Lyman Beecher

 ( 1775 Births ) 

Like most important men of the 1820s, Beecher was a colonizationist, one who supported the American Colonization Society's program of helping free Blacks emigrate to West Africa and set up there a black colony. He is reported to have reacted positively to an announcement of the planned debates on that topic at Lane. However, a June 4, 1834, meeting of the Cincinnati Colonization Society "was addressed at length, by the Rev. Dr. Beecher, president of the Lane Seminary, who defended the society in an able manner, against some of the many charges brought against it, and endeavored to show the friends of abolition, that they might and ought to act in concert with the Colonization Society." He is quoted again as participating in a meeting of the same body on October 31, 1834.

But against a background of the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1830, the agitation in England for reform and against colonial slavery, and the punishment by American courts of citizens like Reuben Crandall who had dared to attack the slave trade carried on under the American flag, news about the brutal treatment of American slaves began to be heard. John Rankin's Letters on Slavery had begun to direct the attention of Americans to the evils of slavery, and a new organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society, held its initial meeting in Philadelphia in 1833. Its president, Arthur Tappan, through whose generous donations Beecher had been induced to head the new Lane Seminary, forwarded to the students a copy of the address issued by the convention, and the whole subject was soon under discussion.

In February 1834, students at Lane, with national publicity, for 18 consecutive nights debated the colonization issue: whether the American Colonization Society, which sought to settle freed slaves in Africa, was worthy of support. The students did not have permission for the debate, but they were not stopped ahead of time. Most of them abandoned colonization as a hoax, replacing it with abolitionism. It was seen as a hoax because firstly it was logistically impossible to relocate more than a handful of freed slaves, and secondly according to Gerrit Smith, the colonization movement aimed to make slavery more defensible, not end it.

Many of the students were from the South, and an effort was made to stop the discussions and the meetings. Slaveholders from Kentucky came in and incited mob violence, and for several weeks Beecher lived in a turmoil, not knowing whether rioters might destroy the seminary and the houses of the professors. The Board of Trustees interfered during the absence of Beecher, and allayed the excitement of the mob by forbidding all further discussion of slavery in the seminary, even at meals, whereupon the students withdrew en masse. The group of about 50 students (who became known as the Lane Rebels) who left the seminary went to the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute, leaving Lane almost without students. Beecher believed himself blameless.