WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN 1819 September 17, Friday: William Aspinwall Tappan was born to Lewis Tappan and Susannah Aspinwall Tappan. TAPPAN FAMILY A Vienna court accepted the resignation as guardian over Karl van Beethoven of Councillor Mathias von Tuscher and ruled that Ludwig van Beethoven’s nephew be placed with his mother and a court-appointed guardian, Leopold Nussböck (a city official). The 1st whaling ship arrived in the Hawaiian Islands. Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 17th of 9th M / This morning Br Isaac with Uncle & Aunt Stanton arrived from N York. Our hearts are glad to see them & thankful we are in the enjoyment of health so as to be able to receive them, but the Hand of the Lord is upon us. There is much sickness prevailing both of fever & the Disentary, which casts a gloom over poor Newport RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN 1827 The Oneida Institution opened on the bank of the Erie Canal in Whitesboro near Utica, New York under the leadership of one George W. Gale who “having impaired his own health through hard study had regained it through farm work.” It may have been an informal sort of institution until the Oneida Presbytery took it over and appointed Gale its 1st president.1 At that time it was being intended as a school for the preparation of Presbyterian ministers. According to Benjamin Thomas’s THEODORE WELD (Rutgers UP, 1950, page 18), one of the students at this Whitesboro “manual labor institution” would be Theodore Dwight Weld. William Aspinwall Tappan would attend the Academy of the Oneida Institution under “Monitor-General” Weld. Lewis Tappan or Arthur Tappan would, among others, sponsor a “Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions” and send Weld to the west on salary to “collect data from which might be deduced guiding principles for the most successful union of manual labor with study; to ascertain to what extent the manual labor system was suited to conditions in the West; and to compile a journal of his findings” (Thomas, page 31). After losing his journal of observations in a near-fatal carriage accident, Weld would never resume 1. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in his LEWIS TAPPAN AND THE EVANGELICAL WAR AGAINST SLAVERY, 1997 LSU paperback edition of 1969 Case Western Reserve U original, page 352 in “Bibliographic Essay,” has termed Thomas’s book “a short, lively life of the great antislavery orator, though it accepts uncritically the anti-Garrisonian interpretations popular at the time of its composition.” HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN it. He would apparently think of himself more as a missionary of manual labor education than as any kind of mere investigator. He would interview educators and collected facts, but primarily what he what he would do would be make speeches and promote the cause — until in the late 1830s he would burn out and go into semi- retirement. “It sounds as though he may well have helped ignite a grassroots movement rather than promote the ends, directly, of the “Society for Promoting...” (L.F. Anderson, “The Manual Labor School Movement,” Educational Review XLVI, pages 369-386). Donald G. Tewksbury’s THE FOUNDING OF AMERICAN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR (Teachers College, Columbia U, 1932; 1965 facsimile reprint, pages 28-54) lists colleges founded before the Civil War. It lists Wabash Manual Labor College, Indiana Baptist Manual Labor Institute (later Franklin College), and Knox Manual Labor College (later Knox college). DATE: After completing training in the law, William Aspinwall Tappan became a merchant. TAPPAN FAMILY DATE: William Aspinwall Tappan became interested in Transcendentalism and in literature and sought out Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. TAPPAN FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN 1843 April 30, Sunday: Ewald Flügel would publish and annotate the following Waldo Emerson letter in 1889. It is a letter that Charles Stearns Wheeler had received while seeking in Europe relief from the tuberculosis that would take his life at Leipzig on June 13th. At Leipzig he had become intimate with the American consul, Dr. Johann Gottfried Flügel (grandfather of Ewald Flügel), and had given the manuscript letter to him in token of this relation. The letter included information about Robert Bartlett, who had taken an ocean cruise to Havana on account of his health, and about Emerson’s Latin School chum Samuel Bradford, Junior, and about Ellery Channing, Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, Henry G. Wright (1814?