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Chapter 1  ORIGINAL COMMITMENTS TO BLACK EDUCATION, 1833–35 O ne of the early events that established the character of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute was the decision in 1835 to accept black students. Oberlin’s founders understood the signi0cance of the egalitarian step they were taking when they expanded the admissions policy of the institute, and they took it with caution and trepidation. The decision came about through a combination of 0nancial need, chance opportunity, and the colonists’ religious sense of obligation. It is at best indirectly expressed in the twelve-point Oberlin Covenant.1 In the interests of the Oberlin Colony the colonists were prepared to do what they could “to extend its inluence” to save the human race after Adam and Eve had committed original sin and fallen from God’s grace. Yet, “this was not a church covenant,” wrote one of the signers, but a colonial covenant whose purpose was to turn away some prospective colonists “that might have been drawn into the enterprise by considerations of . . . worldly advantages.”2 Founder John Jay Shipherd took the Covenant with its speci0c articles of agreement with him when he traveled to the eastern states to recruit prospective colonists in late November 1832; however, the pivotal document that formed the social and religious life of the place under the supposed requirements of Christian 15 benevolence was probably not signed until the settlement began a year later, and after a few years the colonists laid it aside.3 The intent of the covenant did not in any way 0x the creation of an interracial educational setting in the United States.4 Just two years after the establishment of the college, cofounder John J. Shipherd was seeking additional 0nancial resources to rescue the institution from possible economic collapse. At about the same time, abolitionist students and faculty at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati—a group known as the Lane Rebels—were seeking a new educational home after President Lyman Beecher and the faculty of the seminary had dismissed them late in 1834. Lane was dominated by conservative Presbyterians , many of whom were colonizationists, and it had become a center of theological controversy over the moral question of slavery.5 The growing spirit of intolerance prompted the departure of the aggressive and restless contingent of abolitionist students. After an interim of about 0ve months, Oberlin’s collegiate institute invited the thirty-two students to enroll in its small, newly formed theological department. The Lane students, some of them the sons of slaveholders , immediately changed the character and composition of the school. They had arrived in Oberlin already pro0cient in the Greek and Hebrew languages and understanding the value of manual labor. They had also garnered experience working among the free black population of Cincinnati to establish Sunday schools, lyceums, and circulating libraries. A Lorain County farmer named Jabez Burrell, who lived eleven miles away in She2eld, came forward to board and lodge many of the Lane Rebels. Other friends and neighbors of the collegiate institute helped the ledgling school establish the new theological department by providing money and supplying labor to erect a building to accommodate the students.6 Constructed in 1835, the one-story building stood for 0ve years and was known as Slab Hall or “Rebel Hall.”7 The Cincinnati exodus included Lane trustee and abolitionist minister Asa Mahan, who became the 0rst president of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute . Lane professor John Morgan joined the Oberlin faculty. New York City merchants and Congregational revivalists Arthur and Lewis Tappan 0nanced these departures. They also provided funds to underwrite the evangelical causes of the college and urged the institute with their purses Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College 16 to recruit their friend, New York revivalist Charles G. Finney, to direct the theological department itself. Among the conditions Finney set for accepting the ofer, in addition to being able to labor as an evangelist, were two actions taken in February 1835 by the Oberlin trustees: placing the internal management of the college in the hands of the “new anti-slavery faculty ” and resolving to support “the education of people of color.”8 In 1883, on the occasion of Oberlin’s Jubilee celebration, President James Harris Fairchild declared that this complex arrangement for church, school, and society was the work of Providence.9 The arrival of the Lane students and faculty caused Oberlin “to be known as the ‘decided opponent’ of slavery as it is practiced upon the colored people of this country...

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