Early in 1831 Lewis Tappan began to write to Finney begging him to come back to New York: "I do not think a powerful revival will take place here unless you do come .... The ministers here do not use the necessary means and will not. Depend upon it a blow must be struck in this city, heavier than anything we have had yet, or the revival will linger, and finally go out." But the evangelist hesitated. The revival in Rochester was proceeding with almost unprecedented success; urgent calls for his services were coming in from New England, from various points in upstate New York and from Ohio. The known opposition on the part of many New York City clergymen troubled him. His convert and lieutenant, Theodore Weld, had always favored delay in approaching the large population centers. As early as 1827 he had written: "Don't be in too great haste to get hold of the cities .... Kindle back fires, Back Fires, BACK FIRES far and wide. Let them stretch over the interior; the while you are engaged there the cities are preparing fast--when ripe--at the favorable nick of time--give the word--rally your forces and in the twinkling of an eye make a plunge--and they are a wreck."

From Rochester Finney went to Buffalo and then to New England: Providence, where a firm friendship with Josiah and W. C. Chapin was cemented, and Boston, itself, where he reached a temporary understanding with Lyman Beecher.

Few men have been so sought-after. Each mail brought news of ripening fields awaiting his sickle. The call from the West grew louder, that from the metropolis more insistent. In the spring of 1832, Asa Mahan and Theodore Weld bombarded him from Cincinnati; the Tappans moved heaven and earth to bring him to New York. "Lord send thy servant Finney here," prayed Weld in Cincinnati. But Weld, said Lewis Tappan, knows little of New York and "thinks the centre of the World is where he acts." New York City, Tappan declared, was the key to the soul of the nation: "Do what may be done elsewhere, and leave this city the headquarters of Satan, and the nation is not saved. It is truly wonderful what mighty influence New York has throughout the country. The South, and especially the West, look to this city for moral impulse. 20 thousand strangers here upon an average all the time carry to every part of the Union the views and feelings formed while here. A blow struck here reverberates to the extremities of the republic." He admitted the importance of the Great Valley but declared that "very soon Railroads will bring all the business men to this city twice a year." "It is the opinion of all the EIders of the Free Pres[byterian] Churches that this city is the place for you to preach & that now is the time. May God give you wisdom & grace to make a decision."

Turning a deaf ear for the time being to the supplications from beyond the Alleghenies, Finney came again to New York City in the late spring of 1832. Lewis Tappan, with the aid of his brother, Arthur Tappan, William Green, Jr., and other pious business men, took over the Chatham Street Theater and remodeled this stronghold of the Devil (all theaters were) into a revival hall in which two thousand persons could be seated. The renamed Chatham Street Chapel was dedicated April 23, 1832, at half past five in the morning in order not to conflict with business hours. Two Sundays later Finney preached two sermons and administered the Lord's Supper in it. Immediately after, he began a series of revival sermons which attracted large crowds and produced many converts despite the cholera panic.

His preaching by this date seems to have undergone a considerable change; from this period there are no more accounts of the falling of the "slain" or similar "exercises" among his hearers. Perhaps it was partly the effect of his sojourn in Boston in the previous winter; perhaps it was the product of association with Phelps, the Tappans and other gentlemen of New York, perhaps only an evidence of greater maturity. It is quite clear anyway that the character of Finney's appeals had been transformed, not in essentials, it is true, but in tone. "I do not mean .... that you have essentially changed your manner or stile [sic] of preaching but... you reason more than formerly," wrote a colleague in March. Another took him to task a few weeks later: "I fear that the peculiar circumstances in which you have been placed have led you rather to a discussion . . . of abstract theological subjects than to those soul-stirring appeals to the heart and the conscience by which you once brought so many sinners to the feet of Jesus." Of course, he never did lose his power to stir the emotions of a great audience, as is abundantly testified by witnesses of his sermons of later years, but he never seems again to have gone to such great lengths in "breaking down" sinners.

A more refined, more "cultured," more intellectual Finney was emerging--the Finney of New York City--and of Oberlin.

To assist in the work in the city Finney brought down from upstate a whole company of his followers: the Reverends Joel Parker, D.C. Lansing, Herman Norton and John Ingersoll, father of the great agnostic. Not least important was Thomas Hastings whom he brought to New York from Utica to introduce his ideas of church music as a form of worship. Apparently Hastings took direct charge of the singing at the Chatham Street Chapel (and later at the Broadway Tabernacle) and supervised the music at some dozen churches.

But, from the time that he began to preach at the Chapel, Finney was in poor health. In the summer he fell victim to the cholera and was for some time unable to appear in the pulpit. A year later he was still a sick man. Finally in the winter of 1833-34 his friends prevailed upon him to take a vacation in some distant land in the hope that the sea voyage would help him. He sailed on January 20, 1834, in a small brig, the Padang, bound for Smyrna. The voyage was one of the most unhappy periods of his life. His stateroom was oppressively tiny and the little brig was badly knocked about by storms during the journey of sixty-eight days to Malta. There, and in Sicily, he spent some weeks, but did not continue to Syria and Palestine as he had considered doing, but sailed for Boston from Messina, arriving at the former port July 18. In the autumn of 1834 his health was rather worse than better. He returned to his labors in the Chatham Street Chapel with misgivings--seriously considering giving up preaching altogether. He even sat for his portrait "on condition that Br. Green shall give it to my family in case I should be taken away."

