Author: Tappan, William B.
Biography:
TAPPAN, William B. (1794-1849: ancestry.com)
William Bingham Tappan was born in Beverly MA, the son of Samuel and Aurelia (Bingham) Tappan. His father, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, was a teacher, but he died in 1805 and the boy was apprenticed to a clockmaker. He already had a taste for reading and versifying but it was not until after he had moved to Philadelphia in 1815 that he began to send contributions to newspapers. He retrained to be a teacher and then in 1822 secured a position as a superintendent in the American Sunday School Union--an appointment that he held for the rest of his life, working in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and lastly (from 1837) Boston. He was licensed to preach by the Congregationalist church in 1840. In 1822 he married Amelia Colton (1796-1886) with whom he had eight children, four of whom died in infancy. Tappan was a prolific writer, mainly of poems and hymns. After the period covered by this bibliography, he brought out a supplement to the collected Poems of 1834, Poems . . . Not Contained in a Former Volume (1836), and four later gatherings, besides volumes of new verse such as Missions (1838), The Poet's Tribute (1840), The Daughter of the Isles (1844), and The Sunday School and Other Poems (1848). Benson describes him grumpily as "indefatigable," Griswold as "the most industrious and voluminous of our religious poets." He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, MA. (ancestry.com 10 Nov. 2020; findagrave.com 10 Nov. 2020; Appleton; R. W. Griswold, Poets and Poetry of America [1873] 199; Benson) HJ