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The Legacy of This Place: Oberlin Ohio

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The Legacy of This Place: Oberlin Ohio THE LEGACY OF THIS PLACE: OBERLIN, OHIO Barbara Brown Zikmund, Ph.D. [This paper was prepared for a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of Faith and Order in the United States “On Being Christian Together,” July 19-23, 2007 in Oberlin, Ohio. It is based on my doctoral dissertation: "Asa Mahan and Oberlin Perfectionism: 1835-1850" completed in 1969 at Duke University.] Beginnings Oberlin owed its beginning to a man named John Jay Shipherd; a Congregational minister with a keen desire to evangelize the West. Shepherd was working in Elyria, Ohio when he began dreaming of a religious colony where, as he put it, “consecrated souls could withdraw to Christian living in the virgin forest.” One of his students, named Philo Penfield Stewart, encouraged him and together Stewart and Shipherd conceived of a plan for a utopian colony and school. They proposed to name the colony after “John Frederic Oberlin,” a pious European pastor who was very popular with missionary minded American Christians, because in 1830 the American Sunday School Union published The Life of John Frederic Oberlin, Pastor of Waldback. Shipherd and Stewart were dreamers. In a providential sequence of events they obtained a tract of land southwest of Elyria and began convincing families to move to Oberlin. By March 1833 a small group began to clear the woods. Oberlin’s first resident, Peter Pindar Pesse, moved his family into a new log cabin a month later. By the end of 1833 approximately a dozen families called Oberlin home. [Robert Samuel Fletcher, History of Oberlin College (Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1943) 101-06.] About the same time Shipherd contracted with some teachers and made plans for a school. He was impressed with the success of the Oneida Institute in upstate New York, which operated on a manual labor plan. In such a school students worked the land to pay for their studies. The only other educational institution in the area, Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio, did not have enough land to support manual labor. Soon, what began as an innocent common school mushroomed into an ambitious plan for higher education. On February 28, 1834 the Ohio legislature granted the Trustees of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute a state charter. [Robert Samuel Fletcher, History of Oberlin College (Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1943) 117-124.] Things did not go well. Some teachers decided not to come; the school’s president fell ill; the students did not understand the manual labor scholarship system; and Shipherd was inept at handling funds. Although classes began on December 3, 1833 with 30 students living and working in the colony, by the end of the year the financial situation was serious. Faith and luck led Shipherd to Cincinnati, Ohio, a booming metropolis at the southern edge of Ohio. In Cincinnati a drama had been unfolding that was to have major consequences for Oberlin. 1 Lane Theological Seminary Lane Theological Seminary had been chartered in 1829 in Cincinnati, Ohio to train clergy for various forms of Protestant ministry on the expanding Western frontier. Its early years had been characterized by a battle between “New School” Presbyterian/Congregational leaders deeply committed to revivalism and abolition and “Old School” Presbyterian/Congregational leaders just as passionate to protect the doctrine and practices of classic Calvinism. During these years, Arthur Tappan, a wealthy Eastern abolitionist philanthropist, began talking about starting a “New School” theological seminary on the manual labor plan. He was convinced that such a work-study system was the only way to provide affordable education on the western frontier. To that end, Tappan commissioned Theodore Weld, a radical activist who had felt a call to ministry through revivalism and who had been a student at the Oneida Institute, to determine where this seminary might be located. Weld listened to many suggestions and eventually recommended that Tappan’s dream seminary build on the foundations of Lane Theological Seminary, where a “New School” takeover was already in progress. With Tappan’s support, Lyman Beecher, a well-known New England “New School” Congregationalist, became president of a revitalized Lane Theological Seminary. Beecher was well-known and brought prestige to the school; he was theologically progressive and positive about frontier revivalism; and most importantly, Arthur Tappan was ready to pledge a great deal of money to Lane if Beecher was president. After Beecher arrived in Cincinnati, so many students flocked to Lane that by 1833 it had one of the largest seminary enrollments in the country. Tappan was pleased, but wanted more. As an abolitionist he asked Weld to discuss immediate emancipation with the students. Therefore, early in 1834, although the faculty did not think it was prudent, the students held a debate on the question: “Ought the people of the slave-holding states