biography
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1788–1873)
|
| biography:
| Merchant and abolitionist, born in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA. The brother of Benjamin and Arthur Tappan, he entered into partnership (1828) with Arthur as a silk jobber in New York, and succeeded him as editor of the New York Journal of Commerce, which he sold in 1831. He 1841 he set up the first commercial credit-rating agency in the USA. With Arthur he helped fund and direct anti-slavery societies, and he actively sought close links with abolitionists abroad, and together they founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (1840) and the American Missionary Association (1846). Like his brother, Lewis gradually became more radical as an abolitionist, and in 1855 he left the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society to become an officer in the Abolition Society, which called for elimination of slavery in existing slave states. |
|
|