A prospect of greater and greater influence was opening up in New York. Plans were under way for the great Broadway Tabernacle especially designed for Finney's use. Isaac M. Dimond seems to have been chiefly responsible for the building of the Tabernacle. He was yet another Connecticut Yankee, since 1830 a successful manufacturer of jewelry in the city. Construction began in the spring of 1835 and, a year later, in the completed edifice, Mr. Finney was installed as pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle Congregational Church.

Printed propaganda for the cause was distributed by the "Revival Tract Society," whose committee on publication included, at different times, Finney, William Green, Jr., Lewis Tappan, D.C. Lansing, Joel Parker, and Joshua Leaviii, among others. At the beginning of December, 1834, Leavitt began the publication in the New York Evangelist of Finney's twenty-two Friday lectures on revivals of religion--reprinted in book form a few months later and in successive editions throughout many years, one of the most influential religious publications of the period. Further to spread the revival spirit it was planned that the new Tabernacle should contain a classroom under the choir where Finney could prepare enthusiastic converts for the practice of the "new measures" in the ministry.

EVERYWHERE Finney appealed successfully to the young men: young lawyers, young business men, young farmers, young teachers and students. Many of them abandoned their former occupations and proposed to enter the ministry. The prospect of spending four years in the usual college course plus two or three years at a theological seminary daunted them. Some were already in their late twenties or early thirties and they were impatient to be about the Lord's business. Most did not have the financial resources from which to pay the cost of such an extended preparation; others were in poor health. Besides, did the traditional dose of Latin and Greek and Mathematics really in any practical way prepare for the ministry? Did the average college lay sufficient emphasis on piety and morality? Finney, himself, had intentionally avoided attending a college, and all emulated Finney.

New departures in revivals had broken the crust of indifference and formalism in the churches; new departures in education, especially designed to meet the needs of the current situation, furnished the logical solution of the problem. The Finney men were bold; they were already known as innovators; they feared conservatism more than experiment, if they feared the latter at all. Success in the churches evoked confidence, and the spirit of aggressive reform swept into other fields.

Rev. George W. Gale, while at Western, took several young converts into his home to teach them the arts and divinity as he had taught Finney, following a practice common both before and since the establishment of the first theological seminaries. The unusual feature was that these young men paid Gale for instruction, books and board, not in cash but by working on his farm for a certain number of hours each day. This was in 1826. Gale always considered himself the originator of the system of "manual labor with study," and there is no evidence to show that he knew at the time of similar prior or contemporaneous experiments in this country or by Fellenberg in Switzerland. Perhaps this is a case of simultaneous, independent invention.

By 1827, Gale was prepared to apply the combination of manual labor and study on a large scale. At Rome, on February 14, 1827, when the new-measures men were conveniently aslembled for the annual meeting of the Oneida Presbytery, Gale presented to them his scheme for a manual labor school. The Oneida Academy was formally organized March 1, 1827. In the first announcement of the school, made public on that occasion, it was declared that its "primary object" was "to educate young men who have ultimately in view the gospel ministry." It was expressly provided that the instructors were to be required "to inculcatge the truths of the Christian religion, as well as the principles of science." The students were to support themselves and the school and benefit their health by three to four hours of mechanical or agricultural labor daily. In April a hundred-acre farm was purchased at Whitesboro, a few miles from Utica, and instruction and farming began in May.

The Reverend George W. Gale and the Reverend John Frost were, from the beginning, the leading spirits in the enterprise and were naturally appointed the first agents to secure funds. Mr. Gale and Mr. Pelatiah Rawson became the first instructors. In September Gale was able to write to Finney, "Our School is prosperous. We had an examination last month, much to the satisfaction of the Trustees. Our crops are promising. We have an excellent class of young men and they make as good progress in their studies as any class I ever saw." Toward the end of the year the faculty turned in their official report to the trustees. In this it was stated that, "The labour performed by the Students has been, upon an average, three and a half hours a day. This is the only compensation which has been received for board and washing .... About forty acres of land have been cultivated--two for a garden, and the remainder for corn, potatoes, etc. Twenty acres have been mown. Between forty and fifty acres of wood have been chopped, fifty barrels of cider have been made, and other work necessary on the farm .... The income of the farm . . . has exceeded the expenses of boarding the students, keeping of stock, hire in the house, and the hire of a labourer for a year, about $150. It is, therefore, an ascertained fact, that a student may defray the expenses of his board, by three and a half hours of labour, and without interfering with his studies." Twenty-seven students were in attendance during the first term, and twenty-three of these were active Christians and intended, for the most part, to enter the ministry. In June, 1828, the Oneida Presbytery took official favorable notice of the school: "Whereas the Oneida Academy promises to be a great blessing to the church .... Resolved unanimously that it be recommended to the congregations under our care to contribute liberally to the funds of this infant and interesting institution."

