Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Cincinnati Lane Seminary : Together With the Laws of the Institution.and a Catalogue of the Officers and Students. November, 1834

Cincinnati: Corey and Fairbank, 1834. First Edition. 47 pages, complete; 8 7/8" x 5 ⅜." Slight odor else near fine, very good minus overall. Very Good. The Lane Seminary debates were perhaps the most extended and famous of many colonization versus emancipation debates that happened in the 1830s. "Founded in 1829, Lane was bakrolled by Arthur Tappan and headed by Henry Ward Beecher. In 1831 a Rev. Samuel Crothers published letters against slavery in a local paper, and a year later Stanton, a student at Lane, held that the North should not help the South put down a slave rebellion. In 1834 Weld and his followers from Oneida became students at Lane. With the charismatic Weld leading off, students armed with literature from the ACS and AASS explored immediatism for eighteen days in two-hour-plus sessions... to the dismay of the administration, the students not only formed an anti-slavery society but also started teaching in Cincinnati's black community. Contact with African Americans made the Lane rebels even more committed to immediatism and against colonization. Their activities caused an uproar, and school authorities sought to ban discussion of slavery." Seventy-five students would end up leaving the seminary, and financed by Tappan, make their way to the fledgling Oberlin University, contributing to the establishment of Oberlin as a center of the abolition movement. The effect on young Harriet Beecher Stowe, who witnessed the debates, is not known exactly, though the play and film Sons and Daughters of Freedom, depict the events as a transformative event in her attitudes on the subject.

Offered here is the annual report for the Lane Seminary from 1834, which contains an article on the dispute on pages 33-47, entitled "Statement of the Faculty Concerning the Late Difficulties in the Lane Seminary," penned by Lyman Beecher, Thomas Biggs and Calvin Stowe in October of 1834. The essay lays out the reasoning of the faculty for the students' eventual dismissal, and gives a detailed account of the events that transpired, including the attempted reconciliation by Beecher that ultimately failed.

An interesting and significant piece of abolitionist history despite its appearance as a nondescript institutional annual report. OCLC locates thirteen copies.