Dal-Dix: Dalton through Dixon

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


DALTON, Thomas, 1794-1883, free African American, Massachusetts, abolitionist.  Leader, Massachusetts General Colored Association.  Leader, New England Anti-Slavery Society.  Wife was Lucy Dalton.  Organized anti-slavery conventions with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.


DANA, Charles Anderson,  1819-1897 New Hampshire, newspaper editor, author, government official, anti-slavery activist and abolitionist leader.  Proprietor and managing editor of the New York Tribune.  As editor, he had the Tribune actively advocate for the anti-slavery cause.  The Tribune became one of the leading newspapers promoting anti-slavery.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 64-65; Wilson, J. H., Life of Charles A. Dana. New York, 1907; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 49-52)

DANA, CHARLES ANDERSON (August 8, 1819-October 17, 1897), newspaper editor, was born at Hinsdale, New Hampshire, a descendant of Jacob, eldest son of Richard Dana who in 1640 was a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had few early advantages beyond the good blood of Puritan ancestors. His father, Anderson Dana, a country storekeeper, failed in business and removed to upper New York, where he became a farmer; his mother, Ann Denison, died when he was nine. Sent to Buffalo at the age of twelve to clerk in the general. store of an uncle, he was thrown entirely upon his own resources at eighteen, when the panic of 1837 ruined his employer. While a boy on the farm he had studied Latin on his own initiative; he used his evenings in Buffalo to read widely, become familiar with the Latin classics, and begin the study of Greek. He joined a literary society there called the Coffee Club, and delivered before it a youthful lecture on early English poetry which was much admired. Thus prepared by his own efforts, he was able to matriculate at Harvard without conditions in the fall of 1839, and took high rank in his first college term. Despite one long absence for teaching school he had begun his junior year in 1841, when his eyesight became impaired by over study and he returned to Buffalo. Twenty years later .he received from Harvard an honorary A.B., as of the class of 1843. About the time he left college, George Ripley [q.v. ] was launching the Brook Farm enterprise, which Dana, with an idealistic enthusiasm then characteristic of him, hastened to join. He was engaged to teach German, Greek, or anything else, and to work on the Farm, while in view of his storekeeping experience he was made one of the managing trustees. For the next five years he remained at Brook Farm, placing in it what slender capital he could, and proselytizing earnestly for it. With characteristic energy he taught, sang bass in the choir, wrote essays and poems for the Dial and the Harbinger, and delivered lectures. According to T. W. Higginson, he was the best all-round man at the Farm. He opposed its conversion into a "Phalanx" as demanded by Fourierist ideas, but after this was effected he remained stanchly loyal to the organization (Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm, 1900). In a lecture of 1895 at the University of Michigan he paid a warm tribute to the charm of life at the Far!1), and the value of his association there with Ripley, Hawthorne, George W. Curtis, Margaret Fuller, and others.

Dana's writings for the Harbinger had so fixed his attention upon journalism that when a disastrous fire terminated the Brook Farm experiment in 1846 he naturally turned to that field. A slight previous connection with the Boston Daily Chronotype enabled him at once to become its assistant editor. The paper was too poor to pay much, and its strong Congregationalism repelled Dana, who had now progressed far in Unitarian liberalism. In the absence of the editor he made the Chronotype come out "mighty strong against hell," so that his superior later had to write a letter of explanation to every Congregational minister in the state. Within the year Dana used his acquaintance with Greeley to obtain the city editorship of the New York Tribune, at the munificent wage of first ten and later fourteen dollars a week. For the next fifteen years he devoted himself to the paper, and soon stood second in its office to Greeley alone. Outwardly this period of subeditorship was uneventful. Its first years were broken by a long trip (1848-9) to Europe, where Dana supported himself by contributing no fewer than five letters a week to as many journals in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. He could not have gone abroad at a more instructive moment, for he witnessed the uprisings in Paris and Berlin at close range. His experiences did more than acquaint him with European affairs. They swept away many of his idealistic illusions, gave him an insight into the selfishness and chicanery of politicians, and helped lay the foundation for his subsequent cynicism. Later, as managing editor, he had little time for travel, but found leisure to edit an American edition of H. J. Meyer's Universum (1852), and to compile The Household Book of Poetry (1857), which in successive editions commanded an enormous sale. A trip which Dana made with W. H. Appleton to the opening of the Chicago & Rock Island Rail Road resulted in plans for an American Cyclopedia in sixteen volumes under the editorship of himself and George Ripley. The first volume appeared in 1858, and despite the interruption of the war, the work was completed in six years. Two editions of it sold more than three million copies (Grant Overton, Portrait of a Publisher, 1925, p. 45).

Dana's years on the Tribune gave him experience in two directions. As a writer he became the master of a compressed, sententious style, sometimes epigrammatic, and increasingly tinged by cynicism. His principles were largely, though by no means completely, liberal. He took up Kossuth's cause with ardor, advocated a railway to the Pacific, and ably seconded Greeley's opposition to the expansion of slavery, though he had little use for · the Abolitionists. He believed in a high protective tariff, and opposed labor unions formed to conduct strikes, arguing that the workers' true remedy for unfair industrial conditions lay in a cooperative industrial effort. His hostility to militant labor persisted throughout his life, and gave many of his utterances on industrial questions an illiberal and even reactionary tendency. In editorial management Dana soon made himself an expert. Frequently, as during Greeley's European trips in 1851 and 1855-56, he was in sole charge. He then decided the entire contents of the paper; edited everything, even Greeley's contributions, with iron hand; and took the initiative in important business changes.

In the events leading up to the Civil-War Dana and Greeley acted with substantial harmony, and there is no question that Dana acquiesced in Greeley's willingness to let the erring sisters depart in peace. But, though the words were written by a subordinate, Dana was responsible for the Tribune's disastrous war cry, "Forward to Richmond!" which Greeley opposed. This was the first serious token of a divergence in views and temper which rapidly became intolerable. Dana was too aggressive and positive in dealing with both civil and military policy to suit Greeley. The result was that, after Greeley had acted rather shiftily, Dana's resignation was demanded and accepted (March 28, 1862), with a promise of six months' salary. This virtual dismissal was a blessing in disguise. After declining the suggestion that he take a diplomatic post or a place with the Treasury (Wilson, pp. 182-83), he at once entered the service of the War Department, where Secretary Stanton was eager to repay him for editorial support.

The best part of Dana's war service was performed as a special commissioner at Grant's headquarters, nominally to investigate the pay-service, but actually to report daily on military oper;1tions and thus enable the Administration to 111easure accurately Grant's capacities. During the Vicksburg campaign his observations were equally valuable to the Washington officials and to Grant himself. Dana instantly perceived the general's high qualities, he increased Lincoln's faith in him, set Stanton right regarding the jealous McClernand, and by his daily dispatches relieved Grant of much irksome letter- writing. Of Sherman's military genius Dana also formed a high opinion. Made assistant secretary of war after the fall of Vicksburg, he was sent to report upon the movements of Rosecrans against Bragg. His judgment was not in all regards unerring, but he was right in urging the removal of Rosecrans. Later with Grant and Sherman at Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge, he again proved an excellent advocate for these men. During 1864 he alternated desk service in Washington with field service in Virginia, and formed impressions of Lincoln, the cabinet members, and some leading congressmen which enabled him long afterward to give pungent sketches of them in his Recollections of the Civil War (1898). On July 1, 1865, he resigned and immediately left the capital.

