Brothers in arms Brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan were successful businessmen, but commerce was never their foremost interest. They viewed making money as less important than saving souls, which is one reason they helped found The Journal of Commerce as a publication free of “immoral advertisements.”   Arthur Tappan   Lewis Tappan Reared in a devoutly Calvinist family in Massachusetts, the brothers failed in the dry-goods business before establishing a successful silk-importing business in New York in 1826. When Arthur Tappan joined Samuel F.B. Morse in establishing the JoC the following year, their main objective was to elevate the moral tone of New York. The Panic of 1837 forced the Tappans to close their silk-importing business, and almost scuttled The Journal of Commerce, but the brothers persevered. In the 1840s they founded another lucrative business enterprise when they opened the first commercial credit-rating service, the The Mercantile Agency, a predecessor of Dun and Bradstreet. The Tappan brothers made their mark in commerce and in abolitionism Throughout their careers, the Tappans devoted time and money to philanthropic causes as diverse as temperance, the abolition of slavery and the establishment of theological seminaries and educational institutions such as Oberlin and Kenyon colleges in Ohio. Their beliefs about the Sabbath extended to campaigns against stagecoach service and mail deliveries on Sundays. In the early 1830s, while a principal owner of the JoC, Arthur Tappan allied himself with William Lloyd Garrison and co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Their positions on the slavery issue weren’t universally popular. On July 4, 1834, Lewis Tappan’s New York home was sacked and his family’s furniture burned the street. The Tappans, and The Journal of Commerce, attracted bitter criticism for their campaign to free Africans who had taken over the slave ship Amistad. James Gordon Bennett Sr.’s rival New York Morning Herald denounced “the humbug doctrines of the abolitionists and the miserable fanatics who propagate them,” particularly Lewis Tappan and The Journal of Commerce. The Tappans continued their efforts to find a peaceful end to slavery. Arthur Tappan was president of the Anti-Slavery Society until 1840, when he quit to protest its decision to take on other causes, including women’s rights. The Tappans supported the Underground Railroad, which smuggled escaped slaves north to freedom, and helped found other anti-slavery organizations. Arthur Tappan died in 1865, Lewis in 1873. Both men lived long enough to see the Emancipation Proclamation fulfill much of their lives’ work.

Business information also largely traveled by water, arriving with the cargoes shipped among the ports. Imagine the hunger for that information among the merchants who awaited news of the markets they traded with or the goods they had ordered from other ports in the U.S. and Europe. Ships sailing from Europe took at least a month, and usually longer, to reach New York. But even old news was worth its weight in gold in the city’s burgeoning commercial markets.

With the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal that connected New York with the Great Lakes, New York City had already become the largest American port. During the year of the JoC’s founding, 1,414 vessels (including 386 full-rigged, 609 brigs and 381 schooners) arrived in New York. By 1840, just 13 years later, nearly 4,000 ships entered and departed the port in foreign trade and another 5,000 entered and departed in the domestic coastal trade.

Arthur Tappan had invested $30,000 in the JoC, a substantial sum, but he soon found himself too busy with his silk business to remain as proprietor. He turned control over to his brother Lewis, who was not interested in investing more money in the paper. Arthur Tappan threatened to close the paper unless he could turn it over to men who would maintain the high ideals he had laid out for it.

Tappan found such men in Gerard Hallock, the editor of the Observer, and David Hale, a nephew of Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale. Morse had brought Hale to the paper from Boston, where he had been his business manager. Hallock and Hale took control of the paper when they came up with $5,000 each. Hallock served as editor, and Hale ran the business.

From its earliest days, the paper was an outspoken supporter of free trade — a position that didn’t sit well in the mid-1800s with many in the Northeast, which was industrializing and wanted protection from foreign imports. The JoC’s editors also dispensed their views generously on the nation’s morals, as in this editorial from Feb. 28, 1839:

“In all the range of human folly there is nothing more foolish than the desire to possess boundless wealth, which after all gives the possessor nothing but trouble and anxiety. Our advice to all our friends is, ‘Do not set out to be enormously rich. Bound your desires by what you know is judicious. Let your mind run on something more noble than moneymaking. Keep your business within your means. If you are prosperous, give your money away freely.’ ”