-1846) the mystic teacher of the Ham Common School near Richmond in Surrey who in 1842 came with Alcott and Lane and joined Brook Farm and then the Fourierists, George Partridge Bradford of Brook Farm, Giles Waldo, Henry James, Sr., William Aspinwall Tappan, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and Horace Mann, Sr., as well as THE DIAL. My dear Wheeler, It is very late for me to begin to thank you by letter for your abundant care & supply of my wants, and, to point the reproach, here has come this day as I am putting pen to paper to send by Mr. Mann tomorrow, a pair of books from Mr. Weiss, brought from your own hands. Two full letters I have received, & printed the substance of the same, & had the reading of a part of two more addressed to Robert Bartlett, since I wrote you. But, all winter, from 1 January to 10 March, I was absent from home, at Washington, Baltimore, Phila & N Y, & would not write letters to Germany, on the road. — What shall I tell you. Our Dial, enriched by your manifold Intelligence, yet languishes somewhat in the scantiness of purchasing patrons, so that Miss Peabody wrote me at N.Y. that its subscription list did not now pay its expenses. I hoped that was a hint not to be mistaken, that I might drop it. But many persons expressed so much regret at the thought of its dying, that it is to live one year more. Ellery Channing has written lately some good poems for it, one, especially, called “Death” & a copy of verses addressed by him to Elizabeth Hoar. Channing has just rented the little red house next below mine, on the Turnpike, and is coming to live here next week. His friend, S.G. Ward, is editing a volume (about the size of one of your Tennyson’s) of Channing’s poetry, which will appear in a week or two. Thoreau goes next week to New York: My brother William at Staten Island has invited him to take charge of the education of his son, for a year or more, & the neighborhood of the city offers many advantages to H T. — Hawthorne remains in his seat, & writes very actively for all the magazines. Alcott & Lane remain also in their cottage. [Henry G.] Wright has withdrawn from them, & joins the Fourierists, who are beginning to buy & settle land. These are all our village news of any import: only, next week, they begin to build a railroad, which may unseat us all, & drive us into new solitudes. I do not notice any very valuable signs about us in the literary & spiritual realm. Yet I found at Washington, & at NY some friends whom I greatly cherish [these had been Giles Waldo, Henry James, Sr., and William Aspinwall Tappan]. I think our wide community with its abundant reading, & a culture not dependant on one city, but taking place everywhere in detached nervous centres, promises to yield, & already yields a great deal of private original unviolated thought & character. Nature is resolved to make a stand against the Market, which has grown HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN WILLIAM ASPINWALL TAPPAN so usurping & omnipotent. Everything shall not go to Market; so she makes shy men, cloistered maids, & angels in lone places. Brook Farm is an experiment of another kind, where a hot-bed culture is applied, and everything private is published, & carried to its extreme. I learn from all quarters that a great deal of action & courage has been shown there, & my friend Hawthorn almost regrets that he had not remained there, to see the unfolding & issue of so much bold life. He would have staid to be its historian. My friend Mr Bradford writes me from B.F. [Brook Farm] that he has formed several new friendships with old friends, such new grounds of character have been disclosed. They number in all about 85 souls. — You will have heard of Carlyle’s new work “Past & Present.” I am just now printing it in Boston (from Ms. partly) braving the chances of piracy from New York. It is certain to be popular from the fear of one class & the hope of another: and is preliminary, Carlyle seems to think, to Cromwell. It is full of brilliant points & is excellent history, true history of England in 1843. — You will have heard of Robert Bartlett’s illness, & the great anxiety of his friends respecting him. He went away, I heard, in good spirits, & somewhat amended: but his health is in a most critical condition. It is a great grief to me, who was every year learning to value him more, thought there has been something curious, as well as valuable in his unfolding.... Margaret Fuller thanks you for your account of [August von] Platen[-Hallermünd]; and wishes further to ask you to send her a copy of the Vol. III of Eckermann’s “Conversations with Goethe,” which you announced. I will pay your brother for it.