Dana's acquisition of the New York Sun, which marked the opening of the most significant part of his career, occurred at the close of 1867. It was preceded by an abortive journalistic venture in Chicago, where he became editor of an unsuccessful paper called the Republican (Recollections, p. 290). When this sheet began to fail, he secured capital for the founding of a newspaper in New York, his associates including W. M. Evarts, Roscoe Conkling, Alonzo Cornell, Cyrus W. Field and A. A. Low. A fortunate chance enabling him to purchase the Sun for $175,000, he assumed its editorship cm January 25, 1868, with an announcement of policy which has become a journalistic classic. After declaring that the Sun would be independent of party, would advocate the speedy restoration of the South, and would support Grant for the presidency, he summed up its new spirit in a single sentence : "It will study condensation, clearness, point, and will endeavor to present its daily photograph of the whole world's doings in the most luminous and lively manner." Imbued with this spirit, the Sun at once achieved a new success.

In his capacity as leader of public opinion, Dana was frequently perverse, cynical, and reactionary, and more than once affected by personal resentments. He broke sharply with Grant, and after 1869 attacked his administration more fiercely than did any other New York daily. Yet in 1872, while making the cry "Turn the rascals out" ring through the country and assailing Grant almost scurrilously, he gave only a cynical quasi-support to the Liberal Republican party, whose candidate he contemptuously called "Dr. Greeley." In 1876 the Sun opposed Hayes, whom it later branded as a receiver of stolen goods and a fraudulent president. Four years later it relentlessly attacked Garfield, whom it described as a participant in the Credit Mobilier frauds, the Boss Shepherd thefts, and the back-pay grab; yet at the same time it treated Hancock with ill-veiled condescension, speaking of him as "a good man, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds." The most remarkable exhibition of Dana's political perversity was his unremitting enmity to Cleveland, which grew out of an unworthy bit of personal pique, the failure of Cleveland to keep a supposed promise to appoint Franklin Bartlett, son of Dana's friend W. O. Bartlett, to a post connected with the state judiciary. Dana at the same time declared that sooner than join in making Blaine president, he would quit work and burn his pen. The consequence was that in 1884 he had to support B. F. Butler and his Greenback ticket, which polled a farcically small vote in New York. In his social and economic opinions of these years Dana showed the same perversity, accompanied sometimes by an impudent levity. He denounced the reformed civil service as "a German bureaucratic system," advocated the annexation of Cuba, Santo Domingo, and if possible Canada, and abused Cleveland for his conciliatory foreign policy, demanding the resignation of Secretary Bayard for negotiating the fisheries treaty with England. He declared that the McKinley Act was the most scientific and valuable tariff the country ever had. Dana's hostility toward labor unions cropped out in the great railway strike of 1878; and later he urged that labor organizations be placed under precisely as stringent governmental regulation as affected the trusts. In New York City the Sun supported some of the worst figures in Tammany, and opposed some of the best reform movements.

As a news editor, however, Dana at once took a very high place. The Civil War had tended to exalt news at the expense of editorials. Dana approved of this, declaring that "if the newspaper has not the news, it may have everything else, yet it will be comparatively unsuccessful." Under him the Sun's news-pages were characterized by conciseness, cleverness, and sparkle of style. Discarding conventional standards of news importance and emphasizing human interest, he taught the staff that a good story on the Sunday crowd at Coney Island might be worth more space than a column on the Carlist War or a lecture by Huxley. The Sun gave prominence to crime in its "daily photograph," and specialized in eye-catching headlines. The enterprise of the reporters obtained many scoops, and the foreign and domestic correspondence of the paper attained such excellence that when in 1897 a long-standing quarrel with the Associated Press came to a head, Dana's managing editor, Chester S. Lord, was able to organize over-night a comprehensive news service of his own. Though sternly excluding fine writing, the Sun insisted upon vividness, and made generous room for clever brief essays. The paper was at all costs bright, witty, and enjoyable. As a result it became the "newspaper man's newspaper," and attracted to its staff a singularly brilliant roster of writers. Indeed, one of Dana's titles to fame as an editor is that he gave opportunity and advancement to such editorial writers as E.P. Mitchell, and such news writers as Julian Ralph, David Graham Phillips, Jacob Riis, and Richard Harding Davis. He mingled constantly with the staff, encouraging, suggesting, and praising frequently, while chiding rarely and gently.

Dana was a man of wide intellectual and esthetic interests, which in later life he had leisure and money to indulge. He took quiet pride in learning the chief European tongues, living and dead, his last two trips abroad being for the purpose of perfecting his Russian. He liked to conduct private classes in Dante or Icelandic; he h ad a valuable collection of Chinese porcelains; and at his home on Dosoris Island in Long Island Sound he grew a remarkable variety of foreign trees, shrubs, and flowers. He prided himself on being a connoisseur of wines, though he seldom did more than taste them. Though much interested in politics, he preferred to make his friends among literary people, musicians, and artists. Married, March 2, 1846, to Eunice Macdaniel, he was devoted to wife and children. He had the faculty of endearing himself to close newspaper associates, but he never forgave a grudge or a slight.

[Jas. H.Wilson, Life of Chas. A. Dana (1907), is uncritically eulogistic and emphasizes his war services. Chas. A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (1898), a graphic and honest work, throwing some light on his years upon the Tribune, should be supplemented by The Art of Newspaper Making (1895), and Eastern Journeys (1898). See also Frank M. O' Brien, The Story of the Sun (1918); Edw. P. Mitchell, Memoirs of an Editor (1924); Chester S. Lord, The Young Men and Journalism (1922); Willard G. Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (1927); Henry Watterson, Marse Henry: An Autobiography (1919); Oswald G. Villard, Some Newspapers and Newspapermen (1923); J. J. Dana, Memoranda of Some of the Descendants of Richard Dana (1865); and biographies of Greeley. The Sun published no obituary. Magazine material is voluminous, but must be used with care.]

A.N.


DANE, Nathan, 1752-1835, jurist, anti-slavery activist, delegate to the Continental Congress, 1785-1788, Massachusetts, framed Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (Appletons, 1888, Vol. II, p. 72; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 63; Locke, 1901, pp. 93, 158n; ; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 76) He published “A General Abridgment and Digest of American Law” (9 vols., Boston, 1823-‘9), and “Appendix” (1830). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 72.

