Henry Clarke Wright

For more than two decades Henry Clarke Wright (1797–1870) was a controversial abolitionist, pacifist, anarchist and feminist.

Clarke was born in Sharon, Connecticut to father Seth Wright, a farmer and house-joiner, and mother Miriam, a stay-at-home seamstress.

When Wright was four his family moved to the “western country” of Hartwick; it was a small, poor town, on the frontier in upstate New York.

Working as an apprentice to a hat-maker in Norwich, New York, he experienced an emotional religious conversion during a revival meeting and went on to study first under the local minister, and then at the Andover Seminary School in 1819 for four years. Afterwards, in 1823, Wright married a wealthy widow by the name of Elizabeth LeBreton Stickney, and moved to the upscale area of Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Wright's interest in reform movements preceded Henry’s own. She influenced his decision to turn away from the parish ministry and enter the field of missionary work and reform in the 1830s.

By this time Wright had adopted radical positions on two controversial reform issues that were breaking up evangelical consensus. In the peace movement, he sided with radical pacifists who promoted an ethic of non-violence in all forms of conflict. Consequently, in 1836 he was appointed an agent of the American Peace Society. On matters of anti-slavery, he sided with William Lloyd Garrison promoting immediate abolition.

Wright later, upon resigning from the American Peace Society, was quickly employed by Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society. He wrote columns for Garrison’s famous anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and gained respect among Northerners for his strong moral beliefs contained within his call for non-violent immediate abolition. He also had the special responsibility of organizing children’s anti-slavery movements in towns across the Northeast.

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