The Oneida Institute (/oʊˈnaɪdə/ oh-NYE-də)[1] was a short-lived (1827–1843) but highly influential school that was a national leader in the emerging abolitionist movement.

[3]: 32  His former teacher (in the Addison County Grammar School, Middlebury, Vermont, 1807–1808)[4] John Frost,[2]: 38  now a Presbyterian minister in Whitesboro with Harriet Lavinia (Gold) Frost his wife — daughter of Thomas Ruggles Gold,[5] — who was the primary partner in setting up the institute, bringing her considerable wealth to the enterprise.

The institute occupied "more than 100 acres (40 ha) bordered by Main Street and the Mohawk River and by Ellis and Ablett Avenues in Whitesboro village.

Oneida hired its second president, Beriah Green, from Oberlin's competitor in northeast Ohio, Western Reserve College.

The institute opened in May 1827 with 2 instructors, Gale and Pelatiah Rawson (sometimes spelled Peletiah), the latter a Hamilton College graduate and engineer that had worked on the just-completed Erie Canal.

[2]: 42  There were initially 20 students,[10]: 11  including most of the 7 that had been working in exchange for instruction on Gale's farm in Western, New York, a pilot project.

[2]: 42–43  Theodore Weld, who would become the leader of the students, was among them,[10]: 11  as was evangelist and future Oberlin president Charles Grandison Finney.

[12]: 96  Gale's goal was to supplement study with the physical and spiritual or psychological benefits of exercise; for the time this was an innovative and informed position.

[3]: 32  "The result was a large crop of crusaders and reformers, who were later turned loose to fulminate against drink, slavery, Sabbath breaking, [and] irreligion, some of whom became famous in their proseletyzing fields.

He led a 1833[contradictory] exodus of "Oneida boys...disenchanted with Gale's leadership and the lack of regular theological courses"; they rafted down the French and Allegheny rivers to Cincinnati, and constituted 24 of the 40 members of the Lane Seminary's original student body.

[3]: 67 Green "revamped Oneida's curriculum by giving greater attention to the study of ethics or moral philosophy than was the case during Gale's tenure, or indeed at most American colleges in the 1830s."

[3]: 66 In 1836 (another source[17] says 1838), in the "juvenile department", William Whipple Warren studied arithmetic, English grammar, geography, and "the Greek of Matthew's gospel".

"[10]: 2 For admittance to the school, Green stated: It is expected of those who would enjoy the advantages offered at the Oneida Institute, that they furnish trustworthy testimonials of good mental and moral character, be competent to teach a common English school, and able to recite the Greek Grammar, and profess the design of pursuing our course of study fully.

In 1833, allowing African-American students into educational institutions alongside whites was controversial at best, and aroused bitter, even violent opposition.

[3]: 54  The city of New Haven in 1831 unexpectedly and decisively prevented the setting up of "a new college for the instruction of colored youth",[26]: 11  of which there was none in United States.

[28] The Canterbury Female Boarding School, in Canterbury, Connecticut, was forced to close after it admitted one African-American girl in 1832, and the school for "young ladies and little misses of color" which replaced it was met with such escalating violence from the townspeople that director Prudence Crandall was forced to close it out of concern for the students' safety.

New-York Central College was forced to close in part because of local hostility to education of African Americans, and even more so to African-American professors.

[29]: 362 A month before Green's arrival in August 1832, 35 students formed an antislavery society on immediatist principles, the first in New York State.

After incurring the large debt (Charles Stuart called it "embarrassments"), "in 1841 the instructors relinquished nearly all of their salaries", and enrollment was cut to 25; the following year, 50–75.

[33] "[T]he education societies withdrew their aid from its students, because its course of study substituted Hebrew for Latin, and it was called an Institute, not an Academy, College, or Theological School.

This was because it was "regarded as the hot-bed of sedition, [and] that Beriah Green, the principal, had been active and successful in propagating the doctrines of abolitionism."

Second, replacing the classics with the Bible: "this did much to disconnect the institution with the general theory and habit of culture in the country and to stamp it with a certain reputation of singularity which could not fail to be in many ways disastrous."

Finally, the treating of black and white students equally, and its "iconoclastic zeal for the overthrow of social institutions and interests", led to "much popular odium".

[8]: 208–209 "Oneida was the seed of Lane Theological Seminary [c. 1830], Western Reserve University [1826], Oberlin [1833] and Knox College [1837].

Elizabeth, "lady principal", daughter of Robert Everett, two of whose brothers attended the Oneida Institute, married John Jay Butler.

The school buildings are no longer standing, and the campus land has been reused for a factory, a funeral home, and some residences.

Listed in bold are those students who, under the influence of Theodore D. Weld, left Oneida for the Lane Theological Seminary.