DANE, NATHAN (December 29, 1752-February 15, 1835), lawyer, statesman, was a descendant of John Dane of Berkhamstead and Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, who settled at Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1638 and subsequently became a freeman of Roxbury. Fourth in the direct line from him, Daniel Dane, a farmer, married Abigail Burnham and resided at Ipswich, where their son, Nathan, was born. His life, until he was twenty, was spent on the farm, his education being obtained at the common schools. In 1772, however, he determined to attempt a college course, and having prepared himself privately in eight months, entered Harvard College in 1774, where he graduated in 1778 with high honors. He then read law in the office of Judge William Wetmore of Salem, at the same time teaching school at Beverly, Massachusetts. In November 1779 he was married to Mrs. Mary Brown. On his admission to the bar in 1782 he commenced practise at Beverly, being in the same year elected a representative of that town in the General Court of Massachusetts. His ability was early recognized; he was reelected in three successive years, and in 1785 was elected a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress. In the proceedings of this body he took an active part, serving on important committees and displaying great assiduity in the performance of his duties. He was reelected in 1786 and 1787. In the latter year the chief subject for consideration before the Congress was the organization and government of the territory lying northwest of the Ohio River, respecting which he took a memorable part. He assisted in drafting the Ordinance for the Government of the Northwest Territory, and, after reporting it to Congress, on his own initiative prepared and moved the addition of an article reading "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory" (Indiana Historical Society Publications, no. 1, 1897, p. 69). The Ordinance as thus amended was adopted without further change. He opposed the new Federal Constitution as finally drafted, and at the ensuing election for the state convention to consider its ratification, was an unsuccessful candidate. On retiring from Congress he resumed his law practise at Beverly, but in 1790 was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. He was reëlected in 1793, being the same year appointed a judge of the court of common pleas for Essex County, which position he resigned without taking his seat on the bench. In 1795 he was appointed a commissioner to revise the laws of the Commonwealth. He was reelected annually to the Massachusetts Senate from 1793 to 1798 (Fleet's Register and Pocket Almanac, 1794- 99), but the last mentioned year was the last occasion upon which he was a member of the legislature, an increasing deafness rendering it difficult for him to participate in public assemblages. He continued, however, to assist in the work of statute revision and, in 1812, with Prescott and Story, composed the commission appointed to revise and publish the Massachusetts Colonial and Provincial laws. He was also in that year presidential elector, and in 1814 made his last public appearance, at the Hartford Convention, though subsequently he was chosen as delegate from Beverly to the constitutional convention of 1820, it being known at the time that he would be unable to attend. He had now become almost entirely deaf, and, withdrawing from practise, devoted his time to completing two works upon which he had been engaged continuously for upward of thirty years. One of these, "A Moral and Political Survey of America," composed of a lengthy series of essays, was never published. The other, a General Abridgment and Digest of American Law, with Occasional Notes and Comments, was published in eight volumes in 1823, a supplementary volume appearing in 1829. This work was important as being the first comprehensive compendium of law to be prepared and printed on this continent, and displayed not only his great legal attainments but a meticulous attention to detail and a methodical labor which. was characteristic of everything which he undertook. His outstanding characteristics were industry, directness and simplicity. "He was uniformly prompt, punctual and systematic. He had a particular time and a particular way for doing everything." Always a student, during the last twenty years of his life he never spent less than twelve and often fourteen hours a day in his library. He possessed a singularly well-balanced judgment, a great forethought, and was totally devoid of temperament. Of his powers as a speaker, there is little information, but it may be confidently surmised that his extraordinary influence with his contemporaries was due more to the matter than the manner of his utterances, and that his intellectual endowments more than compensated for his lack of popular attributes. He was a benefactor of Harvard Law School, to which he gave in his lifetime $15,000, the fruits of which were the establishment of the Dane Professorship of Law and the founding of Dane Hall. He died at Beverly, in his eighty-third year.

[Details of Dane's ancestry are contained in J. W. Dean, "A Pedigree of the Dane Family," published on John Dane, A Declaration of Remarkable Providences in the Course of My Life (1854). Much the best review of his life and achievements appeared in Green Bag, III, 548. See also A. P. Peabody, Harvard Grads. Whom I Have Known (1890), p.12; E. M. Stone, History of Beverly (1843), p. 135; Proc. Massachusetts Historical Society, X (1869), 475; Pennsylvania Mag. of History and Biography, XIII (1889), 309; J. A. Barrett, Evolution of the Ordinance of 1787 (1891). Date of birth given in tombstone inscription published in Stone's History of Beverly is December 27, 1752; most accounts, however, including that by Stone, give December 29.]

H. W. H. K.


DANGERFIELD, Newby, free African American man with John Brown during his raid at the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, October 16, 1859; hanged with John Brown, 1859 (see entry for John Brown).


DAVENPORT, Franklin, 1755-1832, abolitionist, soldier, New Jersey legislature, U.S. Senator 1789-1799, U.S. House of Representatives from New Jersey 1799-1801, member and delegate of the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, founded 1793, nephew of Benjamin Franklin.  (Basker, 2005, pp. 223, 239n9; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 82).

DAVENPORT, Franklin, senator, b. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; d. in Woodbury, New Jersey, about 1829. He received an academic education, and, after studying law, was admitted to the bar, and practised in Woodbury. During the Revolutionary war he served as captain of the artillery in Col. Newcomb's New Jersey brigade, and for some time was under Col. Samuel Smith in Fort Mifflin. He was a colonel in the New Jersey line during the whiskey insurrection in 1794, and marched with the troops to Pittsburg. Subsequently he became the first surrogate of Gloucester county, and was appointed U. S. senator to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of John Rutherford, serving from 19 December, 1798, till 3 March, 1799. He was then sent to congress, and served through the entire term from 2 December, 1799, till March, 1801. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 82.


DAVIS, Henry Winter, 1817-1865, statesman, lawyer.  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, 3rd District of Maryland, 1854, 1856, 1858, 1863-1865.  Anti-slavery activist in Congress.  Supported enlistment of African Americans in Union Army.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 97-98; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 119; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 198; Congressional Globe) He published a book entitled the “War of Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Nineteenth Century” (Baltimore, 1853). His collected speeches, together with a eulogy by his colleague, John A. J. Cresswell, were published in New York in 1867.

DAVIS, HENRY WINTER (August 16, 1817- December 30, 1865), politician, statesman, was the son of Reverend Henry Lyon Davis, president of St. John's College (Maryland), an ardent Federalist and Episcopalian, and Jane (Brown) Winter, a cultured woman with aristocratic connections in the town of Annapolis. During the campaign of 1828 Davis's father was removed from his position by the partisans of Jackson on the board of trustees of the college, and set adrift under circumstances which greatly influenced the career of Henry Winter Davis. After a strenuous course at Kenyon College (Ohio), young Davis procured, after much delay and difficulty, the meager funds necessary to enable him to study law at the University of Virginia. He left the University in June 1840 with some knowledge of law, mainly Coke on Littleton, and began his career at Alexandria, Virginia, a handsome man of twenty-three, six feet tall, and of aristocratic bearing and manner. Here he quickly won an enviable reputation, obtained a good income from his profession, and on October 30, 1845, married Constance C. Gardiner, daughter of a prominent citizen of the town. After her death, he married, on January 26, 1857, Nancy Morris of Baltimore, whither he had moved in 1849. Attaching himself to the Whig party, Davis appeared on the platform as a speaker with Robert Winthrop and Horace Greeley in the unhappy campaign of General Winfield Scott for the presidency in 1852. In 1855 he was chosen to a seat in Congress where he immediately took a prominent place among the leaders of the Know-Nothing party. The hot disputes about Kansas left him unmoved, nor did the ardent campaign of 1856 budge him from his steady conservatism. He supported Fillmore, and endeavored to hold his neutral position from 1856 to 1860. But the decline of the Know-Nothing party and the break between Douglas and Buchanan compelled him to take sides. On the last clay of January 1860, after a deadlock of seven weeks, he cast his vote for William Pennington, Republican candidate for speaker. This enabled the new party to organize the House and to prepare more effectively for the presidential campaign already opened. The decision made Davis a national character, but the legislature of Maryland repudiated his action by a vote of 62 to 1. From that clay to his death every public act of Davis was a matter of immediate concern to the country. He was for a moment candidate for the Republican nomination for the vice-presidency, and thought of himself from that time forward as a suitable candidate for the presidency. He was guided by an overweening ambition, but his abilities as a statesman and an orator were acknowledged to be extraordinary. In his district he was both hated and loved beyond all other public men and his campaigns for reelection were violent and bloody. Notwithstanding his vote for the Republicans in January 1860, he was the guiding spirit of the Bell and Everett party in Maryland; and he procured the nomination of Thomas H. Hicks [q.v.], Unionist, for governor. His purpose was not to defeat the Republican party in Maryland, but the regular Democrats, with Breckinridge as their candidate. Bell and Everett won; Hicks likewise was successful.

