Amos Dresser

Amos Dresser (December 17, 1812 – February 4, 1904) was an abolitionist and pacifist minister who was one of the founders of Olivet College. His name was well known in the Antebellum period due to a well-publicized incident: in 1835 he was arrested, tried, convicted, and publicly whipped in Nashville, Tennessee for the crime of possession of abolitionist publications. The incident was widely reported and became well known. Dresser published an account of it, and was a descendant of Robert Cushman, a Mayflower pilgrim. His father died when he was an infant; he lived with his mother, Minerva Cushman, and his mother's second husband, Henry Pierce, until his mother’s death in 1826, when Amos was 13. To prepare for the ministry, in 1830 he enrolled in the new Oneida Institute of Science and Industry, a manual labor school near Utica, New York, predecessor of Oberlin, and briefly the most abolitionist school in the country.

He was one of the first to join a group, led by Theodore Weld, that left Oneida, eventually enrolling as students at the new Lane Seminary near Cincinnati, Ohio. This was the first organized student activism in the country. Dresser was active in the initiative among the group to teach Negroes in Cincinnati. However, unlike others at the time, he did not enroll immediately in the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, as it was called until 1866. of sixty prominent citizens. He was sentenced to "twenty stripes on his bare back", which were carried out in public. The Committee claimed that were it not for them, he would have been lynched. Dresser then hurriedly left Nashville, without his luggage and horse, which he never recovered, although "I have frequently written to my friends concerning them."

Dresser published in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette the story of what had happened to him, twice had it reprinted in pamphlets, plus the American Anti-Slavery Society issued it the following year, accompanied by other testimony on slavery. In January 1837, he spoke on it to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, forced to meet in the hay-loft of a barn. Descriptions in Southern newspapers support his account, although they call the Bible-selling a sham obscuring what according to them was his alleged real purpose: distributing abolitionist literature and fomenting a slave insurrection.

In 1836, he became a successful lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. He worked for abolitionist leader Henry B. Stanton in Worcester County, Massachusetts, lecturing at Athol, Massachusetts, Ashburn, and Slatersville, Rhode Island. He then went to Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and in 1839 to Jamaica to assist another Lane Rebel, David Ingraham, in missionary work among the "Negroes".

Dresser's later life Dresser returned to Ohio and, along with other Lane Rebels, enrolled at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, where he obtained a degree in 1839. While a student at Oberlin he supported himself by working for the American Anti-Slavery Society as a lecturer. After completing his studies, he married Adeline Smith, a former Oberlin student, and from 1839 to 1841 they were missionaries in Jamaica. Among their children was Amos Dresser Jr. From 1852 to 1865 Dresser was pastor of churches in Trumbull and Ashtabula Counties, Ohio, in the Western Reserve, Underground Railroad center and the most anti-slavery region of the country. From 1865 to 1869 he was pastor of three churches in Oceana County, Michigan. In 1869 he went to Butler County, Nebraska, where he had the “whole county for a parish.” In 1879 he went to Red Willow County, Nebraska. At some point towards the end of his life Dresser and his wife went to live in Lawrence, Kansas, with one of their children, and both Amos and Ann Jane died there. He spoke on this topic to the Ashtabula (Ohio) Bible Society in 1858.