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The Rev. Dr. Edward Beecher was a preacher's preacher and a scholar's scholar. He was the son of Rev. Lyman Beecher of whom Theodore Parker said was "the father of more brains than any man in America."1 And indeed, Edward along with his twelve siblings who included Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in America, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the most famous novelist of her day, were at the firestorms of reform in religious thought and action, women's rights, and the antislavery movement. Born in 1803 in New York, Edward, like so many of his generation, had been expected to lead a public life as a productive citizen and moral compass in a nation that needed guidance. Hard work was needed to set a course for the successful development of wealth, territorial expansion, and a moral society. He was young, educated, strong, and had a faith in God matched by faith in his fellow Americans. He was always ready to take on challenges, and none of those were bigger than becoming a partner in the antislavery movement in the East and on the frontier of the West.
When Yale President Jeremiah Day was asked whom he recommended for the presidency of the newly established Illinois College, "he told them Edward Beecher if they could get him." In fact, as Lyman Beecher Stowe points out, "[n]obody but a Beecher would have given up a powerful eastern church, to assume responsibility for a feeble western college. But here was a chance to help his father save that great western country for education and Protestantism, and also a chance for pioneering - always an irresistible appeal to a Beecher."2
As the young Beecher studied, tutored, taught, and preached, the young men of the Yale Band, an erstwhile group of soon-to-be graduates of Yale College, had fixed their eyes on Illinois as the place where they thought they could make the most difference through mission work and cultural formation. In 1828, John M. Ellis, an agent for the American Home Missionary Society in Illinois, had published a call for help in developing a new college in the West, and his article had been read just at the time when these young men were casting about for a missionary...