Davis, serving the balance of his term in the House of Representatives during the critical winter of 1860-61, keenly desired to sit in the new cabinet. But Montgomery Blair, a member of perhaps the most influential family in the country and the leader of a forlorn hope of Republicans in Maryland, was chosen. Davis was alone and without a party, for the Union party was rapidly disintegrating. On February 7, when the Confederacy was just raising its head in Montgomery and the leading Republicans of the North were acquiescing in the secession movement, Davis in one of the important speeches of his life asserted that in Maryland they did not recognize the right of secession and that they would not be dragged from the Union (Congressional Globe, Appendix, 36 Congress, 2 Sess.). But Governor Hicks and the people of Maryland did recognize the right of Southerners to secede and they seemed about to take legislative action in that direction. Davis said later that but for his activity Lincoln would have been inaugurated in some Pennsylvania village. He wrote a public letter to the New York Tribune urging that th e Federal forts in Maryland be placed in the hands of Union men. Then he simply announced himself as a candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives. It was the 15th of April. Four days later the 6th Massachusetts Regiment was attacked in Baltimore. One of the most spectacular and bitter of political contests ensued, with Davis everywhere the militant leader of the Unionists. On June 13 his opponent, Henry May, a Southern sympathizer, was elected by a vote of 8,335 to 6,287.

It was a decisive defeat, but Davis became even better known to the country, traveled widely, and spoke often for the Union. However, either his chagrin at the presence of Montgomery Blair in Lincoln's cabinet or the President's open violation of many of the sacred traditions of the country led him into opposition. He could hardly contain himself when he thought of the procedure in the many courts martial of the day, or of the thousands of men in prison without proved offense. To him the habeas corpus was sacred beyond a question. Before a very hostile Brooklyn audience, early in November, he bitterly arraigned the President and all about him. There are few instances of a speaker's attaining such complete mastery over his audience as Davis did on that occasion. Nor did he-ever cease to oppose most of the President's policies. He was not arrested or imprisoned, however, and in the hotly contested election of 1863 he was returned to the House, where he was at once made chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. He then became and remained a close friend and ally of Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means. It was at the moment when Lincoln sent to Congress his program of reconstruction, known as the Louisiana Plan. Davis ranged himself at once on the side of the opposition, attacking upon every possible occasion the " usurpations" of the President, and ridiculing unmercifully the foreign policy of Seward, the management of the navy by Gideon Welles, the conduct of General Frank P. Blair as an army commander, and the unrelenting campaign of Montgomery Blair against himself in Maryland. In a little while the great majority of the House hung upon his words and followed him implicitly. He was more the master of that body than Thaddeus Stevens himself.

The most important of Davis's campaigns in the House of Representatives began early il1 the session and culminated in a victory over the President in spite of all that Seward, Welles, and the Blairs could do. Instead of reporting a reconstruction bill such as Lincoln suggested, Davis wrote and substituted a measure of his own. The President would leave the reconstructed states to abolish slavery themselves; Davis would compel immediate emancipation. The President would allow ten per cent of the voters to set up a new state government; Davis would require a majority. The President would proscribe only a few of the leading Confederates; Davis would proscribe a vast number. The President said nothing about repudiating Southern debts; Davis would compel repudiation of all Southern war debts, state and Confederate. His was a policy of "thorough," like that of the Cromwellians in England. Davis's principal speech in support of his drastic plan was made on March 22, 1864, when the supporters of the President and the rising radical opposition were engaged in the bitterest warfare. He denied the right of the President to reconstruct a state and considered the Emancipation Proclamation as invalid until approved by Congress. He claimed all power for Congress and wished so to reconstruct the Southern states, when they were completely beaten and utterly helpless, that no court could ever undo the work. The Davis bill passed the House and the Senate by large majorities. When at last, after his renomination and the adjournment of Congress, Lincoln pocket vetoed the measure, Davis was beside himself with rage. He took the extreme risk of a violent attack upon the nominee of his party at a moment when' few thoughtful men had any real hope of complete success in the war. In July, conferences of leading Republicans were held in New York. Davis took part. In the spirit of these troubled men, Davis wrote the famous Wade-Davis manifesto which appeared in the leading papers on August 8, 1864. In this document he reviewed the history of the congressional plan of reconstruction and ridiculed the President's plan in unmerciful language (Speeches and Addresses of Henry Winter Davis, pp. 415-426).

It is said that Davis never entered the White House during Lincoln's incumbency and that this manifesto brought the relations of the two men, as well as of the opposing groups in the Republican party, to the necessity of some understanding. The presidential election was pending and the people of the North had plainly lost heart. Davis was in Baltimore waging his campaign for reelection, while Seward, Weed, Welles, and the rest were fighting in Washington and elsewhere for the success of their chief. On July 1, Chase resigned and gave up his open fight on the President. On September 4, the news of victory at Atlanta reached Washington. Early in September, Montgomery Blair ceased his war upon Davis and offered his resignation. Before the end of September, Davis called at the White House and henceforth made speeches on behalf of the President. Lincoln was reelected and Chase took his seat as chief justice, but the ambitious chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations was defeated in his district.

When Congress met, however, in December 1864, Davis, now a "lame duck," was the most popular man in it. He fought through the short session, saw Andrew Johnson inaugurated with more than wonted pleasure, and, after the death of Lincoln, went to Chicago to make another of his great speeches: He attacked Johnson as he had attacked Lincoln, and outlined once more the program of congressional reconstruction which was indorsed by Charles Sumner at Worcester on September 14 and readopted by Congress the next year. Davis, still only forty-eight years old, looked forward to the day when he might sit in the coveted White House, mean while impeaching Andrew Johnson, as he must have sought the impeachment of Lincoln if the latter had lived. A private citizen of extraordinary prestige, he returned to Washington in December 1865, and with his mere presence at the door of the House of Representatives broke up the session. Exposed to inclement weather during the holidays, he took cold. This developed into pneumonia and on December 30 he died.

[There has never been an adequate study of Davis's career, though Bernard C. Steiner, The Life of Henry Winter Davis (1916), offers a brief review of the main facts and incidents. J. A. J. Creswell's sketch of Davis's life is published as an introduction to The Speeches and Addresses Delivered in the Congress of the U.S. and on Several Public Occasions, by Henry Winter Davis (1867). Gideon Welles and Adam Gurowski make frequent mention of him in their diaries.]

W.E.D.


DAVIS, Paulina Kellogg Wright, 1813-1876, abolitionist, feminist, women’s rights activist, reformer.  Davis was married to abolitionist Francis Wright.  They served on the executive committee of the Central New York Anti-Slavery Society.  Their house was attacked by an angry mob for their anti-slavery activities.  After the death of her husband, she re-married, to anti-slavery Democrat Thomas Davis, who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1852.  In May 1850, in Boston, Davis and other women’s rights activists planned and organized the first national women’s rights convention.  (American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 214-216; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 216; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 106; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 141-142;)

DAVIS, PAULINA KELLOGG WRIGHT (August 7, 1813-August 24, 1876), editor, suffragist, was born in Bloomfield, New York, daughter of Capt. Ebenezer and Polly (Saxton) Kellogg. Both parents were very conservative in their views and their associates. When Paulina was seven years old she was left an orphan and was subsequently adopted by an aunt in Le Roy, New York, where she received her education. Her aunt was an unyielding Puritan and the child was under constant restraint, which probably accounts for her later advocacy of freedom and personal rights. Religion was part of her daily routine, and upon leaving school she decided to become a missionary to the Sandwich Islands. This idea was abandoned in 1833 when she married Francis Wright, a merchant of wealth and position in Utica, New York. The Wrights took an active part in the anti-slavery convention held in Utica in 1835. Mr. Wright died during that year. Mrs. Wright had spent much of her leisure time in studying anatomy and physiology, and in 1844 she began lecturing on the subject to groups of women. She imported from Paris the first known femme modele in this country. Its use in her lectures brought much unfavorable comment. Her early efforts, however, helped to open the medical profession to women. She contributed many articles to the Woman's Advocate and McDowell's Journal. In 1849 she married Thomas Davis of Providence, Rhode Island. When he was elected to Congress in 1853, she went with him to Washington. There she was badly received by the women, who considered her knowledge and work unbecoming to her sex. In February 1853, she established the Una, the first distinctively woman's rights paper published in this country, which she continued for nearly three years at h er own expense. The paper expressed the broadest view of individual freedom. In 1859 she visited Europe and spent a year in travel, giving her leisure time to picture galleries and the study of art. On her return she continued her activities in behalf of woman suffrage. She took charge of the arrangements for the meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Movement held in New York in 1870. At the opening session she gave a report of the history and progress of the movement during the preceding twenty years (published as A History of the National Woman's Rights Movement, 1871). In 1871, with h er niece and an adopted daughter, she visited Europe, where she took up seriously the study of art, under the direction of Carl Marko, of Florence, Italy. In 1874 her health failed and she returned to the United States. Most of her remaining time was spent as an invalid at her home in Providence, Rhode Island, where she died in 1876.

