Clarke was born in Sharon, Connecticut, to father Seth Wright, a farmer and house-joiner (builder), and mother Miriam, a stay-at-home seamstress.

When he was four, the family moved to the "western country" of Hartwick; it was a small, poor town, on the frontier in upstate New York.

Working as an apprentice to a hat-maker in Norwich, New York, Wright experienced an emotional religious conversion during a revival meeting.

He wrote columns for Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, and gained respect among Northerners for moral beliefs contained within his call for non-violent immediate abolition.

He published two accounts of conversations he had with the Grimkés about extending his radical pacifist views to question all forms of domination in the family.

[1] At a large meeting in Boston's Melodeon Hall on May 30, 1850, Wright was the first of four male speakers to endorse Lucy Stone's proposal to call the first National Woman's Rights Convention.

Still claiming to be faithful to non-resistance, Wright argued to the Society that true abolitionists should furnish arms for slave insurrection.

John Brown is and will be a power far more efficient.The Natick Resolution was well-recognized immediately prior to the American Civil War as a leading document of militant abolitionism.

[3][4]William Ellery Channing explained this reaction by characterizing reformer Wright as among "the travelling conversational Shylocks ... each the special savior on his own responsibility".