The second year of the enterprise was a discouraging one, as it was a season of excessive rain and part of the crops were destroyed by the overflowing of the river. Considerable progress was made, however, in 1829, 1830 and 1831. An additional farmhouse was secured and a considerable expansion in enrollment thus made possible. A barn and a cow stable were built and a two-story shop, fifty by thirty feet, where the students could make boxes when there was no farm work to do. The student Society of Inquiry established a reading room where its members could read periodicals, gratuitously supplied by their publishers: the New York Evangelist, the Western Recorder, the Rochester Observer, the Sunday School Journal, the Home Missionary, the Journal of Health, the African Repository, etc. A "Friend" in New York donated some five thousand volumes for a library. G. P. Judd, one of Finney's early converts, sent curiosities from the Sandwich Islands for a "cabinet."

In June, 1829, a petition was sent to the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York requesting incorporation. The charter, promptly granted to the school under the name of the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry, entitled it to a share in the state "literature fund." The first public "exhibition" was held in the Presbyterian Church in Whitesboro in August "in the presence of a crowded audience." There were ten speakers. "Among the number was a young Seneca chief, . . . who spoke in his own native dialect. This, together with the Latin and Greek orations, was of course unintelligible to the majority of the audience "The Western Recorder thought it "highly creditable."

Students and instructors maintained a strenuous schedule. "The hour of rising and going into the field, by common consent, has been four o'clock A.M. in the summer months." Rising time, meal time, class hours and study periods were signalled by the blowing of a horn. The day was always begun with devotions. There were some classes at five, an hour before breakfast! Diet was frugal: "We have griddle cakes and molasses once a week," wrote one student, "rice and molasses once--hasty-pudding once, and a baked bread-pudding once. These we have in the morning. Twice in the week we have codfish and potatoes for dinner. For the remainder we have bread and butter and bread and milk." At each meal one student was appointed to read aloud while the others ate. "We are now reading the life of Thomas Spencer. No time is lost. Frequently we pass resolutions and transact important business at the table, while we are all eating as fast as we can." There was regular weekly drill in "declamation" and all students participated in formal debates on Thursday nights. All exercises were compulsory, including manual labor. "The plough, the hoe, the spade, the shovel, the axe, and the scythe, fall into the same hands that Virgil, Cicero, and the sages of Greece--Blair, Paley, Brown, Euclid, and Legendre, have occupied." Theodore Weld, who attended as a student but who acted as agent, was "monitor of the milking class," getting up extra early every morning to supervise the milking of thirty cows and "get the milk off in wagons to Utica by daybreak."

But piety and high moral purpose were even more central considerations than manual labor. The Society of Inquiry kept alive the student enthusiasm for missions. The revival atmosphere was constantly maintained. Some of the students walked miles to neighboring communities each week to teach Sunday Schools. In 1830, from their savings from labor at five cents an hour, they contributed two hundred dollars "for the establishment of Sabbath schools in the valley of the Mississippi." In the "Narrative of the State of Religion" presented at the meeting of the Oneida Presbytery in February, 1831, it was noted that, "The Oneida Institute, in Whitesboro, has shared largely in the favour of the Lord," and that, of the sixty students, "most . . . have given satisfactory evidence of conversion to God."

Of course, the new-measures men played a large role in sponsoring and financing the school. Finneyite ministers who supported the enterprise included, besides Gale and Frost, Samuel C. Aikin, Noah Coe, Luther Myrick, D. C. Lansing, N. S. S. Beman and S. H. Cox. George Brayton of Western gave $250.00; Finney's father-in-law gave a thousand feet of hemlock lumber; Charles and Thomas Hastings contributed cash and favorable publicity through the column of the Western Recorder, Josiah Bissell, Jr., of Rochester, was the largest donor. In 1828 Frost went to New York City where he presented the cause of the manual labor institution to the city liberals. Judge Jonas Platt introduced him and reported favorably on a personal visit to the school farm. Anson G. Phelps promised a hundred dollars. Platt, S. H. Cox, Phelps and Gardiner Spring signed a commendatory testimonial.

But expenditures for buildings and equipment had outrun donations. There was a mortgage of two thousand dollars, and the total debt was nearer five thousand dollars by the end of 1830. The students were growing restless because theological instruction had not yet begun. Gale met the crisis by calling the Rev. Nathaniel Beman from Troy to teach theology and taking Weld away from his studies and his milking class to appeal for funds to the converts of the revivals. Weld had considerable success. "He is a lovely young man," wrote Mrs. Finney's sister who heard him at Adams, "and a wonderful man, and bids fair to be a very useful man in the world and in the church." In December Gale sent Weld to Rochester to tap the philanthropic resources being developed in the revival there. "You know that you among others advised me to the establishment of this Institution," wrote Gale to Finney, "and I had reason to expect your cooperation so far as it was within your power." The subscriptions secured on the Genesee brought Gale and Oneida new hope. Late in January, 1831, following Weld's return to Whitesboro, Gale wrote again: "The Lord has given Brother Weld and this Institution great favor among the people at Rochester .... Monroe [county] . . . has given an impulse to a system of education that is to introduce the millennium .... Little did we think when talking over this subject what was to grow out of the little experiment . . . in Western." But Beman did not come, and students began to look to other institutions where final preparation for the ministry could be secured.

Now, Hamilton College at Clinton, like Whitesboro only a iew miles out of Utica, was greatly disturbed by these developments. President Henry Davis was pretty tough-minded and lhere might have been trouble anyway, but the fact that he opposed the revivals and that several of the trustees of the College were new-measures ministers (Frost, Lansing, Aikin, and Coe) certainly complicated the situation. President Davis, himself, believed that Finney's friends were primarily responsible for the difficulties. "Some believe .... " he later wrote, "that he ['Mr. Frost] and the other members of the board who are of the new school, have been hoping that Oneida Academy would be benefited by the prostration of Hamilton College."