[An obituary of Paulina Davis appears in the Woman's Journal, September 2, 1 876. See also Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others, History of Woman Suffrage (1881), I, 283-89; Timothy Hopkin s, The Kelloggs in the Old World and the New (1903).]

M.S.


DAVIS, Thomas T., 1810-1872, lawyer.  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1862 and 1864 from Syracuse, New York.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, p. 97; Congressional Globe)


DAWES, Henry Laurens, 1816-1903, Massachusetts, judge, U.S. Congressman from Massachusetts.  Served in Congress 1857-1873. U.S. Senator 1875-1893.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 107; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 149-150; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 250; Congressional Globe)

DAWES, HENRY LAURENS (October 30, 1816-February 5, 1903), congressman, senator, was born in Cummington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, the son of Mitchell and Mercy (Burgess) Dawes. After graduating from Yale College in 1839, he taught school for a few months, gaining meanwhile some newspaper experience writing editorials for the Greenfield Gazette and Courier and the North Adams Transcript. Admitted to the bar in 1842, he opened an office in North Adams, but moved later to Pittsfield, where, in 1848, he began his long political career by being chosen to the Massachusetts lower house, of which he was a member in 1848, 1849, and 1852. He sat for one term (1850) in the state Senate, and he was an active participant in the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1853. For some years (1853-57) he was United States attorney for the western district of Massachusetts. He married, on May 1, 1844, Electa Allen Sanderson (1822-1901), daughter of Chester Sanderson, of Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Dawes came into national prominence in 1857, when he was elected to the Thirty-fifth Congress from the Berkshire district of Massachusetts; and he sat in the House of Representatives term after term until 1875, growing steadily in influence until he was recognized as perhaps its most useful and reliable member. His colleague, George F. Hoar, wrote of Dawes, "There has never been, within my experience, a greater power than his on the floor of the House" (Autobiography, I, 203). At first appointed only to the Committee on Revolutionary Claims, he became chairman in succession of the two most important House committees, Appropriations (1869) and Ways and Means (1871). He was also for ten years chairman of the Committee on Elections. There was very little law-making of this period in which he was not consulted. He was a consistent advocate of a protectionist policy and was himself the author of important tariff measures, including the wool and woolen tariff of 1868 which he wrote conjointly with Bingham of Ohio. Manufacturers of textiles in New England depended upon him as their champion when legislation affecting them was introduced. He was responsible for the establishment of the Fish Commission, and, in 1869, at the suggestion of Prof. Cleveland Abbe [q.v.], he initiated a plan for a daily weather bulletin, which was to collect and compare weather reports from all sections of the country, and which soon became the United States Weather Bureau. He was chairman, in 1872, of a House committee for investigating the so-called "Sanborn Contracts." In 1869 he was a candidate for speaker, but was defeated by James G. Blaine.

In 1875 Dawes was elected to succeed William B. Washburn as United States senator from Massachusetts and served three consecutive terms, retiring in 1892. As a member of the Committee on Buildings and Grounds, he proposed and carried through a bill under which the Washington Monument, left unfinished since 1856 because of lack of funds, was finally completed and dedicated in 1885. His most enduring work, however, was accomplished as chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs. A faithful and intelligent friend of the red men, he did his utmost to make their lot a happy one, and Edward Everett Hale said of him, "While he held the reins, nobody talked of dishonor in our dealings with the Indians." He was the author of the Dawes Act of 1887, which opened the way for granting land within the reservations to individual Indians, and citizenship to those competent to manage their own affairs. It was his influence which created a system of Indian education and placed the Indians under the protection of the federal criminal laws. After his retirement from the Senate, he visited Indian Territory in 1895, as the head of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, designated by Congress to secure the voluntary consent of the Indians to the abandonment of tribal relations. His report was widely discussed.

Senator Hoar once declared that Dawes had "proved himself fit for every position in our Republican army except that of trumpeter." In appearance, he was a shrewd-looking Yankee, with high cheek-bones and a gray beard. He was a man of simple tastes, without any showy qualities, and he never sought popular applause. Without any gift of eloquent speech, he confined himself always to a dignified and lucid presentation of his case; but he worked more often in the committee rooms than on the floor of the House or the Senate. Although he influenced legislation upon which millions of dollars depended, he never accumulated a fortune, and his probity was unquestioned. During his last months in the Senate, Dawes was troubled by an increasing deafness, which prevented him from seeking another term. Upon his formal retirement, after thirty-six years of continuous service in Congress, he was tendered a farewell banquet by his associates. In his old age, he became the " Sage of Pittsfield," where he died in his eighty-seventh year.

[There is no extended biography of Dawes, but ample material upon him is to be found in newspapers and magazines of the period. See G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (2 vols., 1903); Bio. Dir. American Congress, 1774-1927 (1928); Obit. Record Grads. Yale University (1910); Outlook, February 14, 1903; Boston Transcript, February S, 1903.]

C. M. F.


DAYTON, William Lewis, 1807-1864, lawyer, statesman, diplomat, U.S. Senator.  Member of the Free Soil Whig Party.  Opposed slavery and its expansion into the new territories.  Opposed the Fugitive Slave bill of 1850.  Supported the admission of California as a free state and the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.  First vice presidential nominee of Republican Party in 1856, on the ticket with John C. Frémont.  Lost the election to James Buchanan.  (Goodell, 1852, p. 570; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 59; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 113; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 166-167; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 280)

DAYTON, WILLIAM LEWIS (February 17, 1807-December 1, 1864), lawyer, politician, diplomat, great-grandson of Eli as Dayton [q.v.], was born at Baskingridge, New Jersey, his .father, Joel, being a mechanic who educated two sons to law and one to medicine. His mother, Nancy, daughter of Edward and Nancy (Crowell) Lewis, was a grand-daughter of Edward Lewis, a commissary of Washington's army. After finishing at the local academy under Dr. Brownlee, he was graduated from Princeton in 1825, taught school at Pluckemin, and read law with Peter D. Vroom at Somerville, being admitted to the bar in May term 1830. Despite feeble health and slowly maturing powers, his " large mind and strong common sense" (J. P. Bradley, post, 75) made Dayton a master of common law. Settling at Freehold, New Jersey, he attracted attention in November 1833 by persuading the court to quash certain indictments (L. Q. C. Elmer, post, 375), and became the leading lawyer there. Elected to the legislative council in 1837, as a Whig, he was chosen one of two new associate justices of the state supreme court on February 28, 1838. He decided the important case of Freeholders vs. Strader (3 Harrison, 110) but resigned in 1841, against friendly protests, to practise law in Trenton, the salary of a justice ($2,000) being too small to support his growing family. On July 2, 1842, Governor William Pennington appointed him United States senator for the unexpired term of S. L. Southard, and the legislature chose him for the full term to March 4, 1851. He resolutely defended his right to independence of action in the face of legislative instructions, insisting (December 1843) that, "if the legislature of New Jersey go further than to advise me of their wishes ... they usurp a power which does not belong to them" (Bradley, post, p. 85).

