Disruptive to Society
The controversy over abolition at Lane Seminary (Cincinnati, Ohio) in 1834–1835 was a significant moment in the history of the abolition movement. Students gathered to debate two questions spanning eighteen meetings: “Ought the people of the Slaveholding States to abolish slavery immediately?” and “Are the doctrines, tendencies, and measures of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the influence of its principal supporters, such as render it worthy of the patronage of the Christian public?” James Bradley, a Black student who freed himself from enslavement by buying his freedom, provided significant testimony on his life experience to critique slavery and demand abolition. By the end of the debates, students led by Bradley and Theodore Dwight Weld, some of whom were sons of slaveholders, overwhelmingly supported abolition, and they began working with Black people in Cincinnati in building schools and lyceums, and attending church services together. This activity enraged white people in the city, and the president of the seminary, Lyman Beecher, along with other faculty and trustees, enforced sanctions on the students, prohibiting their interracial abolitionist work. Rather than submit to institutional leaders’ policies designed to stymie their freedom work, the majority of Lane students withdrew from the seminary and continued organizing with Black people. After 1835, many of the conflicts over student abolitionist organizing unfolded in reference to the Lane Debates and withdrawal of students.
By the fall of 1834, news of the Lane Controversy had enveloped the world of higher learning. College presidents were adamant about stifling abolitionist dissent and preventing similar student revolts in their own institutions. A meeting of college and seminary officials unanimously agreed that “the times imperiously demanded that all antislavery agitation should be suppressed by laws” similar to those proposed at Lane. College officials resolved to make anti-abolition formal institutional policy. They believed that student abolition was too controversial and would ostracize students from the South who provided key finances to their institutions, evidence of slavery’s connections to northern colleges. Student abolitionism was also antithetical to colonization and contradicted faculty’s outlook on the future of the United States as a white country.
Amherst College student abolitionists recognized the potential threat faculty power posed to their activities. In August 1834, they voted unanimously to affirm the principles of their antislavery society. The timing of the vote suggests they were aware of the stirring backlash of suppression. Yet, they remained steadfast in their convictions. Students also continued their subscriptions to movement publications and listened to a peer’s testimony detailing a recent trip to the South, where he witnessed the oppression of enslaved people. The students continued their activities despite growing opposition to student abolitionism.
By the fall of 1834, Amherst student abolitionists were directly under siege. The colonizationist college president Heman Humphrey and other faculty demanded that the student society disband. Humphrey’s sanction precipitated a fascinating exchange between students and faculty that illuminates the ways in which abolition challenged power relations in the academy. The Amherst controversy unfolded in parallel to the Lane rebellion, and student abolitionist organs at Andover Theological Seminary and Hamilton College dissolved around this time as well. In October, the students unanimously rejected Humphrey’s suggestion to cease their work. Student leaders, including Leander Thompson, authored a rebuke to Humphrey. Their declaration affirmed abolition as a moral, religious, and political movement. The students could not overlook the cause of the enslaved. “We look again over two millions of our Countrymen — we hear the clanking of their chains. We listen to their moving pleas for deliverance,” the students wrote. They believed it was their duty to follow the golden rule. Disbanding their organ, they believed, would violate their moral obligations and vocation. The students’ organization had also grown to upwards of 70 members. Signifying their evangelical abolitionism, they argued that slaveholders were guilty of the sin of enslaving people “whose birth-right is liberty and who possess immortal minds created to be free.” Abolition must come; “Fiat Justitia, ruat Coelum” (Let justice be done though the heavens fall). They resolved to continue campaigning for Black freedom.
Student abolitionism was representative of the movement’s broader impact on society. Abolition challenged the political economy of slavery as well as organized colonization. Student abolition was a direct challenge to college colonizationists. At Andover, faculty actively buoyed anti-abolitionist sentiment. This mirrored the broader reactionary backlash against abolition across the country, exemplified in the proliferation of anti-abolition mob violence in northern cities and towns, the suppression of abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets in the South, and the advent of the “gag rule” in Congress.
The censure of student abolitionism demonstrated the reach and influence of the slave power in northern institutions. Slaveholders and their sympathizers had a grip on colleges and attempted to dictate the parameters of study and debate on campus. The opposition of most faculty to abolition was a formidable obstacle to the movement and particularly for student abolitionists. Such dynamics — the institutional power of administrators and faculty beholden to capital and the ideologies tethered to it, on the one hand, and insurgent dissenting movements for a new humanity among students and some faculty on the other — resonate across the history of the university and continue in our own time.
