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Charles Dexter Cleveland, one of the first American classicists to face the attacks on Latin and Greek philological education, was also a pioneer in providing American anthologies and texts for the study of classical antiquities (“classical civilization”) He balanced teaching and public life, to prove to the young democracy that classicists were not hopelessly bogged down in monarchy, colonialism, and racism. Though his father was a successful broker and dry goods supplier in Boston and was later known as "Father Cleveland" for nearly 40 years of service as “Missionary to the poor of the City of Boston.” For several years Cleveland followed his father's mercantile pursuits, but his hunger for education led him to Dartmouth where before he had completed his B.A., he had already published his edition/translation of Theophrastus and his famous Epitome of Greek Antiquities.While a student, Cleveland, with three fellow students, wrote a now-famous letter dated 25 September 1824 to the faculty of Dartmouth College seeking admission for a student denied entry only because of his race.  The four students asked that the student in question, Edward Mitchell (1794-1871) from Saint Pierre, Martinique, be "permitted to...enjoy with us, the advantages of our institution as part of the class oc 1828.

Cleveland's study of Greek antiquities and his Salem home-bred hatred of slavery nourished each other. “The Spartans,” he wrote, “boasted that they were the freest people on earth. But they kept their slaves in the greatest subjection.” The jab at his own country is unmistakable, and as early as 1844 and 1845 he had joined his Dartmouth schoolmate and fellow abolitionist Salmon P. Chase (1808-73) on the lecture block.

In the early hours of March 24, 1849, Cleveland was present along with Lewis Thompson, James Miller McKim, and William Still in Philadelphia when the slave Henry "Box" Brown (ca. 1815-97) emerged from the wooden crate in which he had been shipped from Richmond, VA, the day before. The event depicting all five men was immortalized in a lithograph made by Peter Kramer and in another version of the same scene published by A. Donnelly.

In 1861President Lincoln made Chase his Secretary of the Treasury and appointed Cleveland United States Consul in Wales, which ended his professional career in classics. But even while consul, Cleveland continued to condemn slavery in speeches, including the one titled "Slavery and War," which he gave at the Victoria Park Congregational Church in London on April 28, 1864. During these years his health had begun to decline and on August 18, 1869, he died, according to the New York Times "so suddenly of heart disease that neither a physician, his sons nor daughters were by his bedside when his spirit took flight."  He was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery on Ridgeville Avenue in Philadelphia. In 1901 with funds collected by Cleveland's students, the Historically Black Hampton University in Hampton, VA, named a building in his honor citing "his labors as an abolitionist...[and] as one of the organizers of the National Liberty Party [an early abolitionist group founded in 1840], a promoter of the underground railway, and a noted anti-slavery orator."