An independent Whig, he urged protection for home markets and industrial independence (speech of April 1844), and opposed the tariff of 1846. Favoring arbitration of the Northwestern claims, he thought statehood for Oregon undesirable and improbable. He voted against the treaty for the annexation of Texas (June 8, 1844), warning his Newark constituents that the annexation would mean the repeal of a protective tariff and four more slave states (speech of February 24, 1845). Although he protested against the Mexican War, " he invariably voted the necessary measures to sustain the executive in its prosecution" (Bradley, p. 99). He opposed the extension of slavery but voted for the ratification of the Mexican Treaty.

Following the policy of the new administration he opposed the compromise measures of 1850, especially the Fugitive-Slave Act, and lost his seat in the Senate to Commodore Robert Field Stockton, Democrat. Resuming law practise at Trenton, he was "almost invariably employed on one side or the other of every" important cause" (Bradley, post, u4). With Chancellor Green, S. G. Potts, and P. D. Vroom he had compiled the New Jersey revised statutes of 1847. He served as attorney-general of New Jersey 1857-61, and as such acted as prosecutor in the famous Donnelly murder case (2 Dutcher, 463, 601). His speech at the "Fusion Convention" in Trenton, May 28, 1856, resulted in his being nominated for vice-president on the ticket with Fremont, though many of his friends desired him to have first place, and in the Republican convention of 1860 his state supported him, on the first three ballots, for the presidential nomination (C. M. Knapp, New Jersey Politics During the Period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1924). In 1861 he was appointed minister to France. Not knowing French, quite unversed in diplomacy, he yet established the best of relations with Louis Napoleon's government, with diplomatic colleagues, and with the press. He wore court dress since "he had not come to France to make a point with the government about buttons" (Elmer, post, p. 391) and gained the entire confidence of the Emperor whom he had "frequently met during his residence in New Jersey" (Galignani's Messenger, Paris, December 5, 1864). Keeping both governments advised on innumerable topics, he was able to avert French intervention, to stop Confederate use of French ports, to prevent construction of six Southern war vessels, to intern the Rappahannock, and to force the Alabama out to meet the Kearsarge. His long letter on the war, November 16, 1862, to Drouyn de Buys, produced gratifying results (Seward to Dayton, January 9, 1863, see Executive Document No. 38, 37 Congress, 3 Sess.). Seward came to have much confidence in him, and referred to his "approved discretion" (Seward to Dayton, February 8, 1864). Dayton died abruptly at 9 p. m., December 1, 1864, of apoplexy, leaving an estate of over $100,000. His wife, Margaret Elmendorf Van Der Veer, whom he married May 22, 1833, bore him five sons and two daughters. Their married life was entirely happy. He had no enemies. At his funeral John Bigelow said of Dayton, "He could not act falsely."

[T. P. Bradley, "A Memoir of the Life and Character of Hon. Wm. L. Dayton," in Proc. New Jersey Historical Society, series 23, IV, 69-118; L. Q. C. Elmer, The Constitution and Govt. of the Province and State of New Jersey ... with Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar (1872), pp. 372-96; genealogy in Lewis Letter (Lisle, New York), November December 1889, pp. 135, 138; obituaries in many newspapers.]

W.L.W-y,


DE BAPTISTE, George, 1814-1875, free African American abolitionist, businessman.  Aided fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad in Madison, Indiana, as well as Ohio and Kentucky areas.  Became active in abolition movement in Detroit area. (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 3, p. 538; American National Biography, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 306)


DEITZLER, George Washington, 1826-1884, abolitionist. (Dictionary of American Biography, 1936, Vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 201-202)

DEITZLER, GEORGE WASHINGTON (November 30, 1826-April 10, 1884), anti-slavery leader in Kansas, the son of Jacob and Maria Deitzler, was born at Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. There he grew to manhood with only a common-school education-"very common" he once said. While still a young man he emigrated to the new West. After a short residence in Illinois and in California he went in March 1855 to Lawrence, Kansas, where he engaged in farming and real-estate dealing. He soon took an active part in politics, so that when the plan to organize a free-state government, in opposition to the pro-slavery territorial government, was set on foot he was sent to Boston to see Amos Lawrence and other friends of the cause. He at once received an order for one hundred Sharps rifles which were very soon on their way to Kansas in boxes marked "books." Other shipments of "books" followed. Military companies armed with these new weapons were formed among the free-state men. In th e so-called Wakarusa War in November 1855, Deitzler was aide-de-camp to the commander of the free-state forces and during part of the time w as in full command. A few months later, when the territorial judiciary began to function, Chief Justice Lecornpte instructed a grand jury sitting at Lecompton that levying war on the authorities of the territory was treason against the federal government. Deitzler and several other free-state leaders were promptly indicted on a charge of treason. They were immediately arrested and kept in a prison tent at Lecompton for about four months. In September 1856 they were freed on bail. Later their cases were nolle-prossed.

Deitzler's activities in behalf of the free-state cause were incessant. He served on committees, attended meetings and conventions, of which there w ere many, counseled with other leaders, and wrote for the press. He was elected a member of the free-state territorial legislature of 1857-58 and was chosen speaker of the House of Representatives. He was also a member of the Kansas Senate under the Topeka constitution. In 1860 he became mayor of Lawrence and in 1866 treasurer of the University of Kansas. When the Civil War began he was active in organizing the first regiment of Kansas Volunteer Infantry and was appointed its colonel. In August 1861 his regiment took a prominent part in the battle of Wilson's Creek where he was severely wounded. Promoted to the rank of brigadier-general in November 1862, he served under Grant until October 1863 and then resigned on account of impaired health caused by his former wound. During all of these years he had remained a bachelor. His home was at the Eldridge House in Lawrence. In September 1864 he was married to Anna McNeil of Lexington, Missouri. A month later General Price led an invading Confederate army into Missouri and eastern Kansas. The entire militia of the latter state were called out-about 20,000 in number and Deitzler was placed in chief command with the rank of major-general. He directed the movements against the Confederates in the successful campaign that followed. Various enterprises engaged his attention after the return of peace. He promoted the Emporia Town Company and was a director in the new Leavenworth, Lawrence & Fort Gibson Railroad Company. In 1872 he removed with his family to California. While in southern Arizona in the spring of 1884 he was thrown from a buggy and killed.

[The main facts of Deitzler's career are presented in his brief autobiography, now in the archives of the Kansas State Historical Society. Secondary sources are: Q. W. Wilder, Annals of Kansas (1875); G. T. Andreas, History of the State of Kansas (1883); L. W. Spring, Kansas (1885); F. W. Blackmar, Life of Chas. Robinson (1902); Trans. Kansas Historical Society, IV (1886-88); V (1891-96); VI (1897-1900); VIII (1903-04); X (1907-08); XIII (1913-14). The date of his death is sometimes given as April 11, although the Leavenworth Evening Standard, April 11, 1884, states that he died April 10.]