Rev. John Monteith, one of the professors in the College, was a follower of Finney and an advocate of more practical education and had assisted Gale and Frost in the establishment of the Oneida Academy. Davis suspected him, naturally, of being responsible for student unrest and of being allied with the "reformers" among the trustees. According to Davis, when the revival began in Utica one Hamilton College senior prayed for the president "as an old gray-headed sinner, leading his scholars down to hell!" and in chapel Monteith prayed: "Thou knowest, 0 Lord, that the faculty of Hamilton College have sinned in high places; and we pray thee, 0 Lord, if they are obstacles to thy work, that thou wouldst remove them out of thy way." There was an effort among the trustees to get Davis to resign and when he refused a plan was introduced by Gerrit Smith, the philanthropist-reformer of Peterboro, for the trustees to take most of the executive power out of the president's hands. The plan failed of adoption, but the College tottered; many students left in mid-course to continue their studies elsewhere.

In 1829 Monteith left Hamilton for Pennsylvania where he established the Manual Labor Academy of Pennsylvania on a fifty-acre farm at Germantown. By the end of 1830 this school was declared to be prosperous except for pecuniary difficulties, with 23 pupils and 3 officers including the principal, an assistant teacher and a farmer. The students were required to labor four hours a day by which means they "more or less defrayed their own expenses, and established their health, invigorated their constitutions."

When Weld went to Rochester in December and January, 1830-31, to collect funds for the Oneida Institute, he presented the cause of manual labor-with-study in persuasive terms. Perhaps he overdid it, for Rochester new-measures men decided to have a manual labor school to educate their own young hopefuls. The Reverend Gilbert Morgan, a graduate of Union College and Princeton Theological Seminary, at the time teacher of a school at Johnstown, New York, and a member of the Albany Presbytery, was secured to direct it. In April, 1831, Morgan visited the Oneida Institute to study the operation of the manual labor system there, preparatory to introducing it at Rochester. He reached Rochester in the latter part of that month and opened the Rochester Institute of Practical Education in May. In mid-July, the Rev. William Wisner, acting as "President of the Board of Directors," issued the first circular announcing the etablishment, principles, plan and purpose of the school: "The Rochester Institute of Practical Education was organized in May last .... Its students exceed forty, collected from four denominations of Christians, all equally privileged. It owes its origin to the late revivals of religion in the western part of the state. Many young men of piety and talents were anxious to prepare for the gospel ministry, and to support themselves by manual labor rather than burthen the church." The aims of the school were declared to be "to secure to its members vigor of health, and strength of bodily constitution, to cherish the proper moral and religious habits, and to develop their minds in a direction adapted to their high destination, and to gird the sterner and nobler energies of the soul to the power of great accomplishment." The students, like their brothers at Whitesboro, rose at four, spent a half hour in devotions, and labored at least three hours a day. Instead of making boxes they, appropriately, made flour barrels. As at the beginning of Jefferson's IJniversity of Virginia the students drew up their own rules and elected their own officers of enforcement. The success of this plan of student government was dependent, it was believed, upon the labor system. "Manual labor with moral truth does in fact elevate the character and call forth the energies of the soul. Idle, vicious and ignorant young men, surrounded by temptations, are incapable of self-government."

The first public examinations of the Institute were held in January, 1832. It was incorporated by the legislature in April following, but the financial support received was wholly inadequate. In April also, Morgan announced the abandonment of the Institute and the founding of the Rochester Seminary of General Education. Though apparently manual labor was given up, the emphasis on piety and "a course of study preparatory to the sacred ministry" continued in the Seminary.

Gale and many of the other pious Yankees were persuaded that manual labor was to be the central practical feature of the coming American, Christian program of education. In 1830 Gale wrote: "Depend on it, Brother Finney, none of us have estimated the importance of this System of Education. It will be to the moral world what the lever of Archimedes, could he have found a fulcrum, would have been to the natural. In July, 1831, Lewis Tappan, Gale, and others founded the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, and later in the same year persuaded Theodore Weld, a living, breathing and eloquently speaking exhibit of the results of manual labor-with-study, to accept the general agency. In 1832 he travelled over 4500 miles, nearly 2,000 on horseback or afoot, delivering over two hundred lectures on manual labor and temperance. His journeys were not unaccompanied by adventures. In Connecticut the stage in which he was travelling overturned, and in Ohio near Columbus it was carried away by the water at a ford. In the latter case he barely escaped drowning and believed that his recovery from the exposure was attributable to his temperate habits and a physique strengthened by manual labor. In May, Gale received a letter from Weld postmarked Danville, Kentucky. "He is not recovered from his disaster," wrote Gale to Finney, "thinks it doubtful if he ever does ....from what he says I judge that he speaks often, and with great effect both for the temperance and manual labor causes. He is a marvellous man in many respects! In Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama he spoke once or twice each day on manual labor, temperance and female education. He observed the evils of slavery and discussed them privately with James G. Birney and William T. Allan in Huntsville, Alabama, and Marius Robinson, a student at the University of Nashville. In November Weld was back in New York City delivering an address "on the salutory influence of regular exercise upon the human system" in the Chatham Street Chapel. In the following winter he prepared at his desk in the office of the New York Evangelist the first and last report of the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions. This document contains the most elaborate formal printed statement of the case for the manual labor schools.