The controversy over abolition at colleges and seminaries was deftly represented in an editorial exchange in May 1834 between James Hall and Theodore Weld. Hall was the editor of the Western Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal. A former judge and politician from Illinois, Hall moved to Cincinnati in the 1830s and chided student involvement in abolition. He believed that no seminary or college should foster such sentiments. He wrote, “There certainly ought to be some spot hallowed from the contests of party, sacredly protected from the contamination of the malignant passions, where the mind might be imbued with the lessons of truth, and peace, and honor, unalloyed with prejudice. Such sanctuaries should all our seminaries of learning be.” Hall singled out the student abolitionists at Lane for their actions when conventional wisdom had ruled abolition absurd. “The calm wisdom of the nation has long since settled down in the opinion that this subject should be left to the providence of God,” he claimed, and not to the proclivities of “boys at school wearing paper caps, flourishing wooden swords.” Hall mocked students for their dedication to Black freedom and dismissed them as youthful idealists. He went on to explain his version of the function of colleges and the purpose of higher learning.
Hall’s objective was to shield colleges from the abolition movement. According to Hall, “Colleges are public property: they are intended for the general good, and are parts of a great system of beneficent institutions, the objects of which are the education of the youth, the dissemination of useful knowledge, and the creation of a pure and elevated public sentiment.” Colleges served the public good, he claimed, and “must possess the public confidence.” To maximize the purpose and usefulness of them, he claimed, colleges must appeal to the widest audiences for patronage. But when a college assumes a partisan character, according to Hall, “its sphere of operation will be limited, and its usefulness diminished.” An institution that served a specific political interest diminished its influence in society, he believed. Hall explicitly argued that students’ public support for abolition was “at variance with those of a great body of people in some of the states” and as a result their “charity becomes limited.” In other words, a college or seminary that fostered abolition “deprive[s] the institution of the confidence of parents in the slaveholding states.”
Hall’s position was clear. Abolition obstructed college revenue streams from slaveholding patronage. His editorial neglected to mention the politicized nature of slavery and its ideological grasp on colleges, an inherently political position that contradicted his own argument for college neutrality. Acknowledging such contradictions assumed Black humanity. Hall could not accept such terms. The contradictions in his argument mounted, as he went on to praise the ACS as “one of the noblest devices of Christian benevolence and enlightened patriotism” worthy of public patronage. Hall overlooked these explicitly political assertions because the political economy of slavery underpinned society and its institutions, and the ACS was seen as the only respectable solution to slavery. For Hall and many other whites, the ACS’ conservative outlook made it the only reputable organization, as it touted opposition to slavery while aligning with their racist ideology. And yet Hall continued, “No good can be gained” from political discussions “by students, or by the establishment of political clubs in colleges.”
For Hall, the question of slavery was simply too serious for students to consider. “Surely a topic of such grave magnitude … connected with the whole scheme of civil subordination is not one to be made the theme of sophomoric declamation.” According to Hall, the possibility of colleges and seminaries becoming sites of political debate over topics like slavery was “preposterous.” Such institutions should be “kept pure from the contamination of irritating topics, and the influence of peculiar doctrines in politics.” In Hall’s view, colleges should simply continue operating as they had been, receiving money from slaveholders, and students and faculty should continue supporting the ACS. Any kind of political challenge to these systems was not to be tolerated at colleges.
Hall perceived student involvement in abolition as a political conspiracy. “Are the sympathies of these young gentlemen to be worked upon in reference to the abstract question of slavery, while a cunning agent is enlisting their prejudices, and preparing them to divulge the doctrines of party?” Hall believed that abolitionists were indoctrinating “embryo clergymen” to spread abolition across the country. This was a “cunningly devised scheme,” Hall quipped, but he assured his readers that “the indignation of the public will put it down, and the united voice of all moderate and reflecting men … will be raised to admonish these gentlemen, to mind their own business, and their books.” Hall condemned the introduction into colleges of abolition or any controversial topic because he believed it was antithetical to the purpose of college education and would be disruptive to society.
Hall’s meditation on the proper political role of colleges in society reveals his belief in their significance in shaping political and social issues. Hall’s position aligned with that of many college officials as they contended with the radical challenge of student abolition.