T. L. H.


DELANY, Martin Robinson, 1812-1885, free African American, publisher, editor, journalist, writer, physician, soldier. Publisher of abolitionist newspaper, North Star in Rochester, New York, with Fredrick Douglass. Published, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, 1852. Published, The Ram’s Horn in New York.  Supported colonization of African Americans in 1854. Led National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1854.  Recruited thousands of African Americans for service in the Civil War.  First African American major in the U.S. Army.  (Mabee, 1970, pp. 133, 145, 400n18; Pease, 1965, pp. 319-330; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 32, 50, 55, 164, 192, 251-252, 264, 275, 704-705; Sernett, 2002, pp. 151, 240, 314n61; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 219-220; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 382)

DELANY, MARTIN ROBINSON (May 6, 1812-January 24, 1885), first negro major in the United States army, was born in Charles Town, Virginia (now in W. Virginia), the son of free negroes, Samuel and Pati Delany. His paternal grandfather, a member of the Golah tribe, once fled to Toronto with his wife and two sons, but was brought back and later lost his life in an encounter with a slaveholder. His maternal grandfather, a prince of the Mandingo tribe, had been captured in the Niger Valley, sold, and brought to America along with his betrothed. As a boy of six Delany received his first instruction from peddlers of books. Because of persecution his people were forced to remove to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1822. In 1831 he went to Pittsburgh, where he found better opportunity for study under Reverend Louis Woodson, who was employed by a society of negroes interested in education. By 1834 he was already showing his interest in organizations for the welfare of the poor people of the city; and within the next two years he began the study of medicine under Dr. Andrew N. McDowell, though his work in this field was soon interrupted. On March 15, 1843, he was married to Kate A. Richards of Pittsburgh, and he became the father of eleven children. In 1843 also he began in Pittsburgh the publication of the Mystery, a small paper that somehow attracted a good deal of attention to itself, as when it gave a notable description of the fire in the city in 1844. Sued for libel by a negro who was said to be assisting slave-catchers, he was once fined $200 and costs; but several citizens came to his assistance and the fine was later remitted. During the years 1847-49 he was associated with Frederick Douglass in bringing out the North Star, published by that orator at Rochester, New York. In July 1848 he was mobbed in northern Ohio. The next year he resumed his studies, being received in the medical department of Harvard College after he had been refused entrance at institutions in Pennsylvania and New York. After leaving Harvard he lectured in the West and served with great efficiency in the cholera epidemic in Pittsburgh in 1854. His little book, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, issued in Philadelphia in 1852, was earnest and thoughtful, and anticipated Booker T. Washington in its emphasis on practical education. In 1854 he issued a call for a National Emigration Convention, which met in Cleveland in August. The convention established a permanent board of commissioners, of which Delany was made president. A second convention was held in Cleveland in August 1856, and in this year he removed to Chatham, Ontario, where he engaged in the practise of medicine. Two years later a third convention, held at Chatham, chose Delany as chief commissioner to explore the Valley of the Niger, making inquiries "for the purpose of science and for general information and without any reference to, and with the Board being entirely opposed to, any Emigration there as such" (see Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, 1861, by Delany himself). Accordingly, in May 1859 he sailed from New York in the bark Mendi, owned by three African merchants. The next year he visited Liverpool and London. On his return to the United States he assisted Charles L. Remond and Charles H. Langston in recruiting negro soldiers, and he was an acting examining surgeon in Chicago. On February 8, 1865, he received his commission as major and on April 5 was ordered to Charleston. After the war he served for three years in the Freedmen's Bureau, was for several years custom-house inspector in Charleston, also for four years a trial justice in the city. He was a severe critic of the corruption of the Reconstruction period in South Carolina and, with Richard H. Cain [q.v.] and Joseph H. Rainey, was a leader of the Honest Government League. He was nominated for lieutenant-governor on the Independent Republican ticket, in 1874, but was defeated. In 1879 he published Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, etc. In 1884 he was employed to act as agent for a Boston firm in Central America; but by this time his health was failing. He died the following year at Xenia, Ohio.

[In addition to references given above see A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868); sketch in Wm. J. Simmons, Men of Mark (1887); W. P. and F. J. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (4 vols., 1885-89); A. A. Taylor, The Negro in South Carolina during the Reconstruction (1924); Daily Morning Post (Pittsburgh), October 18, 1854; News and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), February 13, September 2, 15, October 2, 3, 1874; Jas. T. Holly, "In Memoriam," A. M. E. Church Review, October, 1886.]

B. B.


DEMING, Henry Champion, 1815-1872, lawyer, soldier.  Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Connecticut, 1863, 1865.  Colonel, commanding 12th Connecticut Regiment.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 138-139; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 230-231; Congressional Globe). He published translations of Eugene Sue's “Mysteries of Paris” and “Wandering Jew” (1840), a eulogy of Abraham Lincoln, delivered by invitation of the Connecticut legislature in 1865, “Life of Ulysses S. Grant” (Hartford, 1868), and various addresses.

DEMING, HENRY CHAMPION (May 23, 1815-October 9, 1872), lawyer, politician, was a member of a family identified throughout with Connecticut. John Deming recorded his homestead at Wethersfield, Connecticut, in 1641. His descendants settled at Lyme and later at Colchester, and one of them, David Deming, was a prominent merchant of the latter place and a member of the legislature. He married Abigail, daughter of Henry Champion, and their youngest child, Henry Champion Deming, was born at Colchester. His parents were well-to-do, and his early education was of the best, being completed at Yale, where he graduated in 1836. He then entered the law school at Harvard (LL.B., 1839), and on being admitted to the Massachusetts bar moved to New York City, where he opened a law office. His inclinations however were toward literature rather than law, and for a time he was on the editorial staff of the New World, a literary monthly. In 1847 he returned to Connecticut and practised law at Hartford for a short time. Possessed of unusual gifts as a public speaker and debater, he entered into local politics. A Democrat of the old school, he was elected as representative of Hartford in the state legislature in 1849, and from that time forward practically relinquished law and devoted himself to public affairs. In 1851 he became a member of the state Senate and in 1854 was elected mayor of Hartford, which office he held for five successive years. In 1859 he became again the city representative in the state legislature, and in 1860 was once more elected mayor. When the Southern states threatened secession he was strongly opposed to the adoption of coercive methods, and after the outbreak of the Civil War, announced that, though he adhered to the Federal government, he would not support a war of aggression or invasion of the seceded states. The subsequent advance of the Confederate forces upon the Federal capital, however, induced him to become a strong Unionist, and the Republican majority elected him speaker pro tempore of the state legislature. Late in 1861 the 12th ("Charter-Oak") Connecticut Regiment was raised, in order to participate in the New Orleans expedition, and he was appointed lieutenant-colonel. He took part in all the subsequent operations under General Butler and the regiment under his command was the first body of Federal troops to enter New Orleans. In October 1862 he was detached and appointed provisional mayor of New Orleans, performing his difficult duties with great tact and efficiency. He resigned however in February 1863, returned to Hartford, and was at once elected to the Thirty-eighth Congress by the Republicans. He served two terms in Congress, being placed on the committees on military affairs and on expenditures in the war Department, of which latter he was chairman. In the national House, his oratorical powers, strong character, and practical experience of war conditions combined to assure him an outstanding position. In 1866 he was a delegate to the Loyalists convention at Philadelphia, and in 1869 was appointed United States collector of Internal Revenue for his home district. This latter position he continued to hold till his death, which occurred at Hartford, October 9, 1872. He was married twice: in 1850 to Sarah, daughter of Laurent Clerc of Hartford, and in 1871 to Annie Putnam, daughter of Myron W. Wilson and widow of Sherman L. Jittson.

Holding public office almost uninterruptedly for twenty-three years, prominent alike in federal, state, and municipal politics, his reputation rested principally upon his unusual oratorical powers, though he possessed great administrative ability. Of cultured tastes and widely read, he published translations of Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew (1840), and, in collaboration with G. C. Hebbe, The Smugglers of the Swedish Coast, or The Rose of Thistle Island (1844), from the original Swedish of Mrs. E. S. F. Carlen. He also wrote The Life of Ulysses S. Grant, General, United States Army (1868).

