Weld, Theodore Dwight

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Theodore Dwight Weld
    Place of Birth
    Burial Place
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    3
    Family
    Ludovicus Weld (father), Elizabeth Clark Weld (mother),Angelina Emily Grimké (wife, 1838), Sarah Moore Grimké (sister-in-law)
    Education
    Other
    Other Education
    Andover Seminary
    Occupation
    Educator
    Journalist
    Other
    Other Occupation
    Lecturer
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Quakers (Society of Friends)
    Other
    Other Religion
    Congregationalist
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
    Women’s Rights

    Theodore Dwight Weld (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    When his voice gave out in 1837, [Theodore Weld] took upon himself the task of creating a new roster of antislavery speakers….At training sessions in New York in late 1837, he met Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké, renegade sisters from South Carolina's slaveholding elite who had become antislavery activists. Angelina Grimké and Weld fell in love. Their courtship coincided with the Grimké sisters forthright advocacy of woman's equality, an issue that acted as a lightning rod for various matters, dividing abolitionists and inducing a schism in their ranks. Weld was caught between warring factions. In love with Angelina and egalitarian in his own views toward women, he nonetheless worried that agitating the "woman question" would divert energies from antislavery and bring that movement new opposition. After a romance made stormy in part by the tensions among reformers, they were married in 1838 in a ceremony marked by explicit commitment to equality of the sexes. They also vowed to share their life together with Sarah Grimké, who would live with them for more or less the rest of their lives.

    Almost immediately Weld and the Grimkés began work on American Slavery As It Is (1839), a compilation of firsthand descriptions of slave life in the South. It became the most widely distributed and most influential of all American antislavery tracts, even influencing Harriet Beecher Stowe's depiction of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
    Robert H. Abzug, "Weld, Theodore Dwight," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00744.html.
    Chicago Style Entry Link

    Abzug, Robert H. Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

    view record
    Earle, Jonathan. “The Making of the North's 'Stark Mad Abolitionists': Anti-Slavery Conversion in the United States, 1824-54.” Slavery & Abolition 25, no. 3 (2004): 59-75. view record
    Weld, Theodore Dwight. American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839. view record
    Weld, Theodore Dwight. The Bible against Slavery: An Inquiry into the Patriarchal and Mosaic systems on the subject of Human Rights. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1837. view record
    How to Cite This Page: "Weld, Theodore Dwight," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/23158.