e highly practical; their immediate aims were: First to elevate
the black population of New Haven; secondly, to influence public
sentiment in the city and State; and thirdly, to influence the
theological students in Yale college. So faithful were their labors in
their own city for its black population--described as in most wretched
condition, which seems to have been the case with most of the blacks at
the North in this period--that six years later Garrison pronounced them
more comfortable and less injured by prejudice than in any other place
in the Union. The young men of the New Haven and Andover seminaries
united in a project of a college for the blacks; strong support was
obtained; but the fierce wave of reaction following Nat Turner's revolt
swept it away. Lane seminary at Cincinnati, a Presbyterian stronghold,
became a center of enthusiastic anti-slavery effort, with the brilliant
young Theodore D. Weld as its foremost apostle; he was welcomed and
heard in the border slave States. The authorities of the college,
alarmed by the audacity of their pupils, tried to restrain the movement,
and the result was a great secession of students.

The seceders proposed to form a theological department at Oberlin
College (established two years before) if they could have Charles G.
Finney, the famous revivalist, as their teacher. But Finney declined to
take the place until the conservative trustees consented to admit
colored youths to the College; and thus Oberlin became an anti-slavery
stronghold.

As the anti-slavery movement developed, the call for immediate
liberation became more insistent and imperative. The colonization method
lost credit. Slavery was coming to be regarded by its opponents not
merely as a social evil to be eradicated, but as a personal sin of the
slave-holder, to be renounced as promptly as any other sin. John Wesleys
words were a keynote: "Instantly, at any price, were it the half of your
goods, deliver thyself from blood-guiltiness!" A Virginia minister, Rev.
George Bourne, published in 1816 _Slavery and the Book Irreconcilable_,
in which he said: "The system is so entirely corrupt that it admits of
no cure but by a total and immediate abolition." Two other Southern
ministers, James Duncan and John Rankin, wrote to the same effect. In
England, the abolition of slavery in the West India colonies was being
persistently urged; the impulse was a part of the philanthropic movement
that went along with the eva