Beriah Green
Beriah Green Jr. (March 24, 1795 – May 4, 1874) was an American reformer, abolitionist, temperance advocate, college professor, minister, and head of the Oneida Institute.
[7]: 52–53 He graduated from Middlebury College in 1819, where he was valedictorian,[5]: 2 [6] and then studied to become a missionary (minister) at Andover Theological Seminary (1819–20).
After recovering, in January 1821 he married Marcia Deming of Middlebury, Vermont, and was briefly in the service of the Missionary Board in Lyme, Connecticut, and on Long Island.
[8] In 1826 his wife died, leaving him with two children, and the same year he married Daraxa Foote, also of Middlebury, who outlived Beriah.
In 1829 he accepted a call to the distinctly "orthodox" (conservative) church of Kennebunk, Maine, but the next year left, to occupy a new position,[3]: 14 Professor of Sacred Literature (Bible), and college chaplain, in the one-man theological department of Western Reserve College and Preparatory School, in Hudson, Ohio, 30 miles (48 km) from Cleveland.
In the Cleveland area (the "Connecticut Western Reserve") Beriah came in contact with more African Americans than he had in Vermont or Maine.
[13] Fugitive slaves traveling to Canada on the Underground Railroad passed through northeast Ohio: John Brown, of the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, grew up in Hudson (1805–1825), running a tannery, then moved to a more isolated and safer (for fugitive slaves) site in northwest Pennsylvania, a major Underground Railroad stop.
College president Charles Backus Storrs, who had recommended Green, a contemporary of his at Andover Theological Seminary,[3]: 18 had been a supporter of colonization as a solution to "the negro problem".
"[7]: 53 Green used the college chapel four Sundays in a row to attack the American Colonization Society and its supporters.
Green's four sermons on slavery, delivered in November and December 1832, constitute a turning point of national significance.
As standing for the present alone in that department of instruction, the responsibility of preaching in the College chapel, it is generally known, devolves upon me.
[15] In his sermons, Green took the position, unusual in his day, that negroes were the equals of whites, and the victims of irrational prejudice based on no more than the color of their skin.
Green was chosen as president of the organizational meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1833 in Philadelphia.
Green engaged in a series of public debates in Utica with Joseph H. Danforth of the American Colonization Society, about whether free Blacks should emigrate to Africa.
[10]: 155 [20] In 1835, Green and his friend Alvan Stewart convinced Gerrit Smith to come to an organizational meeting for a New York Anti-Slavery Society, which they had called, in Utica.
An anti-abolitionist mob, including Congressman Samuel Beardsley and other "principal citizens", "reviled the participants" and forced the convention to adjourn.
[7]: 32 The Panic of 1837 hit the Oneida Institute hard — its benefactors the Tappan brothers were ruined and unable to fulfill their pledges — and the college began to decline.
After the party failed to make an impact on American politics, Green became bitter with the democratic process.
His student William E. Allen said Green "is a profound scholar, an original thinker, and, better and greater than all these, a sincere and devoted Christian.
"[23] Charles Stuart, another contemporary, seeking to raise funds for the Institute: "The labors of President Green in the antislavery cause, in the way of lectures, and the use of the press, have been various, indefatiguable, abundant, in the face of evils and proscriptions of various kinds, and eminently successful.
