Lyman Beecher bore a heavy burden in 1835 (see Fig. 4). Three years before, the noted Presbyterian clergyman had moved his family to Cincinnati, where he was to become the president of Lane Seminary. The population of Cincinnati – a hodgepodge of blacks and whites, Northerners and Southerners, Europeans and Americans – reflected its role as a western outpost that linked north and south. As such, it became a site embroiled over the battle to extend or restrict slavery and, importantly for our purposes, a staging ground for northern evangelical Protestants to convert the West. It was in this context that Lane Seminary was founded in 1829 to bring evangelical Christianity to the West and, not incidentally, to battle the vices of barbarism, on the one hand, and Romanism, on the other. The move, however, was star-crossed from the start. As they approached the city, the family had to tarry at Cincinnati’s boundaries because of a cholera epidemic raging within. Matters did not improve on their arrival. Within a year, the majority of the students at Lane Seminary had rebelled because of Beecher’s lukewarm attitude toward abolition and had gone to study with Beecher’s long-time rival Charles Finney. Moreover, Beecher’s second wife, unable to withstand the rigors of life on the frontier, had died. Also, although eventually exonerated, Beecher had been accused of heresy. Identified as a coward by abolitionists and a heretic by Presbyterian conservatives, Beecher might well have despaired.