JOHN RANKIN
Students at Lane Seminary organized anti-slavery protests and seminars. Cincinnati, close to the South had many pro slavery advocates, and these threatened the trustees that they would burn the school down unless the students were reigned in. They were, but it backfired when there was an investigation of the Lane Seminary from which this quotation is taken.
Northern laborers, especially the new Irish immigrants, were fearful of the prospect of competing for jobs with freed Negroes who they perceived would flock to the North. That is what happened but a century later. The blanket assumption that the South was pro slavery was also not accurate. Different sociologies and economics produced different attitudes in communities throughout the South and some were inclined to abolition as Rankin’s history demonstrates.
John Rankin was an American Presbyterian minister, educator and abolitionist. Upon moving to Ripley, Ohio, in 1822, he became known as one of Ohio's first and most active "conductors" on the Underground Railroad. Prominent pre-Civil War abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe were influenced by Rankin's writings and work in the anti-slavery movement.