Weld countered Hall’s criticism of student abolition. Rebuking Hall’s derisive characterization of students, Weld showed that the vast majority of Lane students were in their twenties and some in their early thirties. “Thirty of the theological class are over twenty-six years old, fourteen over twenty-eight, and nine are between thirty and thirty five,” Weld wrote. He retorted, “So much for the babyhood of theological students.” Far from a result of uninformed, passionate impulse, the abolitionist sentiment of the Lane students was based on their study of various arguments related to slavery, abolition, and colonization, and they drew their own conclusions. He outlined the proceedings of the Lane Debates and emphasized that rather than sowing seeds of discord, “harmony and brotherly love prevailed not only during the debate, but still remains unbroken.” Weld was writing in May of 1834, before the controversy with the faculty ensued. To that point, according to Weld, five students had left the seminary, but their withdrawals had nothing to do with the rise of abolition among students. In fact, 18 students had enrolled or expressed interest in joining the seminary after the debates. Rather than fomenting chaos among students, as the detractors claimed, abolition increased enrollment at the seminary.
And yet, Weld lamented, Hall called for silence on such a divisive issue. “What! Are our theological seminaries to be awed into silence upon great questions of human duty?” he asked, and continued, “Are they to be bribed over to the interests of an unholy public sentiment, by promises of patronage, or by threats of its withdrawal?” Weld condemned colleges’ monied interests with the slave power. Should students be “tutored into passivity,” or should all topics of discussion be banned “except upon the popular side?” he asked. Are students to avoid all issues that “involve human interests” in order to pacify popular sentiment? Weld was making an argument for an activist education regardless of public perception or financial ties. Indeed, the state of public opinion on slavery was all the more cause for students to discuss slavery. Those “who preach in the nineteenth century must know the nineteenth century,” he asserted. Students were obligated to discuss political and social questions facing the society in which they lived. He focused on Hall’s hypocrisy and argued that all sorts of political questions had been discussed in colleges. “Colonization discussions have been held, and colonization societies have long existed in almost all our institutions of learning,” and there was no public outcry among whites against it. Temperance, moral societies, antigambling and antidueling societies “have been rife for years in our institutions of learning,” Weld wrote. The only difference with the ascendance of abolition in these places was that many whites, especially white benefactors, objected to its principles. “So long as discussions upon the subject of slavery conduced to results in accordance with your views, your horizon, it would seem, was unclouded with portents of ominous boding.”
As long as students supported Hall’s politics, Weld observed, he had no issue with political organizations at colleges. “But recent discussions have produced convictions about slavery, which disown affinity with yours,” Weld charged, “and have led to the adoption of measures at war with your views of expediency and now forsooth disaster and downfall assail the cause of education.” Weld laid bare the contradictions in Hall’s essay and skewered his arguments, which benefited the slavocracy and the politics of racism exemplified in established social relations. He also condemned Hall’s position regarding public sentiment reacting to forestall abolition. That type of rhetoric led to anti-abolition mob violence. Weld recognized it as such, writing “This is precisely the inflammatory language, word for word, which was used by certain demagogue prints in the city of New York last October.” Weld had put his finger on the suppressionist actions of mob violence as violations of free discussion and abolitionist dissent. “Has it come to this? Is free inquiry to be paralyzed by the terror of pains and penalties?” When it came to discussing Black freedom, the vaunted rights of the Constitution and the law of the land could be denied with impunity by the power of white mobs.
The exchange revealed the stakes of abolition at institutions of higher learning. Hall’s arguments represented the type of college education that was firmly entrenched at Eurocentric American colleges and seminaries. It was an education for the so-called common good, buttressed by white-supremacist ideology, and in practice was exemplified by college colonizationists: remove free Black people from the country while sustaining financial ties to slaveholding patronage in northern institutions. In contrast, Weld articulated an activist education that facilitated study in social and political issues and fostered student agitation for Black freedom. His view of advanced education was to allow any and all discussion on political topics and let students decide for themselves their own positions, not to be dictated by donors and public sentiment.
Hall’s objective, Weld summarized, had been to “muzzle discussion upon the subject of slavery, especially in institutions of learning.” But Hall’s efforts were for naught. As Weld explained to Hall, “You are too late, sir. Discussion has begun.” Indeed, discussion had begun, and students were leading the charge for abolition at colleges from Maine to Ohio.
Excerpted from Dissenting Forces: A History of Abolition and Black Thought in Higher Learning by Michael E. Jirik. Copyright © 2025 New York University. Excerpted with permission of New York University Press. All rights reserved.
