Success Quote by Lewis Tappan

Abolitionist praise with a merchant’s measuring tape still visible. Lewis Tappan is admiring a group of men whose bodies have been thinned by hardship, yet he can’t resist cataloging them the way a 19th-century businessman catalogs inventory: flesh, forms, limbs. The sentence tries to do two things at once: reassure a skeptical white readership that these men are worth respecting, and convert moral sympathy into social credibility.

The intent is strategic uplift. Tappan isn’t merely noting attractiveness; he’s arguing for human equality in the currency his era spent most readily: appearance, “intelligence,” and the ability to present as respectable. “Indeed” signals he’s countering an expectation. The subtext is that the audience has been trained to imagine Black people, enslaved people, or impoverished laborers as degraded, physically and mentally. He concedes “thin in flesh” to acknowledge suffering without romanticizing it, then pivots to a verdict that matters in a racist society: “as good looking and intelligent a body of men as we usually meet with.”

Context matters: Tappan, a prominent businessman turned abolitionist organizer, operated in a world where advocacy often had to pass through the gate of white middle-class sensibilities. The line reveals both the radical and the limitation of that approach. It humanizes, yes, but it also implies a quiet test: their claim to dignity is strengthened because they meet conventional standards of looks and intellect. The sentence works because it exposes the era’s moral battlefield: not only whether these men are free, but whether the public can be made to see them as “men” at all.