Initially working as a teacher in Butzbach, he then spent a short time as a pastor in Ober-Gleen, a district of Giessen.

Following Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's example, Weidig taught his pupils drill and physical exercise and in 1814 founded a parade ground on the Schrenzer, a north-eastern foothill of the Taunus - later historians and biographers thus called him the "father of Hessian drill".

On 5 April 1834 Weidig was suspended from his teaching post and demoted to a small village called Ober-Gleen, now in Kirtorf, im Vogelsberg.

When the "Hessischer Landbote" project was betrayed in summer 1834, Büchner fled to Straßburg but Weidig refused to emigrate to Switzerland with his family.

Ill and desperate, he had written letters to his wife from prison, which were retained by his questioners "for state-political reasons" for many years after his death.