Success Quote by Lewis Tappan

Tappan, the abolitionist businessman, is blunt about a truth reformers still wrestle with: moral suasion alone doesn’t move crowds; momentum does. The line reads like organizing advice stripped of sentimentality. “Draw off the people” frames the public less as a jury to be persuaded than as a mass to be redirected, diverted from a current that’s already carrying them. A “bad or wicked custom” isn’t just individual vice here; it’s social habit, the kind of normalized cruelty that survives because it’s routine, profitable, and convenient.

The language of “beat up for a march” is telling. It’s not only metaphorical militarism; it’s an early sketch of what we’d now call mobilization and message discipline. Tappan is describing attention as a scarce resource and spectacle as a tool. “Make an excitement” isn’t shallow hype for its own sake; it’s a strategy for puncturing complacency. If a practice is embedded in daily life, it requires a public interruption to make it newly visible and therefore newly contestable.

Context matters: Tappan operated in an America where abolitionists were harassed, censored, and attacked, and where business networks and churches quietly lubricated the system they claimed to regret. His subtext is almost accusatory: people don’t abandon injustice because they’re informed; they abandon it when their social environment changes, when refusing to notice becomes harder than paying attention. The quote is less a pep talk than a tactical memo from someone who understood that ethics, in a marketplace democracy, often needs marketing.