Lyman Beecher studied theology at Yale College and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. From 1810-1826, he preached in Litchfield, CT and helped found the American Bible Society. In 1825, he founded the American Temperance Society. Eventually Beecher became one of the best known and most popular ministers of his day. Various evangelists encouraged him to move west. In 1832, Beecher accepted the call to become the first president of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati.

Beecher’s social activism was joined with a conservative impulse towards religious moderation. Although an abolitionist, he opposed the “Lane Rebels” who advocated immediate emancipation. This debate over gradualism versus sudden emancipation led to a schism in the school.

Antoinette Brown was born in New York and began to speak publicly in church at the age of nine. Educated at Oberlin College through the equivalent of Doctor of Divinity, she was initially refused ordination because of her gender. In 1853, the Congregational church made her the first woman to be ordained. She later became a Unitarian. In 1856, she married Samuel Blackwell. She was active throughout her long life in abolition, suffrage, temperance and other causes.

Olaudah Equiano was sometimes known as Gustavus Vassa.  Equiano was born free in what is now Essaka, an Igbo Village in northeastern Nigeria, West Africa.  He was kidnapped as a child and survived the arduous Middle Passage.  At first, Equiano was enslaved on plantations in the West Indies and Virginia.  Later, a captain in the Royal Navy bought Equiano as a present for his cousins in London.  He then returned to North America as the slave of a Quaker merchant.  Equiano began sailing on various vessels as a merchant seaman.  By skillfully building his own small trading business and saving his money for about ten years, Equiano was eventually able to buy his own freedom.  Eventually, Equiano settled in London and became actively involved in the anti-slavery movement.  In 1789, he published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African.  In his narrative, Equiano relates his conversion to Methodism after witnessing the preaching of famed evangelist, George Whitfield.

Yarrow (Mamount) Marmood had been captured on the Guinea Coast and enslaved in what is today the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. prior to the American Revolution.  As an elderly man, Marmood was given his freedom in 1807.  Marmood is listed as a property owner in the 1800, 1810 and 1820 U.S. Census.  He bought several pieces of real estate, established a hauling business and was one of the first stockholders of the Bank of Columbia.  Marmood came from an Islamic people in West Africa and he followed that religion throughout his life.

Biddy Mason was born enslaved on a plantation in Mississippi owned by Robert Marion Smith.  In 1847, Smith became a Mormon convert and decided to move to the Utah territory with his household and his slaves.  In 1851, Smith moved again to San Bernadino, California where Mormon elder Brigham Young was starting a new Mormon colony.  Probably, Smith did not know that California had become a free state in 1850 and slavery was outlawed.  Mason petitioned the court and won freedom for herself and daughters in 1856.  She became a nurse and midwife, working to support her family.  Mason was one of the first African American women to own land in Los Angeles.  She gave generously to many charities and eventually accumulated a fortune of about $300,000.  In 1872, she was one of the founding members of  First AME Church, the first black church in Los Angeles.

Tenkskawatawa was also known as the Prophet of the Open Door.  He was the younger brother of Tecumseh, the great leader and statesman of the Shawnee people.  Tenskawatawa was a shaman, or healer, to his people.  In about 1805, he experienced a divine revelation that he hoped would help repel white settlers from encroaching futher on Indian lands.  After his military defeat in 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe, the people’s faith in this revelation was destroyed.  Tenskawatawa moved north into Canada, though he later rejoined his nation as they moved west to Kansas in 1828.

Phillis Wheatley was born in the Senegal-Gambia region of West Africa in 1753.  She was kidnapped as a child, and after surviving the Middle Passage, was sold to John Wheatley in Boston, Massachusetts.  The young girl learned English with great speed and eventually learned Latin and Greek.  In 1767, Wheatley published her first poem in the Newport, RI, Mercury.  Wheatley traveled to London to promote her work and find a publisher of her poems.  In 1773, 39 of her poems were published in Poems of Various Subjects. Wheatley was eventually freed and married a free African American, John Black, in 1778.  Although she wrote another collection of poems, she was unable to sell enough subscriptions to have it published.  Long in poor health, Wheatley died in 1784 and her second manuscript was never found.  Wheatley’s beautiful poetry spoke of her strong religious convictions after converting to Christianity and her commitment to the abolition of slavery.

Samuel Hopkins was a well educated Congregational minister who served various churches in New England over the course of his long life.  A graduate of Yale, Rev. Hopkins published many religious articles and sermons.  After 1770, he began to preach more urgently against slavery.  He worked actively to aid the passage of laws in Rhode Island banning the external slave trade and making all children born of enslaved women free after 1785.  Eventually Hopkins became an uncompromising abolitionist.  He led members of his church to vote to exclude all slaveholders from his congregation.

William Apes was born in Massachusetts, probably to an African American mother and a father of mixed Indian and white descent.  His paternal grandmother was Pequot.  After a difficult childhood, Apess was ordained a Methodist Minister in 1829.  His book, A Song of the Forest (1829), was the first published autobiography of a native person.  Apes argued against the Indian Removal Act (1830), which gave the government the authority to force Eastern Indians onto Western reservations.  A prolific author,  Apess was committed to fight for Indian rights.

Connecticut-born Samson Occom became a Protestant minister.  In 1749, Occom (or Occum) chose to go to Long Island to serve the Montauk peoples as their pastor and schoolmaster.  Occom was officially ordained in 1759.  In 1766, Occom went to England to help raise funds to establish Dartmouth College.

Born in Africa and kidnapped and enslaved in New York, John Jea gained his freedom after the Revolutionary War.  He became an itinerant Methodist minister and worked tirelessly against slavery.  In 1811, he published his autobiography, The Life, History and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher.

Benjamin Rush, a prominent Philadelphia physician succeeded Benjamin Franklin as the president of the the Philadelphia Society for the Abolition of Slavery.  Rush also published An Address to the Inhabitants of British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping.  He denounced slavery as anti-Christian, writing, “A Christian Slave is a contradiction in terms.”