress); censured by the Senate in 1844 for breach of confidence for passing copies of a proposed treaty with Texas to the press; died in Steubenville, Jefferson County, Ohio, April 20, 1857; interment in Union Cemetery." [Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress]

An Ohio state historical marker placed in the year 2000 at Ravenna reads: "BENJAMIN TAPPAN, JR. (1773-1857) - The founder of Ravenna Township in 1799, Benjamin Tappan, Jr. led a distinguished life of public service. An aggressive force in local politics, he served in the Ohio Senate from 1803 to 1805, as judge of the fifth court of common pleas from 1816 to 1823, and as a Federal district judge from 1826 to 1833. Tappan served as aid-de-camp to Major General Elijah Wadsworth following the surrender of Detroit in the War of 1812, provisioning and arming local militia units defending the northwest frontier against a possible British invasion."

After his retirement from electoral politics, in 1838 Benjamin Tappan formed a law partnership with Edwin M. Stanton, who would later be Secretary of War throughout the Civil War, under both Lincoln and Johnson. It was Johnson's attempt to fire Stanton that led to his impeachment. Tappan's son Benjamin Stanton, M.D. (1812-1884) married, as his first wife, in May 1838, Oella Stanton, sister of Edwin M. Stanton.

Benjamin married Elizabeth "Betsy" Lord in 1823. Elizabeth (daughter of Abner Lord and Mary Selden) was born on 16 Jul 1784 in Lyme, New London, Connecticut; died on 14 Jun 1840. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

"Arthur Tappan was a New York drygoods merchant, and an abolitionist. He was widely known as a patron of religious and patriotic organizations, endowed Lane Seminary at Cincinnati, a professorship at Auburn Theological Seminary, and built Tappan Hall at Oberlin College, Ohio; he assisted in founding the Journal of Commerce and the Emancipator, and was first president of the Anti-Slavery Society. He aided in sustaining the Liberator, and by paying an enormous fine, freed William Lloyd Garrison from the Baltimore jail. One of the most notable of his benefactions was his paying the tuition of one hundred divinity students for four years at Yale College." [Tappan-Toppan Genealogy, citation details below]

From Wikipedia (accessed 9 May 2021):

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. With Samuel Morse, in 1827 the brothers founded the New York Journal of Commerce.

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.

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." [The Life of Arthur Tappan by Lewis Tappan, 1870, page 405.] Their philanthropic efforts crippled and pledges not met, the Tappans were forced to close their silk-importing business, and almost their paper, but the brothers persevered. In the 1840s, they founded another lucrative business enterprise when they opened the first commercial credit-rating service, the Mercantile Agency, a predecessor of Dun and Bradstreet.

The Tappan brothers made their mark in commerce and in abolitionism. Throughout their careers, the Tappans devoted time and money to philanthropic causes as diverse as temperance, the abolition of slavery, and their support of new colleges in what was then the west of the country: successively, the Oneida Institute, Lane Theological Seminary, the Lane Rebels at Cumminsville, Ohio, and Oberlin Collegiate Institute. Their beliefs about observing Sabbath extended to campaigns against providing stagecoach service and mail deliveries on Sundays.

In 1833, while a principal owner of the Journal of Commerce, Arthur Tappan allied with William Lloyd Garrison and co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Arthur served as its first president, and there was in 1835 a reward of $20,000 (equivalent to $495,677 in 2019) 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 13th Amendment eliminate slavery in the United States, granting freedom to millions of African Americans. Arthur is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven.

Arthur married Frances Antill on 18 Sep 1810. Frances was born on 4 May 1785 in Montréal, Québec; died on 21 Jul 1863 in New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut; was buried in Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Buried at Green-Wood, section E, lot 19728.

"He was a drygoods merchant in New York City, a philanthropist and anti-slavery advocate, the partner in business of his brother, Arthur Tappan. He was a leading founder of the American Missionary Association." [Tappan-Toppan Genealogy, citation details below]

His many books and tracts include Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South: On the Social and Political Evils of Slavery (1843); The Fugitive Slave Bill: Its History and Unconstitutionality (1850); American Slavery (1852); The War: Its Causes and Remedy (1861); Is It Right To Be Rich? (1869); and The Life of Arthur Tappan (1870).

From Wikipedia (accessed 9 May 2021):

Lewis Tappan [...] was a New York abolitionist who worked to achieve freedom for the enslaved Africans aboard the Amistad. Tappan was also among the founders of the American Missionary Association in 1846, which began more than 100 anti-slavery Congregational churches throughout the Midwest, and after the American Civil War, founded numerous schools and colleges to aid in the education of freedmen.