Weld had also been commissioned to find a site for a great national manual labor institution where training for the western ministry could be provided for poor but earnest young men who had dedicated their lives to the home missionary cause in the "vast valley of the Mississippi." Such an institution would undoubtedly attract many of Weld's associates who had been in the failure to establish theological instruction at the Oneida Institute. Cincinnati was the logical location. Cincinnati was the focal center of population and commerce in the Ohio valley.

By 1830 many conservative, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were beginning to suspect that by absorbing so many New Englanders into the Presbyterian fold through the Plan of Union they had settled the Goths at the Gates of Rome. Yankee graduates of Yale, of Williams, of Hamilton and "alumni" of the Finney revivals were enabled by the Plan to infiltrate into the Presbyterian churches anywhere--in New York, in the Middle States, and in the West. The fundamental Calvinist doctrines of the divine sufficiency, predestination and the total depravity of man were threatened. The New Englanders accepted these doctrines in principle but acted in practice much like Methodists, insisting on "human ability" (with the help of divine grace, of course) to accept Christ and even perhaps to live a positively good life. This point of view was associated in the New Englanders' logic with active revivalism. Why appeal, said they, to a man to accept Christ if that man lacked the power of decision?

The first settlements in the New West were in Kentucky and the Ohio valley; the first settlers came chiefly from the Middle and Southern States. Their Presbyterian ministers got their inspiration from orthodox Princeton and they founded orthodox Presbyterian colleges: Transylvania (Kentucky), Jefferson (in western Pennsylvania), Miami and Centre. Cincinnati's first Presbyterian minister, James Kemper, came from Virginia by way of the upper Tennessee valley to Kentucky through Cumberland Gap and then crossed north of the Ohio, a route followed by those of his parishioners who didn't float down from Pittsburgh. Also a Virginian was the dynamic Joshua Lacy who came over from Kentucky to assume the pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati in 1808. Twenty years later, when Cincinnati was definitely established as the business center and cultural metropolis of the West, Wilson was the dominant ecclesiastical figure of the community. He was the natural leader in the defense against Yankee heresy.

In the 1830's the invasion reached Cincinnati itself. The pseudo-Calvinists from the northeast were aggressive; and they were organized through the American Home Missionary Society; the American Education Society and the American Tract Society; they were backed by Yankee money from New York as well as New England and they were inspired by the Finney revivals.

First to face the redoubtable Wilson in the Cincinnati arena was the Rev. Amos Blanchard, a licensed preacher from Vermont. He was an outspoken advocate of the liberal point of view, a representative of the American Home Missionary Society. Ordained by the Presbytery of Cincinnati in Wilson's absence, the latter charged him with heresy and called for the revocation of the ordination. Blanchard accused Wilson of slander. Their differences were superficially adjusted in time for Wilson to concentrate his fire on another invader.

In the spring of 1831 twenty "new-school" members of Wilson's First Presbyterian Church seceded. On April 9, 1831, they organized the Sixth Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati and, in June, called the Rev. Asa Mahan of Pittsford, N. Y., to be their pastor. Among the charter members were Amos Blanchard and Mary Blanchard, Franklin Y. Vail and Catharine M. Vail, William S. Merrell, William Holyoke and John Melindy. Blanchard's position has been made sufficiently clear. Vail had come to the West from Connecticut as Secretary of the Western Agency of the American Education Society, a new-school organization for the assistance of young men preparing for the ministry. It was he who presented the call from the Sixth Church to Mahan at the annual meeting of the Presbyterian Assembly at Philadelphia. William Holyoke, one of the first three elders of the church, a coachmaker by trade, later became a leading abolitionist. His name often appears associated with that of John Melindy in religious and reform activities. William S. Merrell, a former resident of Oneida County, New York, had been a classmate of Mahan's at Hamilton College. After graduation he had taught school for a while in Cincinnati and then in the South; in 1830 he returned to that city and opened a drugstore.

Asa Mahan was known throughout his life as a bitter controversialist. He was usually in hot water. Before being licensed by the Oneida Presbytery on May 30, 1827, he had confessed to having circulated gossip and agreed to contradict it. He preached at Pittsford, near Rochester, from November, 1829, to March, 1831, and was there associated with Finney's Rochester revival. As a result of that revival the membership of his church increased considerably. However, when he was being considered for the pulpit of the Third Presbyterian Church of Rochester, though Josiah Bissell declared that he was "anointed of God," there were some reports of dissension at Pittsford due to his disputatious nature. But there was no doubt of his enthusiasm for Finney revivalism and his belief in "human responsibility." When Vail extended to him the call from the Sixth Church he promptly accepted and preached his first sermon in Cincinnati to some fifty hearers on August 25, 1831, in the dilapidated Second-fioor auditorium of the old "College Hall" on Walnut Street.

