William L. Breckinridge

William Lewis Breckinridge (July 22, 1803 – December 26, 1876) was an American pastor and educator. The son of Senator John Breckinridge, he was born near Lexington, Kentucky, and attended college at Transylvania University. Early in his career, he became an emancipationist, and he entered academia in 1831 when he began teaching ancient languages at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. He was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1836 to 1858, and was moderator of the 1859 Presbyterian Church (Old School) General Assembly. He was president of Oakland College near Rodney, Mississippi, for one year prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, and afterwards he spent five years as president of Centre College. Early life and education William Lewis Breckinridge, a member of the prominent Breckinridge family, was born on July 22, 1803, near Lexington, Kentucky. He was the eighth child of John Breckinridge and Mary Hopkins Cabell; John was a sitting U.S. senator at the time of William's birth and later became U.S. attorney general. William joined his family's church at the age of 15, and he attended Transylvania University in Lexington. Career Pastor, emancipationist, and teacher In the early to mid-1820s, Breckinridge and several of his brothers became vocal proponents of antislavery, aligning themselves in the minority; the abolitionist James G. Birney wrote that the men "had disqualified themselves from political usefulness" as a result. In 1849, Breckinridge was among the attendees to the Friends of Emancipation state convention, held in Frankfort, along with his brother Robert, Cassius Marcellus Clay, John C. Young, and Walter Newman Haldeman. He attended a meeting of the American Colonization Society in Louisville the same year, where he gave an address and was a part of a committee which advocated revision of the meeting's resolutions because they did not specifically include provisions for colonization. After the revised resolution passed, he spoke for an hour in favor of the cause of emancipation. Additionally, he was successful in convincing The Louisville Democrat to publish opinions in support of abolitionism; this was the first time the newspaper had done so. He was active in his advocacy against slavery as well and spoke in Shelbyville, Lexington, Brunerstown, Jeffersontown, and Louisville throughout 1849, the last of which was a debate against the lawyer William Christian Bullitt.