The Lane Debates: When the Students Were Right

In February eighteen thirty-four, the students of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati held a debate that lasted eighteen days. The question on the table was slavery: not a theoretical question about its morality, but a practical one about what to do about it now. The students argued for immediate abolition.

Lane had been founded to train Presbyterian ministers for the frontier. Its president was Lyman Beecher, Harriet's father, a man of considerable gifts who was not always comfortable with where his students were heading. The student body included many young men from the South who had firsthand knowledge of what slavery was. Their testimony during the debates was direct and detailed. Harriet Beecher Stowe sat in the audience and listened.

The debates attracted national attention, including hostile attention. Pro-slavery interests put pressure on the seminary's board. The board moved to ban further public discussion of slavery at Lane, to dissolve the students' anti-slavery society, and to require prior approval for student organizations. Beecher, who was away during much of the debate and the fallout, acquiesced.

The students refused. Dozens of them, joined by a Lane trustee named Asa Mahan and supported by the philanthropist Arthur Tappan, left Lane and transferred to Oberlin College in northern Ohio. Mahan became Oberlin's first president. Tappan funded the transfer. Oberlin became one of the centers of American abolitionism and one of the first American colleges to admit Black students.

Lane Seminary went into decline. Beecher spent much of the following decade defending himself from both sides: the abolitionists who felt he had surrendered to proslavery pressure, and the conservatives who thought he had allowed the debates to go too far in the first place. Lane finally closed in nineteen thirty-two.

Oberlin is still open. The students who left were right, and they knew it before anyone with authority over them was willing to say so.