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Chapter 3  MODERATING THE OBERLIN TRADITION, 1875–1959 O berlin’s second and third presidents, Charles G. Finney (1851–66) and James Harris Fairchild (1866–89), contributed to a lowering of the college’s liberal spirit of equality in educational opportunity. Some might argue that this development began in the middle of Fairchild’s presidency and that it coincided with the death of his predecessor in 1875.1 However, the latter had already planted the seeds for more conservative positions on blacks and women. Apparently, as early as 1835, Oberlin benefactor Lewis Tappan had begun to doubt “Finney’s attachment to anti-slavery principles and [he] threatened to withhold his subscription to the [professorship ] association.”2 A year later, Tappan demonstrated his displeasure with the evangelist from New York by refusing to make any additional payments to the endowment fund because he had concluded that “Finney is not an abolitionist.”3 In a letter to Arthur Tappan, Finney once had made a distinction between abolition and amalgamation. He had no inherent taste for amalgamation and, in fact, may have used his position on this matter to mask his prejudice against people of color. The Tappans even accused Finney of supporting “halfway abolitionism.”4 Finney’s attitude on race “must have made itself felt in Oberlin,” and Fairchild, too, was unable to escape this rationalization.5 71 Fairchild was more conservative than presidents Asa Mahan and Charles G. Finney in matters both academic and religious.6 He sometimes found himself out of step with faculty members who held more liberal views on human rights and racial issues, including professors who had wrestled with the college’s early 0nancial struggles and who had sustained the racially inclusive college and community that divine providence—as both they and the Tappan brothers believed—had favored during the founding years. That Oberlin would turn its back on the college’s commitment to interracialism has intrigued historians but has been inadequately covered. During the Civil War, Oberlin had contributed about 850 young men to the military conlict that engulfed the nation.7 President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the Union’s eventual victory in 1865 sharpened the civic identity of Oberlinians, who had sacri0ced much in supporting the rights of black Americans during the antebellum period. How special it was, too, for the local newspaper to record in November 1864 the venerable John Keep, by then eighty-three years old, going to the poll to cast his vote for Lincoln and for “our Christian Commonwealth.”8 Keep was long remembered by African Americans for having cast the deciding vote in 1835 in favor of the proposition that “colored people were allowed the privileges of the college.” Upon the passing of Keep in February 1870, Oberlin’s “colored people” held a meeting in Watson Hall to draft resolutions to express their feelings for him, to mourn “the loss of a true Christian advocate of freedom,” and to request that Oberlin blacks turn out “‘en masse’ to attend the funeral of Father Keep as a token of our love to him as a friend.”9 The principled stands of John Keep and other likeminded Oberlinians drew on the concept of equality born in the American Revolution and on a con0dent sense of America’s mission and destiny in the world.10 From the early years of the Civil War until the end of the nineteenth century, a subset of the Oberlin College community continued to press forward the idea that black and white students could learn and live together. This small core of individuals could not ignore race discrimination in the North or the South, and they exerted themselves to advance educational improvement and mutual aid wherever possible.11 Yet, as America worked its way through the Reconstruction era and toward the promise of prosperity in the Gilded Age, a tired and somewhat divided evangelical college found Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College 72 itself slowly retreating from its earlier emphasis on individual salvation, social activism, and reform. Over time, national discourse invoked less and less often the moral imperatives found in the Emancipation Proclamation , and African Americans were left to choose from a number of opposing bodies of thought (to 0ght for equal rights for all blacks or to join the back-to-Africa movement).12 Not all was a slow drift away from the founders’ ideals. Oberlinians continued their eforts to improve the lot of mankind beyond the borders of Lorain County. To...

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