A clash between Wilson and Mahan was inevitable. Mahan was as aggressive as Wilson, another pseudo-Presbyterian of the yankee tradition, and the champion of the seceders from Wilson's own church. In sermons, in charges before the presbytery, and in editorials in his personal organ, the Standard, Wilson blasted at Mahan. In particular Mahan was accused of saying that he had never adopted the Confession of Faith of the Presbyterian Church and never would. Considering Mahan's combative nature and his theology, it is more than likely that this charge had some basis in fact. Anyway, a special committee of the presbytery, made up mostly of hostile conservatives, was appointed to investigate. On the other hand, William Holyoke and an associate, representing the Sixth Church, lodged charges against Wilson of "unchristian conduct" in slandering Mahan in the press. Eventually the charges and counter-charges were appealed to the synod, where a settlement was made.

Blanchard, Vail, Mahan and their associates, having prepared the ground and sown the seeds, called for Finney to come and reap the harvest. Amos Blanchard wrote from Cincinnati, on the first day of 1831, using "the language of the Macedonfan Cry 'Come over and help us'." He pictured the "Porkopolis" as a city of about 28,000 people "now increasing in wealth and numbers beyond a parallel in the history of any other city" and situated "in the heart, almost, of a country containing more than 4,000,000 of inhabitants, and capable of sustaining more than 100,000,000." There Finney would find, he declared, a great deal to be done: "The whole number of attendants in the 4 Presbyterian churches does not exceed 3,000. There may possibly be as many more in all the other evangelical churches. Six thousand subtracted from 18,000 leaves 22,000 who either do not attend anywhere, or only where damnable error is preached There in this city a very large Roman Catholic cathedral, a Jew Synagogue, a Swedenborgian Church, 1 Unitarian, one Universalist, one Campbellite Baptist, and one Christian or New Light Society. The regular attendants at these poisonous fountains may possibly be 3 or 4,000 .... Besides these nominal Christians, we have a large number of Infidels, Owenites, Atheists, and Fanny Wright men, who with open mouth and daring front, lift high the arm, and rant out aloud their blasphemies against God." Even within the Presbyterian churches Blanchard found "a state of spiritual torpor." "Worldlymindedness exists to a great extent among the eldership, some going so far as to keep their pork houses open on the Sabbath where hogs are cut up for the market on Sunday .... When I look over the empty pews of our churches my soul is distressed and I am often led to exclaim 'O Lord how long?'" "O do take this matter into serious & prayerful consideration," he continued. "I have faith to full assurance that a wide and effectual door of usefulness is opened here for you--a door such as would have rejoiced the heart of Paul .... Do not disregard the cry of dying millions who are rushing dark and unholy into the gates of eternity .... Do not wait till Satan has made this city the high place of Belial--a brimming mountain of sin, which will hereafter send its torrents of spiritual death over these fair and fertile regions." In the following summer nine other ministers, including the Rev. Franklin Y. Vail, joined with Blanchard to petition the evangelist to come to Cinncinnati. Blanchard's invitation was certainly peculiarly adapted to appeal to Finney's fighting spirit and must have done much to strengthen his interest in "the dying millions" of the Great Valley.

Early in 1832 Mahan, having done, himself, some pioneer work for more aggressive Christianity, led in an even more insistent supplication. Twelve ministers, fifteen leading laymen and Theodore Weld, then lecturing in the Valley, signed the petition of February, 1832. Mahan wrote the petition and led the list of signers, among whom were Blanchard, Vail, Rev. David Root of the Second Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati, Rev. Thomas Brainerd of the Fourth Church, Rev. D.C. Blood of Cleves, Gideon Blackburn, president of Centre College--a southern liberal, Rev. Thomas Cole of New Richmond, and Rev. L. D. Howell, teacher in the "Literary Department" of Lane Seminary. Among the lay signers were William Holyoke and D. W. Fairbank of Mahan's church, J. C. Tunis, J. H. Groesbeck, Robert Boal and Dr. James Warren. Mahan and Weld reenforced the invitation by direct, personal appeals. "Sure I am," wrote Mahan, "that among the numerous calls which reach you from different parts of the country none are so loud as that which calls you to this city .... God has raised you up for the great valley and it must have your labors." Weld seconded him strongly: "You never can move this vast valley by working the lever in Boston, New York or Philadelphia .... Cincinnati is the spot for you to begin by all means.... Besides, here is to be the battle field of the world, here Satan's seat is. A mighty effort must be made to dislodge him soon or the West is un-done." Arthur Tappan and his brother and other associates in New York and Philadelphia were willing to finance Finney for an invasion of the West, but the Tappans much preferred that he should make his headquarters in New York City. Finney went to New York City. As second choice Cincinnati took Lyman Beecher.

The Western Presbyterians felt that they should have their own theological seminary, where Western and Eastern young men could be prepared in the West for service at the West. The Rev. James Kemper, an educational pioneer in Kentucky and Ohio, and the Rev. Joshua L. Wilson were leading sponsors of the scheme and naturally thought that Cincinnati would be the appropriate location. Despite their efforts, the logic of the situation and the promise of a gift of land by Kemper and his sons, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church eslablished their Western Theological Seminary at Alleghenytown, across the river from Pittsburgh.

Cincinnati's disappointment was great but short-lived, for Yankee money did what the Presbyterian Assembly had been unwilling to do. New Orleans, like New York and Cincinnati and most other prosperous American cities, had its colony of New England-born merchants, lawyers, teachers and ministers. Ebenezer Lane and a brother, natives of Maine, were commission merchants in this great Southern port. Like the Dodges, Phelpses and Tappans in New York their consciences directed them to do something for religion and morals with the profits they made. In October, 1828, they offered $4,000.00 to found in Cincinnati a manual labor institution "to prepare indigent young men for the ministry." One of the apparent advantages of "manual labor-with-study" was that it impressed practically-minded business men favorably.

