John Gregg Fee (September 9, 1816 – January 11, 1901) was an abolitionist, minister and educator, the founder of the town of Berea, Kentucky, The Church of Christ, Union in Berea (1853), Berea College (1855), the first in the U.S. South with interracial and coeducational admissions, and late in his life another congregation that would become First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) 2 blocks from his first. (1890). During the American Civil War, Fee worked at Camp Nelson to have facilities constructed to support freedmen and their families, and to provide them with education and preaching where the formerly enslaved men who had joined the Union Army were taken to be mustered out in the last years of the Civil War.
Early life and education
Fee was born in Bracken County, Kentucky on September 9, 1816, the son of John Fee Jr., of Irish and Scots descent, and Sarah (Gregg) Fee, of Irish and English descent. His father inherited a bondsman who reached the term of his indenture. He then began to buy slaves, finally holding thirteen. Later he recognized more of its problems and invested in lands in free states, but held on to his slaves throughout his life and opposed his son's abolitionism.
Following a conversion to the Christian faith at age 14, John Fee, Jr., wanted to join the Methodist Episcopal Church. His father encouraged him to wait, and a couple of years later they both joined the Presbyterian Church. He studied at Augusta College in Bracken County, Kentucky and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He then entered Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1842, where in studying for the ministry, he made lifelong friendships. The young Fee became a staunch abolitionist, vowing to "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
Career
Fee returned to Kentucky, preaching against slavery, but found it difficult to find a permanent position, as there was widespread pro-slavery sentiment. He started in Lewis County, which had fewer slaveholders, so more people who supported his point of view. In the 1840s, he came into conflict with the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky, which opposed his church's stance to refuse fellowship to slaveholders.
Fee left the Presbyterian Church over this matter and came to believe that Christianity had to be non-denominational and non-sectarian. He began writing about abolition, and some of his work was published by the American Missionary Association (AMA), established in 1846. By 1848 the AMA commissioned Fee as an itinerant preacher in Bracken and Lewis counties. In Lewis County, he and parishioners built a Free Church of Christ.
With a land donation from Cassius M. Clay, a wealthy landowner who supported the church and gradual abolition, in 1853 Fee founded the town of Berea, Kentucky in the interior of the state in Madison County. Like-minded people began to gather there. He preached in neighboring counties, often running into violent opposition to his anti-slavery views. His autobiography is filled with his accounts the volatility of the decade before the war, when he was often challenged and threatened because of his stand on abolition and equal treatment of black people.
In 1855 with other members of Union Church, Fee founded Berea College, the first college in the state that was interracial and coeducational. It began as a one-room schoolhouse, which also served as their local church building. He modeled the school on Oberlin College of Ohio and hired some teachers from there as his school expanded. There was great interest in the college, as small as it was. In Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio attended its commencement ceremonies as one of the speakers. Fee, J.A.R. Rogers, who acted as principal, and other supporters drew up a constitution for the school, and pledged their own support with more than of land for the college's campus.
In 1859 Fee took his family to Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended the AMA Convention and did fund-raising for the school. Abolitionists also encouraged him to seek help from Henry Ward Beecher's church in Brooklyn, New York. Abolitionists and supporters of education created a broad national network that sustained such progressive efforts. Word of Fee's seeking help from Beecher made the news in Kentucky, in a distorted fashion, and stirred up pro-slavery sentiment against him.