92

390 HISTORICAL ANNOTATION

commercial center in northeastern Scotland, Aberdeen is located on the North Sea,
ninety-five miles northeast of Edinburgh. Cohen, Columbia Gazetteer of the World,
1: 4–5.
220.24/382.17 Henry C. Wright] Abolitionist and pacifist Henry Clarke Wright
(1797–1870) was one of Garrison's close associates. Reared in central New York,
Wright served an apprenticeship as a hatmaker before studying at Andover Theo-
logical Seminary. In 1835 he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and served
as one of Theodore Dwight Weld's "seventy agents" until the executive board of
the American Anti-Slavery Society removed him in 1837 because of his extreme
opinions. At about the same time he gave up his lecturing agency in the American
Peace Society, which was also discomfited by his radicalism, and in 1838 helped
found the New England Non-Resistance Society. Nonresistance, the foundation of
Wright's reform philosophy, proclaimed the sovereignty of individual conscience
and opposed all forms of coercion, violence, and the dominion of man over man. In
practice Wright condoned violent resistance to slavery, though he personally es-
chewed violence. From 1842 to 1847 he traveled in Europe, lecturing on nonresis-
tance and abolitionism. His avowal of antisabbatarian views in Scotland and his
accusations (later retracted) that Free Churchmen were "drunkards" made Doug-
lass chary of him. "Friend Wright has created against himself prejudices which I as
an abolitionist do not feel myself called upon to withstand,'' Douglass wrote.
Wright later turned to spiritualism and helped organize the Universal Peace Union
in 1867. He died in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Douglass to Richard D. Webb, 10
November 1845, Anti-Slavery Collection, MB; Henry C. Wright to Douglass, 12
December 1846, in Lib., 29 January 1847; Henry Clarke Wright, Human Life: Il-
lustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (Boston,
1849); idem, "My First Acquaintance with Garrison and Anti-Slavery," Liberty
Bell (Boston, 1846), 148–58; Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States from the
Colonial Era to the First World War (Princeton, 1968), 516–18, 532–600, 926–
27; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 18–22, 60–61, 89–90, 159, 222–29, 234–38,
262, 278–82; ACAB, 6: 623; NCAB, 2: 232.
221.4–5/383.13 Cannon Mills, Edinburgh] Douglass is referring to Tan field
Hall, the assembly hall of the Free Church of Scotland, which was in a section of
Edinburgh known as "Canonmills." Theo Lang, ed., Edinburgh and the Lothians
(London, 1952), 59; Stewart J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Common-
wealth in Scotland (London, 1982), 334.
223.13/387.6–7 New School Presbyterian General Assembly] The predomi-
nantly Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in the United States created a national religious
organization soon after the Revolution. Although many staunchly Calvinistic Pres-
byterians were cool toward the more enthusiastic forms of revivalism, a "new
school" embraced them and closely cooperated with the interdenominational evan-
gelical benevolent movement of the early nineteenth century. Many New School-
ers also proved sympathetic to the era's moralistically defined abolitionist argu-