To supervise the establishment of the school the "Ohio Board of Education" was organized, its membership being made up of Presbyterian ministers and laymen, Wilson being president and Dr. James Warren, corresponding secretary. Elnathan Kemper, one of James Kemper's sons and a convert to liberal doctrines, gave land in Walnut Hills for a site for the seminary in the name of the Kemper family. The charter of Lane Seminary was granted February 11, 1829. The Rev. George C. Beckwith, born in New York, but then preaching in Lowell, Massachusetts, was appointed to a professorship in April, accepted in August, and arrived in Cincinnati in the following November. He "had 3 or 4 students during the winter, spent the summer following at the East" and resigned in August, 1830.

The Lanes insisted on the manual labor system but some members of the board opposed this experiment. Wilson and David Root prepared a report favorable to manual labor early in 1829. President Robert Hamilton Bishop of Miami University, also a Lane trustee, opposed. The following year an elaborate and favorable report on manual labor as practiced at the Oneida Institute, at Monteith's school at Germantown, at Maryville, Tennessee, and elsewhere, was presented to the Executive Committee of the Board. 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 the neighborhood approved of it. In January, 1831, G. W. Gale of Oneida recommended a steward to supervise the seminary farm at Walnut Hills; in February the trustees made the appointment. But in the winter of 1830-31, Lane Seminary was in a state of suspended animation. 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.

At the beginning, conservatives and radicals, Virginians and Yankees, appear to have teamed up effectively in behalf of the seminary. But before 1831 the leadership had passed from Wilson and his local supporters to the Eastern men. On September 20, 1830, the Board met at Franklin Vail's house, appointed him agent, apparently at his own suggestion, and directed him to seek advice and money in the East where Beckwith had failed. Wilson consented though he expressed a lack of confidence in the outcome. Vail hastened away, "there being no time to be lost," and he later wrote, "if the Institution was to be secured in the hands of the New School Men." Vail's friends in the Eastern cities suggested that if Lyman Beecher could be secured to head Lane Seminary money would undoubtedly follow. The trustees accepted the recommendation enthusiastically and on October 22 It unanimously appointed Beecher "President of Lane Seminary and Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology." True, Beecher was preaching in a Congregational church at Boston, but Vail expressed confidence, in a letter to Dr. Warren, that there would be "no difficulty in having the Dr. Presbyterianized."

The funds did follow the nomination, as had been hoped. Arthur Tappan, one of Finney's good angels, agreed to give the income from $20,000 to the support of the school if Beecher accepted. Oliver Eastman, who was Vail's successor as agent, obtained thousands more in subscriptions, but everything depended on Beecher, and Beecher hesitated. His congregation in Boston wanted him to stay, and opposition developed in Cincinnati.

Finney and Beecher had apparently buried the hatchet. In August, 1831, Beecher wrote to Finney: "... You and I are, as much, perhaps even more, one than almost any two men whom God has been pleased to render conspicuous in his church." After all, they both believed in "human ability" and the efficacy of revivals. In the following winter Beecher welcomed Finney when he went to Boston. In February, 1832, Dirck C. Lansing wrote to Finney asking him to intercede with Beecher in behalf of Lane Seminary, his acceptance of the appointment being "of vital importance to the cause of truth and revivals there." Perhaps conservatives in the East informed Wilson of this rapprochement. Certainly his suspicions of Beecher were aroused. On November 8, 1831, Asa Mahan, the arch-radical in the West, was appointed a trustee of Lane Seminary. Nine days later Wilson submitted his resignation as president and member of the Board. In his letter of resignation he denounced the election of Mahan and the appointment of Beecher. "Dr. B. is not a Presbyterian--nor can he honestly become so without a great change in his theological opinions." It seemed to him to be "the full determination of the Majority . . . to render the Lane Seminary entirely subservient to the New School Theology."

Beecher had been deeply interested in the opportunity from the beginning. "I have thought seriously of going over to Cincinnati .... " he wrote earlier to a daughter, "to spend the remnant of my days in that great conflict .... If we gain the West, all is safe: if we lose it, all is lost." He had, he said, "a feeling as if the great battle is to be fought in the Valley of the Mississippi." Another official invitation was extended to him in January, 1832, and in June he accepted. On October 19 Oliver Eastman, now financial agent, wrote from Philadelphia: "The Dr. and his family left here today in an extra stage for Wheeling. His wife, sister, and six children are with him, nine souls. Should he be prospered on his way he will be with you on Saturday of next week [8 days] or early the week after. I rejoice that he is on his way." Indeed, all the friends of Lane Seminary must have drawn a sigh of relief. It was now two years since the appointment was first made. Beecher had been "Presbyterianized" by being admitted to Finney's Third Presbytery in New York City, and an effort of the Rev. Gardiner Spring to get the Synod of New York to revoke this action had failed. On December 26, 1832, Beecher and Professor Thomas J. Biggs were inaugurated together. In January, 1833, Arthur Tappan authorized Vail to draw on him for Beecher's salary.

