Lewis and Arthur Tappan were silk importers who used their great wealth to fund abolitionist causes. For this, and for all their own anti-slavery efforts, they were viewed with suspicion and hatred by many white New Yorkers. In 1834, Arthur Tappan became the primary target of an outburst of anti-abolitionist rioting. In 1836, the Alabama state legislature appealed to its sister states in the North to suppress the abolitionist campaign to "issue millions of essays, pamphlets, and pictures, and scatter them amongst our slave population, calculated to urge them to deluge our country in blood." The State of New York refused to arrest Arthur Tappan or anyone else for actions it did not deem criminal.

In 1840, after a break with William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, the brothers formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in New York. Lewis Tappan, in addition to his abolition work, was the founder of a credit-rating agency that eventually became Dun and Bradstreet.