abolish slavery immediately?” and whether the idea of repatriating slaves to Africa should be supported by the churches? Cincinnati is just across the river from Kentucky and the debate was very controversial. At its beginning most students agreed that slavery was wrong, but they did not consider immediate emancipation reasonable. By the end of the debate most students had experienced a change of heart and fervently believed that Christians should work for immediate emancipation. [Huntington Lyman, “Lane Seminary Rebels,” in Oberlin Jubilee, edited by William Gay Ballantine (Oberlin: Goodrich, 1884), 62.] Cincinnati was a river town bordering a slave state (Kentucky). Following the debate the students formed an Anti-Slavery Society and immediately began working to elevate the plight of blacks in the area. They established reading rooms, libraries and schools. Predictably the mingling of students with the black population aroused bitter antagonism among many town citizens. Almost overnight, what was happening at Lane became national news. [New York Evangelist, V (April 5, 1834), 54.] As the school year came to an end the faculty asked the students to disband their anti-slavery organization and to refrain from public discussion and activities. Their principles were right and their intentions good, but “they should not move so far in advance of public sentiment.” These 2 patronizing words incensed the students, who became even more zealous in their anti-slavery activities during the summer break. [Reported many years later in Asa Mahan, Out of Darkness into Light (New York and Boston: Willard Tract Repository, 1876), 116.] The Lane Board of Trustees became increasingly alarmed. In August a committee reported to the board that “no seminary should stand before the public as a partisan, on any question upon which able and pious Christians differ.” It proposed a set of regulations forbidding students to organize societies without faculty permission and to not hold meetings except for worship or study purposes. [Minutes of the Prudential Committee, August 20, 1834.] The students were outraged. When the seminary reopened in the fall the students refused to cooperate and were promptly dismissed. Although Beecher returned from his summer vacation in the East and tried to put the pieces back together, it was too late. Many documents, debates and stories circulated, while the students tried to decide what to do. They were dismayed not only by the racist attitudes of the city, the faculty and the administration; they were extremely upset by the arrogant misuse of power exhibited by the Lane Board. Not surprisingly, when John Jay Shipherd arrived in Cincinnati in late 1834 and promptly invited the students to come to Oberlin, the Lane Rebels were receptive. Shipherd told them that Oberlin was ready; all it needed was students. The students were flattered but shrewd. They wanted Asa Mahan (a Cincinnati pastor and the only member of the Lane Board of Trustees to side with the students) to be elected president of Oberlin Collegiate Institute; and they wanted John Morgan (the only Lane faculty member who had sided with the students) to be appointed to the Oberlin faculty. Furthermore, the students, Mahan and Morgan stated that they could not come until the Oberlin Board of Trustees passed a resolution guaranteeing “that students shall be received into this Institution irrespective of color.” Shipherd had no problem with their request. [Letter from John J. Shipherd to N. P. Fletcher, December 15, 1834 (Oberlin College Archives).] Unfortunately the earliest settlers of Oberlin were not of one mind about slavery. There had been no agreement on this issue when people were invited to settle in Oberlin. Nevertheless, when Shipherd discovered that many Oberlin residents opposed immediate emancipation and the idea of the school admitting blacks, he was astonished, arguing that such an egalitarian policy was “under God’s blessing.” Shipherd was sure that things would work out and with Mahan he promptly set off to raise money to support the revitalized Oberlin Collegiate Institute. While he was gone the question of race and the school admissions policy was hotly debated. Mahan and Shipherd raised a lot of money. They convinced wealthy abolitionists in the East that there was a weak revival spirit on the Western frontier and that religious heresies were threatening to “undermine the foundations of pure religion.” They persuaded the famous revivalist Charles Grandison Finney to come to Oberlin to teach. Finney, exhausted from his itinerant life as a revivalist, found the idea of Oberlin attractive. He supported the student requests that the faculty be given control over the “admission of students” and the “internal management” of the institution. He endorsed the election of Mahan as president and Morgan to the faculty. For the students the issues were bigger than race. At its core, the Lane crisis was a conflict between trustee power and student-faculty power. Shipherd, Mahan, Morgan and Finney insisted that the Oberlin Collegiate Institute had to give the faculty control over its destiny.
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