But Lane had had students even before it had a regular faculty. In 1831, when the Rev. Lewis D. Howell, a student at Auburn Seminary at the time of Finney's revival there, was interim teacher of the Literary Department, there were fifty young men attending the seminary. Amos Dresser was the only New Yorker among them, but this was not to last long. Three Oneida students went west to teach country schools in the winter of 1831-32. George Whipple and J. L. Tracy went to Kentucky; Calvin Waterbury got a school at Newark on the Licking River in Ohio. When in the spring Waterbury talked too much temperance, the inhabitants threatened to ride him out of town on a rail. He prudently climbed aboard a raft and floated down to Cincinnati. There, he and Dresser were soon joined by two other Oneidas, Sereno W. Streeter and Edward Weed, and by Henry Brewster Stanton from Rochester. Theodore Weld stopped at Cincinnati twice on his manual labor lecture tour--in February and March, 1832, and in the following September. On the earlier visit he delivered several lectures and supported the call to Finney to come west. Lane, he concluded, would do as a manual labor theological school if Beecher would come. The Oneidas need look no farther. It was worthy of the support of the Tappans and their friends and of the manual labor society. Weld adopted the seminary as his own and told the trustees what appointments to make. In Weld's absence the other New York-Yankee students managed the school through Asa Mahan.

When Beecher and Biggs were inaugurated in December, 1832, the enrollment of students had increased to ninety. But the invasion from the East had just begun. Stanton returned to Rochester in the spring of 1833, promising to bring back others from his home town if "the advantages of instruction-room accommodations, etc." were made "vastly superior to those of last summer." "I shall probably visit Oneida Institute about the 10th of April," he added, "where I shall find others whose eyes are turned westward. As many of these brethren will go down the Allegheny either in Rafts or Skiffs during the high water, you will see the importance of giving me an immediate reply to this." Early in June, Stanton and Weld and six other young Finneyites arrived in Cincinnati, having completed their journey down the river from Rochester and Oneida. They were promptly admitted to the seminary on the recommendation of two other "Oneidas" already in attendance. The tempo of the seminary was sharply stepped up, its real head now being on the ground. "Weld is here & we are glad," wrote Professor Biggs to Vail on July 2.

Lane became definitely a school for educating young Yinkees in the West. Of the forty members of the first theological class listed in the General Catalogue of 1881 the antecedents of thirty-seven are known, and thirty-one of these were Yankees from New England or upstate New York. Lane was Oneida moved west. In 1834, or before, twenty-four former students at Oneida Inslitute were enrolled in the literary or theological departmerits at Lane. Eight students, including Henry B. Stanton and his two brothers, came from Rochester and vicinity. Several of these had studied at the Rochester Institute of Science and Industry. Two Yale men came to Lane. John Tappan Pierce graduated from Harvard in 1831 and came to Lane from the Princeton Theological Seminary where he had spent but eight months. Thomas Williamson, George G. Porter, and Josiah Porter from South Carolina, William T. Allan from Alabama and James A. Thome from Kentucky certainly found themselves in a nest of Yankees. Marius R. Robinson was a graduate of the University of Nashville, Tennessee; Huntington Lyman had spent some time in Louisiana; Andrew Benton had been an agent of the American Bible Society in Missouri, but the first two were born in New York and the last in Connecticut. It must have been something of a shock to the real Southerners when on May 28, 1833, James Bradley, "a man of colour" was admitted to the Literary Department?

Of course, it was necessary to expand the faculty. Calvin E. Stowe left Dartmouth for a Lane professorship on condition that $500.00 of his salary should be paid in advance. George Whipple, one of the Oneidas, abandoned his school in Kentucky to study theology and teach elementary courses at the seminary. In mid-summer of 1833 John Morgan arrived to teach in the Literary Department. He had been recommended for the appointment by Professor Chester Dewey, active anti-slavery worker of the Williams College faculty, by Joshua Leavitt, editor of the New York Evangelist, and by Finney, himself. "I have had considerable contact with Mr. Morgan," wrote Finney, "& so far as I am qualified to judge, I most cordially concur with the sentiments expressed above by Mr. Leavitt." Morgan became the one member of the faculty closest to the liberal, Yankee, Finneyite group of students, their trusted adviser and confidant. Weld wrote of him in June, 1834: "I know of no man whose views on all prudential matters are more thoroughly judicious and whose comprehensive grasp of difficult subjects in all their relations is more perfect." Morgan played the same role in the faculty that Mahan did among the trustees.

The students at Lane took the initiative in the affairs of the seminary and practiced piety mixed with practicality in the Oneida manner. 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. In August another student committee went so far as to recommend the diet which they believed was "necessary for the promotion of health and success in their studies." Manual labor was elaborately organized. The work on the farm was in charge of a board of monitors and a student monitor-general, Samuel Wells, formerly of Oneida. The printing shop was supervised by a committee of students made up of James Steele, formerly of the Rochester Institute; R. L. Stanton, an "Oneida," and Marius R. Robinson. Elaborate rules were drawn up for the "Printing Department." The student printers printed Webster's Spelling Book and "Dr. Eberel's Treatise on the Diseases of Children." Alexander McKellar, a skilled cabinet-maker, and others made furniture in the mechanical department. The Society of Inquiry Concerning Missions was very active, and many students taught Sunday Schools in Cincinnati or nearby.