Beriah Green Jr. (March 24, 1795May 4, 1874) was an American reformer, abolitionist, temperance advocate, college professor, minister, and head of the Oneida Institute. He was "consumed totally by his abolitionist views". Former student Alexander Crummell described him as a "bluff, kind-hearted man," a "master-thinker". Modern scholars have described him as "cantankerous", "obdurate," "caustic, belligerent, [and] suspicious". "He was so firmly convinced of his opinions and so uncompromising that he aroused hostility all about him."
Early life
Greene was born in Preston, Connecticut, eldest of six children born to Beriah Green (1774–1865) and Elizabeth Smith (1771–1840). His father was a cabinet and chair maker. Jonathan Smith Green was his younger brother.
The family moved to Pawlet, Vermont, in 1810, and he may have attended the Pawlet Academy. In 1815 he enrolled in the Kimball Union Academy, in New Hampshire. He graduated from Middlebury College in 1819, where he was valedictorian, and then studied to become a missionary (minister) at Andover Theological Seminary (1819–20). However, his religious beliefs did not agree with any denominational creed.
Career
Because of financial need, he began teaching at Phillips Academy, also in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1820. Suffering from health and vision problems, he left the seminary. After recovering, in January 1821 he married Marcia Deming of Middlebury, Vermont, and was briefly in the service of the Missionary Board in Lyme, Connecticut, and on Long Island. Having been ordained, in 1823 he became pastor of the Congregational Church in Brandon, Vermont. In 1826 his wife died, leaving him with two children, and the same year he married Daraxa Foote, also of Middlebury, who outlived Beriah. In 1829 he accepted a call to the distinctly "orthodox" (conservative) church of Kennebunk, Maine, but the next year left, to occupy a new position, Professor of Sacred Literature (Bible), and college chaplain, in the one-man theological department of Western Reserve College and Preparatory School, in Hudson, Ohio, from Cleveland. His salary was $600 per year ().
The buildings of this "Yale of the West" — Green calls it that
— imitated those of Yale College. It had the same motto, "Lux et Veritas" (Light and Truth), the same entrance standards, and almost the same curriculum. It aspired to be as intellectually outstanding as Yale as well. For the time, it was well funded. It was a prestigious appointment.
The topic of slavery
In the Cleveland area (the "Connecticut Western Reserve") Beriah came in contact with more African Americans than he had in Vermont or Maine. The college first admitted an African-American student in 1832, John Sykes Fayette; he graduated in 1836. Three other African-American students — Richard W. Miller, Samuel Nelson, and Samuel Harrison — were also admitted during this time period. Fugitive slaves traveling to Canada on the Underground Railroad passed through northeast Ohio: John Brown, of the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, grew up in Hudson (1805–1825), running a tannery, then moved to a more isolated and safer (for fugitive slaves) site in northwest Pennsylvania, a major Underground Railroad stop. That the two met is possible but undocumented; there is no known correspondence between them. What is documented is his contact with Wm. Lloyd Garrison, who through his weekly newspaper The Liberator, launched in 1831, led the fight for immediate, uncompensated liberation of all slaves. Green wrote that "One copy of Mr. Garrison's 'Thoughts' has reached us [Thoughts on African Colonization, 1832] and we take a few copies of his admirable paper." Garrison was a great influence on Green; one way was to encourage Green to publish his sermons and other writings, which gave him influence.
Sending free blacks to Africa ("colonization") was the mission of the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded by Quakers, and supported by state colonization societies and Southern slave owners. Free blacks were against it; they did not want to move to Africa, having lived for generations in the United States. They said they were no more African than the white Americans were British.
The debate started by Garrison's newspapers and book led to a heated campus debate. "Trustees, faculty, and students began to choose sides." College president Charles Backus Storrs, who had recommended Green, a contemporary of his at Andover Theological Seminary, had been a supporter of colonization as a solution to "the negro problem". But he too read The Liberator, and he said that Garrison's views could not be refuted. His inaugural address, in February 1831, invoked the abolitionism of William Wilberforce.