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Theological college in Ohio, United States

Lane Seminary, sometimes called Cincinnati Lane Seminary,

Its board intended it to be "a great central theological institution at Cincinnati — soon to become the great Andover or Princeton of the West." However, the founding and first years of Lane were difficult and contentious, culminating in a mass student exodus over the issue of slavery, or more specifically whether students were permitted to discuss the topic publicly, the first major academic freedom incident in America. There was strong pro slavery sentiment in Cincinnati, and the trustees immediately prohibited further discussion of the topic, to avoid repercussions. 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. Their competition for jobs had led to the anti abolitionist Cincinnati riots of 1829 and would soon produce the Cincinnati riots of 1836.

"The founding of Lane Seminary was accomplished after years of sometimes disparate efforts on the part of a large number of people." "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." "The location of Lane Seminary is in the midst of a most beautiful landscape. 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. 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. 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. He resigned in August 1830.

Part of "the negro problem", as it was seen in the antebellum United States, was the question of what to do with former slaves who had become free. 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. The freed slaves married and had children, so the number of free people of color (Blacks born free) was rising even faster. Some owners freed their slaves in their wills. Philanthropic societies and individuals raised or donated funds to purchase slaves' freedom; freedmen sometimes were able to purchase the freedom of family members. In some Northern cities there were more than a handful of escaped slaves. The status of these free blacks was anything but comfortable. They were not citizens and in most states could not vote. They had no access to the courts or protection by the police. In no state could their children attend the public schools. They were subject to discriminatory treatment in everyday life. The original "remedy" for this problem was to help them go "back to Africa". The British had been doing this, in Sierra Leone, moving former American slaves there who had gained their freedom by escaping to British lines during the American Revolution, and who found Nova Scotia, where the British took many of them, too cold. The British also took to Sierra Leone slaves captured from slaving ships who were being smuggled illegally across the Atlantic to North America. A well to do African American shipowner, Paul Cuffe, transported some former slaves to Sierra Leone. However, sending former slaves to a British colony as a policy was politically unacceptable. The American Colonization Society was formed to help found a new, American colony of freed blacks. Although there was some talk of locating the colony in the American territories of the Midwest, or on the Pacific coast—a sort of reservation for Blacks—what was decided was to follow the English example and start an African colony. The closest available land was what became Liberia.

The colonization project got off to a promising start, with various governmental and private donations and the participation of distinguished individuals: U. S. presidents Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison; Senator Henry Clay, who presided over its first meeting; as well as most of the future white abolitionists. The problem had been solved, and in an honorable way; the former slaves would fare better in Africa, it was argued, among other blacks. The situation quickly started to unravel. First of all, the disease rates among the new colonists were the highest since accurate record keeping began. Over 50% of them died of malaria and other diseases. 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. He commented on it in the Society's African Repository magazine. Smith was for temperance, and according to him, the fact that blacks in Africa were allowed to import liquor from the United States revealed the true goals of many of the white members of the American Colonization Society: to get rid of the Blacks without having them up north.

Lyman Beecher, head of the Seminary, was a colonizationist, At Lane there was a "colonization society", supporting the efforts of the American Colonization Society to send free blacks to Africa, to Liberia. How it came to be is not known, but it was there when the Oneida contingent and friends arrived. There had been similar groups at Western Reserve and other colleges. Weld read William Lloyd Garrison's new abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, begun in 1831, and his Thoughts on African Colonization, which appeared in 1832. These had a great influence at the other eastern Ohio college, Western Reserve College, leading to Beriah Green's four published sermons, and his relocation under pressure to Gale's school, Oneida. What Garrison desired, and he convinced Green, was "immediatism": immediate, complete, and uncompensated freeing of all slaves. Over a period of several months Weld convinced nearly all of the students individually of the superiority of the abolitionist view. To generate publicity for the abolitionist cause, Weld announced a series of "debates". Weld "had no intention of holding a debate on the pros and cons of antislavery." In his correspondence Weld informed friends that he was trying to get the anti slavery (immediatist) argument and evidence out to as many people as possible. Nevertheless, what was announced was debates, on two points. When the merits of the proposed solutions to slavery were debated over 18 days at the Seminary in February 1834, it was one of the first major public discussions of the topic, but it was more of an anti slavery revival than a "debate". No speaker appeared to defend either American slavery or the colonization project.

"Mr. Henry P. Thompson, a native and still a resident of Nicholasville, Kentucky, made the following statement at a public meeting in Lane Seminary, Ohio, in 1833 [1834]. He was at that time a slaveholder." "Rev. Coleman S. Hodges, a resident of Western Virginia, gave the following testimony at the same meeting:"

Cincinnati was convulsed as never before.

The Lane Debates have been re enacted in recent years by historians from Yale University, the University of Connecticut, and Oberlin College.

A movie about the debates, Sons & Daughters of Thunder, was released in December 2019. It is based on a play by Earlene Hawley and Curtis Heeter.

Archival materials of Lane are located at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia.

Side A: The Lanes, Baptist merchants from New Orleans, and the Kempers, a Presbyterian family from Cincinnati, gave money and land respectively for Cincinnati's first manual labor theological seminary and high school, which opened in suburban Walnut Hills in 1829. The Reverend Lyman Beecher came from Boston as its first president. The president's house, now known as the Stowe House after Beecher's daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, still remains at Gilbert and Foraker. Lane Theological Seminary, bound by present day Gilbert, Chapel, Park, and Yale streets, continued to educate Presbyterian ministers until 1932, when it was merged with McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Side B: In the winter of 1834, the students of Lane Theological Seminary, including some southerners and one African American former slave, organized an eighteen night revival under the leadership of Theodore Dwight Weld. These antislavery debates over immediate abolition versus colonization effectively converted almost all the students to abolition. American newspapers publicized the debates, and women supporters, "the Cincinnati Sisters," organized local schools for African American children. When the trustees prohibited the students from discussing controversial issues, most of the students withdrew, set up a seminary in exile in Cumminsville, and then moved it to Oberlin College. The Lane Seminary Debates marked the shift in American antislavery efforts from colonization to abolition, and the "Lane Rebels" became ministers, abolitionists, and social reformers across the country.