George Washington Gale founded an experimental college called the Oneida Institute (never to be confused with the Oneida Community), organized according to the Manual Labor System which would be characteristic of other schools founded under his influence, for example Knox College in Illinois and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Under this system, students and faculty did the work the college required, feeding hogs or planting vegetables or running the printing press. The system was intended to enhance the health and usefulness of educated people, and to remove economic barriers to education and class distinctions within it, by allowing and obliging students to pay their way by work. The Institute served to prepare Finney converts for divinity school. Its student body was racially integrated and deeply committed to abolition. Arthur Tappan supported the school financially and he sent his sons there.
When the first class of Oneida students were ready for divinity school, Tappan undertook to provide one for them. He sent a student, Theodore Weld, to find a good site for a school in the Middle West, and Weld chose Cincinnati, where Presbyterians had already started the Lane Theological Seminary. Tappan promised to support the school if Lyman Beecher would go to Ohio and serve as its president. He also undertook to pay Beecher’s salary. Beecher moved his family from Connecticut to Cincinnati in 1832, where they remained for eighteen years. In the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Lane Theological Seminary was taken possession of as an anti-slavery fortification by a class of about twenty vigorous, radical young men, headed by that brilliant, eccentric genius Theodore D. Weld; who came and sustained themselves there ostensibly as theological students under Dr. Beecher and Professor Stowe, really that they might make of the Seminary an antislavery fort.”
How all these powerful personalities interacted is not very clear. There was tension of a predictable kind between Beecher, a great intellectual of the period, and the populist Finney (though this difference is easily exaggerated — Beecher, a Yale graduate, was the son of a blacksmith, and a revivalist himself. Finney, a lawyer, lacked formal training for the ministry, but his writings were published and studied in Britain and Germany). It was after contact with Finney that Beecher agreed to leave the East and the eminence he enjoyed there to shepherd Finney’s converts through divinity school. In the event, most of the students left Lane Theological Seminary in a body, to protest attempts by the trustees to forbid abolitionist activities and discussion — Weld and the Oneida graduates had converted all their fellow students to antislavery, using Finney’s revivalist methods, and they had given themselves over to setting up schools for the black population of Cincinnati and teaching in them, printing tracts and mailing them into the South, lending their horses to fugitives from Kentucky, and, worst of all, simply socializing with local black families. Cincinnati was already a big city with a painful racial history and a penchant for mob violence, and the seminary was threatened. Beecher is blamed for failing to intervene to prevent the trustees from acting, but the situation might well have been truly untenable. Only a few years earlier, the city had attempted to deport its entire black population to Canada. It was usual there, as elsewhere, for resentment to find targets of opportunity.
Beecher eventually had the trustees’ rules rescinded, and his school and his circle remained an important center of abolitionism. The so-called Lane Rebels lived in Cincinnati, teaching one another and continuing their antislavery activity, supported by Arthur Tappan, till Tappan discovered Oberlin College, then in the planning stages. He moved the students to Oberlin, funded the school, and brought in Charles Grandison Finney as professor of theology. “In a great forest, in a mud hole” as Finney described it, the college could institutionalize the radicalism of the Lane Rebels without giving unbearable offense. Oberlin students, most notably the great Theodore Weld, taught and evangelized all over the Middle West, turning public opinion against slavery.
Rev. George Washington Gale came west, too, and founded Knox College, a school so Puritan it did not observe Christmas and so radical that it did celebrate the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies. Colleges with strong religious affiliations and reformist social agendas proliferated through the Middle West, little intellectual communities that put into practice their belief in educating women, in forbidding the use of alcohol, in expediting the escape of fugitives from slavery, in enlarging the influence of religious revivalism. This last brought educated people into intense contact with the scattered and transient population of the region, and made them feel moral responsibility for national policies, in a setting where history had not yet hardened around them.
In the manner of colonists, these people came west to do what they could not do at home. Arthur Tappan had tried to assist the founding of a school for young black girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, and a college for black men in New Haven, and both attempts had ended in mob violence. Theodore Weld preached abolition all over Ohio, and absorbed threats and abuse, and made converts. But in Troy, New York, crowds injured him so badly that he never recovered his health. In the East, major institutions encouraged opposition to abolition. But the abolitionists’ educating and institution-building, their preaching and publishing and propagandizing, were unrivaled in the Middle West, virtually unanswered, except by mobs, whose excesses they had learned to exploit to excite public sympathy. When Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman’s son, went back to accept a pulpit in Brooklyn, New York, he brought the experience of an Ohio abolitionist, educated in the skills of political evangelization, who had worn guns to protect an antislavery publisher, who raised money in Northern churches to arm New England colonies in Kansas. His sister Harriet clearly knew the skills of evangelization as well as he did. Both of them undertook to shape public opinion, in one degree or another to make history by interpreting present and collective experience. By any reckoning, they succeeded.
Thus I arrive at last at my starting place, William Holmes McGuffey and his readers. It is hard to know much about McGuffey. He was a westerner by the standards of the time, born in western Pennsylvania in 1800, rescued from childhood poverty by a benevolent schoolmaster, a teacher himself at age fourteen. He became a college professor and then a Presbyterian minister, and lectured and preached for decades, leaving neither lecture nor sermon behind him because he did not write them down. He came to Cincinnati from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and served for several years as president of Cincinnati College. He was influential in the creation of a public school system in Ohio, the first such system in the country.
William B. Smith approached Catherine Beecher, who ran a school for girls, with his plan for a series of readers. She declined and suggested McGuffey. Catherine may have been the most conservative of Lyman Beecher’s children. She was an abolitionist, however, like her father, Smith’s pastor. So far as I have discovered, there is no actual evidence to indicate the kind and degree of affinity that existed between McGuffey and the Beecher circle, beyond a commitment to establishing and strengthening public education. Catherine Beecher went on to establish the National Board of Popular Education to send women teachers into the western territories, an undertaking complementary to McGuffey’s. Calvin Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher and professor at Lane, traveled to Prussia to report on education there, for the purposes of McGuffey’s design of a system for Ohio. Clearly this circle did not make clean distinctions between preaching, teaching, and reform, and among them education was a political and visionary enterprise, designed to establish new norms of thought and behavior. Of course the laws that forbade the education of slaves were a great proof of the liberating force of education.