Contacted by Connecticut abolitionists soon after the Amistad arrived in port, Tappan focused extensively on the captive Africans. He ensured the acquisition of high-quality lawyers for the captives, which led to their being set free after the case went to the United States Supreme Court. With his brother Arthur, Tappan not only gained legal help and acquittal for the Africans, but also managed to increase public support and fundraising. Finally, he organized the return trip home to Africa for surviving members of the group.

Lewis Tappan was the brother of Senator Benjamin Tappan and abolitionist Arthur Tappan. His middle-class parents were strict Congregationalists. Once Lewis was old enough to work, he helped his father in a dry goods store. On his sixteenth birthday, he ventured into other areas of commerce, and ultimately started The Mercantile Agency in 1841 in New York City. The Mercantile Agency was the precursor to Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) and modern credit-reporting services. (D&B is still in existence today.)

Convinced by Arthur to read a biography of William Wilberforce, who led the cause for abolition in Great Britain, Tappan started his quest for abolition in the United States. [...]

Despite his Congregationalist upbringing, Lewis Tappan became attracted to Unitarianism for intellectual and social reasons. William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian minister, became Tappan's pastor. As a peace advocate, Channing played an influential role in Tappan's decision to join the Massachusetts Peace Society. In 1827 his brother Arthur convinced him to return to a Trinitarian denomination. Tappan joined Arthur in the Congregational church. Lewis Tappan initially supported the American Colonization Society (ACS), which promoted sending freed blacks from the United States to Africa, based on the assumption that this was their homeland, regardless of where they were born.

Frustrated by the slow progress of the ACS, Tappan and a sizable nucleus of men, including his brother Arthur, Theodore Dwight Weld, Gerrit Smith, Amos A. Phelps, and James Gillespie Birney, left the ACS to join what was to become known as the "immediatist" camp, who wanted to end slavery in the United States. Weld gained considerable influence following the move of the Tappan brothers to this group. In December 1833, at Philadelphia, Lewis Tappan joined activists such as William Lloyd Garrison to form the American Anti-Slavery Society.

The departure of the Tappans from the ACS is partially explained by the death of an African whom they repatriated. Captured in Africa and enslaved in Mississippi, Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori was a Fulani prince. He would have had potentially lucrative trade contacts in Africa. Partly for business reasons, the Tappans focused on Ibrahim's repatriation, which was finally achieved. Shortly after reaching his homeland, however, Ibrahim died in 1829. This ended the Tappans' hopes of easily establishing significant African trade.

The Tappan brothers were Congregationalists and uncompromising moralists; even within the abolitionist movement, other members found their views extreme. Lewis Tappan advocated intermarriage (at the time called "amalgamation") as the long-range solution to racial issues, as all people would eventually be mixed race. He dreamed of a "copper-skinned" America where race would not define any man, woman, or child. Tappan characterized the arrival of the Amistad and its Africans on American shores as a "providential occurrence" that might allow "the heart of the nation" to be "touched by the power of sympathy."

The Tappan brothers created chapters of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) throughout New York state and in other sympathetic areas. Although Tappan was popular among many, opponents of abolition attacked his homes and churches by arson and vandalism.

Lewis began a nationwide mailing of abolitionist material, which resulted in violent outrage in the South and denunciation by Democratic politicians, who accused him of trying to divide the Union. In the North, the mailings generated widespread sympathy and financial support for the American Anti-Slavery Society. By 1840, however, the anti-slavery program had expanded and the movement splintered.

After 1840, church-oriented abolitionism became dominant. That year Tappan formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in disagreement with the AAS. The latter allowed a woman, Abby Kelley, to be elected to serve on the AAS business committee. Because of his strict religious beliefs, Tappan opposed the participation of women in an official capacity in the public society.

Tappan founded the abolitionist Human Rights journal and a children's anti-slavery magazine, The Slave's Friend.

"In July, 1831, Lewis Tappan, Gale, and others founded the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions ['literary institutions' being schools], and later in the same year persuaded Theodore Weld, a living, breathing, and eloquently-speaking exhibit of the results of manual-labor-with-study, to accept the general agency." [A History of Oberlin College by Robert Samuel Fletcher, 1943] Manual labor--most commonly agricultural, or in a print shop--was supposed to bring students the physical and moral (psychological) benefits of exercise, while providing a type of financial aid to needy students. Among the charges to Weld, who in 1832 traveled over 4,500 miles (7,200 km) and gave over 200 lectures on manual labor and temperance, was "to find a site for a great national manual labor institution where training for the western ministry could be provided for poor but earnest young men." [Ibid.] At the recommendation of Weld, the Tappans supported the new Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. When Weld led a mass exodus to Oberlin, it then received their support.

In 1841, the Amistad case went to trial. Tappan attended each day of the trials and wrote daily accounts of the proceedings for The Emancipator, a New England abolitionist paper. He was a frequent contributor. Throughout the trials in New Haven, Connecticut, Tappan arranged for several Yale University students to tutor the imprisoned Africans in English. The lessons included their learning to read New Testament scriptures and to sing Christian hymns. The Africans later drew from these skills to raise funds to return to Africa.

