With the city being on the border of the South, a lot of fugitive slaves and freedmen went through Cincinnati, including James Bradley, who would participate in the pivotal Lane slavery debates in the 1830s.

"[5]: 25–26  The Presbyterian tradition was to have educated clergy, and there was no seminary serving the vast and increasingly populated lands west of the Allegheny Mountains.

[5]: 28 In the summer of 1828 Ebenezer Lane, a New Orleans businessman, "made known his interest in setting up a theological seminary near Cincinnati based on the manual labor system.

[6]: 5  "Walnut Hill was a pretty little village, quite distant from Cincinnati, the first stopping-place for the stage on the Madisonville or some other northern Ohio route.

There is just enough, and just the right admixture of hills and dale, forest and field, to give it the effect we love in gazing upon a calm and quiet scene of beauty," wrote a visiting minister in 1842.

[8]: 5 A board was set up in October 1828, and the Ohio General Assembly issued a charter on February 11, 1829, specifying that the manual labor system would be "the fundamental principle" of the Seminary.

"[9]: 50  In July, 1830, Beckwith visited the Oneida Institute and wrote back to Cincinnati that manual labor worked well and that the farmers and mechanics of the neighborhood approved of it.

"[10]: 41 In January, 1831, George Washington Gale, president of the Oneida Institute, recommended a steward to supervise the Seminary farm; in February the trustees made the appointment.

There were no teachers and apparently only two students, Amos Dresser and Horace Bushnell, who had come out from the Oneida Institute and had been given special permission by the trustees to occupy rooms in the lonesome Seminary building.

As he put it in his report, "though I can no longer publicly advocate it as the agent of your society, I hope soon to plead its cause in the humbler sphere of personal example, while pursuing my professional studies, in a rising institution at the west, in which manual labor is a DAILY REQUISITION.

In March of 1833 thirty-two students, including apparently all the Oneida Institute "alumni" then present, petitioned against the serving of that harmful and expensive drink, coffee, at the boarding house.

"[9]: 55  Early in June 1833, Weld, Robert L. Stanton, and "six other young Finneyites" arrived in Cincinnati, having completed their journey by river from Rochester and Oneida.

"[9]: 54  However, although technically enrolled as a student, and having declined the chair of Sacred Rhetoric and Oratory,[17] Weld was the de facto head of Lane; "He...told the trustees what appointments to make.

A seven-page response, under the title "Education and slavery", appeared in the Cincinnati-based Western Monthly Magazine;[27] Weld published a lengthy reply.

Since the eighteenth century, Quakers and others had preached the sinfulness of slave ownership, and the number of freedmen (and freed women) was rising and showed every sign that it would continue to grow.

Particularly telling to Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist philanthropist, was that the American Colonization Society allowed the sale of alcohol (as well as guns and chewing tobacco) in the colonies that became Liberia.

Among the participants: Arguments addressing the first question in favor of the immediate abolition of slavery included: In response to the second question, the Reverend Samuel H. Cox, who had served as an agent for the Colonization Society, testified that his view of the Society's plan changed when he realized that no blacks, despite the claims of those who ventured to speak for them, would ever consent to be removed from their native country and transplanted to a foreign land.

So taking the tongs, she heated them red hot, and put them upon the bottoms of her feet ; then upon her legs and body; and, finally, in a rage, took hold of her throat.

This shrewd and intelligent black, cut up these white objections by the roots, and withered and scorched them under the sun of sarcastic argumentation, for nearly an hour, to which the assembly responded in repeated and spontaneous roars of laughter, which were heartily joined in by both Colonizationists and Abolitionists.

At the end of the debate, many of the participants concluded not only that slavery was a sin, but also that the policy of the American Colonization Society to send blacks to Africa was wrong.

Inspired by Prudence Crandall's example, he also set up a school for black women, and Arthur Tappan paid $1,000 (equivalent to $30,520 in 2023) for four female teachers to relocate from New York to Cincinnati.

[25]: 170  As Lewis Tappan put it in his biography of his brother, "[T]he anti-slavery students of Lane Seminary established evening-schools for the adults, and day-schools for the children of the three thousand colored of Cincinnati.

In addition to this two of our students, one theological and one literary [Augustus Wattles and Marius Robinson[35]: 94 ], have felt so deeply their degradation, and have been so affected by the intense desire to acquire knowledge which they exhibit, that they have taken a dismission from the institution, and commenced a school among the blacks in the city.

[5]: 117  In 1835, after the whipping of Amos Dresser, a Lane student, in Nashville, newspapers of that city "warn[ed] the leaders of that institution to be cautious how they proceed.

"[43] As Cincinnati businessmen, the members of the school's board of trustees were quite concerned about being associated with such a radical expression of abolitionism, which could have led to a physical attack on the Seminary.

"[44] President Beecher did not want to escalate the matter by overreacting, but when the press began to turn public opinion against the students that summer, he was fundraising in Boston.

This group of students included William T. Allan, Huntington Lyman, John Tappan Pierce, Henry B. Stanton, and James A. Thome.

John W. Alvord, Huntington Lyman, Henry B. Stanton, James A. Thome, and Samuel Wells gave lectures twice a week in the black community.

"[5]: 132 This was the point at which the former Lane students came into contact with John J. Shipherd, founder of the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute, "a college in name only" that had been founded the previous year (1833).

The most controversial condition insisted on by the Rebels was that Oberlin commit itself to accepting African-American students in general, and the very popular James Bradley in particular, equally.