After achieving legal victory in the US Supreme Court, Tappan planned to use the Amistad Africans as the foundation for his dream to Christianize Africa. The village of Mo Tappan, site of a mission to the Mende people, in modern Sierra Leone, is named for him.

In 1846, Tappan was among the founders of the American Missionary Association (AMA), led by Congregational and Presbyterian ministers, both white and black. It linked anti-slavery activists of the East with Ohio and other Midwestern activists. In addition, it took over managing numerous disparate missions: an Oberlin, Ohio mission to the Red Lake-area Ojibwe, a mission to Jamaica, a Mende mission to the Amistad Africans, and a mission to escaped blacks living in Canada. As the AMA grew in influence, it expanded its enterprises. Among these, it began 115 anti-slavery Congregational churches in Illinois, aided by anti-slavery ministers such as Owen Lovejoy there.

In 1858, Tappan was the Treasurer of the AMA. Under the leadership of President Lawrence Brainerd, Tappan, Foreign Corresponding Secretary Rev. George Whipple, and Home Missions Corresponding Secretary Rev. S.S. Jocelyn, the AMA opposed the long-established and powerful American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and American Home Missionary Society because of what the AMA alleged was their complicity with slavery. During and after the American Civil War, Tappan and his brother Arthur worked from New York with the AMA on behalf of freedmen in the South. In postwar efforts, it led the founding of numerous schools and colleges for freedmen, the historically black colleges and universities (HBCU).

Unwilling to reduce his commitment to U.S. government action against slavery in the southern states, Tappan and other radical political abolitionists denounced the Democratic Party as essentially pro-slavery. Though mistrustful of politicians, Tappan supported various antislavery parties that culminated in formation of the Republican Party. In both 1860 and 1864, Tappan voted for Abraham Lincoln.

Tappan supported the Emancipation Proclamation but believed that additional liberties were necessary. He wrote to Charles Sumner: "When will the poor negro have his rights? Not, I believe, until he has a musket in one hand and a ballot in the other."

Lewis married Susanna Aspinwall on 7 Sep 1813. Susanna was born on 17 Jul 1790 in Brookline, Norfolk, Massachusetts; died on 24 Mar 1853 in Brooklyn, Kings, New York; was buried in Walnut Street Cemetery, Brookline, Norfolk, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Lewis married Sarah Jackson in 1854. Sarah was born on 14 Oct 1807 in Newton, Middlesex, Massachusetts; died on 19 Jul 1884 in Brooklyn, Kings, New York; was buried in East Parish Burying Ground, Newton, Middlesex, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

"[A] American educator, mathematician, author, lawyer and newspaper editor who served as president of Kenyon College, among other public distinctions." [Wikipedia]

"He was educated in the schools of Steubenville, by private tutors, and at St. Mary's College, Baltimore, Md. He studied law with his father and his father's partner, Edwin M. Stanton, who was afterwards Secretary of War under Lincoln. Although admitted to the bar in 1846, Mr. Tappan turned his attention to journalism, publishing for two years a paper called the Ohio Press. He later practiced law in Steubenville, where he was mayor, 1844-5, and superintendent of schools, 1856-9. He was professor of mathematics in the University of Ohio, 1859-60 and 1865-8. He was president of Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, 1869-75, and commissioner of the Public Schools of Ohio, from 1887 until the time of his death. He was the author of a number of textbooks on mathematics. He received the following degrees: A. M. from St. Mary's, 1860; LL.D., from Williams, 1873, from Washington and Jefferson, 1874, and from several other colleges." [Tappan-Toppan Genealogy, citation details below.]

Eli married Lydia Lucretia McDowell on 4 Feb 1851 in Steubenville, Jefferson, Ohio. Lydia (daughter of Alexander Johnston McDowell and Mary Sheldon) was born on 4 Jul 1825 in Steubenville, Jefferson, Ohio; died on 24 Dec 1904 in Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts; was buried in Steubenville, Jefferson, Ohio. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

"[A]n American novelist and short story writer best known for her acute characterizations and depictions of academic life." [Wikipedia]

Mary married John Henry Wright on 2 Apr 1879 in Gambier, Knox, Ohio. John (son of Rev. Austen Hazen Wright and Catherine Myers) was born on 4 Feb 1852 in Urumiah, Persia; died on 25 Nov 1908 in Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts; was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Author of Islandia, a quasi-utopian novel published eleven years after his death, which has remained almost uninterruptedly in print.

Austin married Margaret Garrad Stone on 14 Nov 1912 in Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts. Margaret (daughter of William Eben Stone and Katherine Maria Fay) was born on 19 Jul 1886 in Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts; died on 1 Sep 1937 in London, England; was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]