[J. K. Deming, Genealogy of the descendants of John Deming of Wethersfield, Connecticut (1904), traces his ancestry and contains a sketch of his life. See also Annual Cyclopedia, 1872, p. 630; Obit. Record Grads. Yale College, 1873; History and Biography Record of the Class of 1836 in Yale College (1882); Hartford Daily Courant, October 10, 1872.]

H. W. H. K.


DENISON, Charles Wheeler, 1809-1881, New York City, abolitionist leader, author, clergyman, newspaper editor, The Emancipator.  Manager, 1833-1836, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), December 1833. (Dumond, 1961, p. 182; Sorin, 1971; Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 140). He published “The American Village and other Poems” (Boston, 1845); “Paul St. Clair,” a temperance story; “Out at Sea,” poems (London, 1867); “Antonio, the Italian Boy” (Boston, 1873); “The Child Hunters,” relating to the abuses of the padrone system (Philadelphia, 1877); and a series of  Biographies published during the war, including “The Tanner Boy” (Grant); “The Bobbin Boy” (Banks); and “Winfield; the Lawyer's Son” (Hancock).


DENNISON, William, 1815-1882, Civil War governor of Ohio, lawyer, founding member of Republican Party, state Senator, opposed admission of Texas and the extension of slavery into the new territories.  Anti-slavery man, supporter of Abraham Lincoln. (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, p. 142; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 241; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 446).

DENNISON, WILLIAM (November 23, 1815-June 15, 1882), governor of Ohio, was the son of William Dennison, who with his New England wife, Mary Carter, about 1805 removed from New Jersey to Cincinnati, and there became a successful business man. The son attended Miami University, where he proved to be a capable student of political science, history, and literature. Graduating in 1835, he read law in the office of Nathaniel G. Pendleton, father of George H. Pendleton [q.v.]. He was admitted to the bar in 1840 and practised until 1848, when he was elected to the state Senate as a Whig. After a hot contest, which prevented organization of the Senate for two weeks, he was defeated as his party's candidate for the position of presiding officer.

In 1844, in his maiden speech before the public, Dennison had opposed the admission of Texas and the extension of the area of slavery. The position then taken foreshadowed his course through the next twenty years. As a member of the state Senate, he had a part in the fight for the repeal of the notorious "Black Laws," and while adhering to the Whig party through 1852 he was one of the first of the Ohio party leaders to join the Republican movement. In February 1856 he attended the preliminary convention at Pittsburgh and served as a member of the Committee on Resolutions; and in June he was acting chairman of the Ohio delegation in the Philadelphia Convention, which nominated Fremont. Three years later, as Republican candidate for governor, he defeated Judge Rufus P. Ranney, who ranked as the leader of the state bar, and thus found himself in the executive chair when the Civil War began. He came to the governor's chair with little experience in public affairs. Although he was well regarded by the business men of the capital city, to whom in large part he owed his nomination, he was but little known to the public, and his nomination was thought to be due to a dearth of able rivals. He campaigned with unexpected brilliance in 1859, but his success did not win for him the full confidence of the people, who decided that he was aristocratic and vain. Thus handicapped, he met the war crisis without adequate support in public opinion. Disposed in advance to be discontented, the people of Ohio were unable for a time to appreciate the energy and wisdom with which he performed his duties. Regarding the Ohio River as an unsafe line of defense for his state, Dennison dispatched McClellan with state troops to aid the loyal citizens of western Virginia in driving out the Confederates. He advocated a similar campaign in Kentucky, but the Federal government preferred to respect the state's neutrality. As a means of preventing the transportation of war supplies and war news without his approval, he practically assumed control of the railways, telegraph lines, and express companies at the outset of hostilities; and against the advice of his attorney-general, he used money refunded by the Federal government on account of state military expenditures without turning it into the treasury for reappropriation. Many complaints thus arose, not without some justification, in spite of the fact that he had with extraordinary promptness succeeded in placing in the field more than the state's quota of the troops called for by the Federal government. As a war governor, Dennison proved unpopular, and the party leaders did not venture to renominate him in 1861. Moreover, they felt the necessity of uniting with the War Democrats, and effected this purpose by supporting David Tod. Dennison accepted the situation without any show of personal feeling, and continued to give loyal support to his party. Governor Tod, in particular, constantly sought his advice and aid.

In 1864, Dennison acted as chairman of the Republican National Convention, and in the same year was appointed postmaster-general by Lincoln, which office he held until 1866, when he resigned it on account of dissatisfaction with President Johnson's course. In 1872 he was mentioned for the vice-presidential nomination, and in 1880 was defeated by Garfield for the Republican nomination as United States senator. In the same year he was chairman of the Sherman Committee in Ohio, and leader of his forces in the national convention. It is thought that had Grant been nominated, Dennison might have won the vice-presidency.

Notwithstanding his prominence in political affairs, Dennison was primarily a business man. Soon after his admission to the bar he had married the daughter of William Neil of Columbus, a promoter of stage transportation, and had settled in that city. In the early fifties he became president of the Exchange Bank, member of the city council, and organizer of the Franklin County Agricultural Society. In the dawning era of the railway, he was a pioneer promoter of the new type of transportation, leading in the organization, especially, of the Hocking Valley and Columbus & Xenia railroads. An enterprise of another type which he was influential in establishing was the Columbus Rolling Mills. By such ventures, notwithstanding heavy losses in the panic of 1873, he acquired a considerable fortune. To the end of his life, mostly on account of his reserved manner, few knew him well. On the street he spoke only to old and intimate friends. Yet no man knew better how to treat his fellows in parlor or office, and never, intentionally, did he mistreat friend or foe (Cincinnati Enquirer, June 16, 1882). He died in Columbus after a period of invalidism lasting about eighteen months.

[Most sketches of Dennison are based on Whitelaw Reid, Ohio in the War (1868), I, 1017-22, and index. See also E. O. Randall and D. V. Ryan, History of Ohio (1912), IV, Passim; Ohio Archeology and History Society Pubs., I, 1-23; IV, 444; IX, 149; Harper's Weekly, January 28, 1865; Ohio State Journal and Cincinnati Enquirer, June 16, 1882. The best source for the years of Dennison's governorship is his message of January 6, 1862, which includes documents.]

H. C. H.


DEXTER, Samuel, 1761-1816, lawyer, jurist.  Member of U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts.  U.S. House of Representatives, 1793-1795.  U.S. Senator, December 1799-June 1800.  Opposed slavery as member of U.S. House of Representatives.  Secretary of War and Treasury.  (Appletons, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 161-162; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 280281; Locke, 1901, pp. 71, 93; Annals of Congress). He was the author of the reply of the senate to the address of President Adams on the death of Washington, and published a “Letter on Freemasonry”; “Progress of Science,” a poem (1780); and “Speeches and Political Papers,” besides political pamphlets. 162.

DEXTER, SAMUEL (May 14, 1761-May 4, 1816), lawyer, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest child of Samuel [q. v.] and Hannah (Sigourney) Dexter. Brought up with great care, he received a thorough classical education at the hands of the Reverend Aaron Putnam of Pomfret, and entered Harvard College in 1777 where he graduated in 1781 with highest honors. He then studied law at Worcester, Massachusetts, with Levi Lincoln and was admitted to the Worcester County bar in 1784. He commenced practise in Lunenberg in 1786, but moved to Chelmsford and later to Billerica, finally establishing himself at Charlestown in 1788. He was in the same year elected a member of the state House of Representatives from Charlestown, and during his two years in that body acquired a wide reputation for sound judgment, and exercised great influence over its deliberations. In 1792 he was elected Federalist representative of Middlesex. Massachusetts, in the Third Congress and served as such di March 3, 1795. Four years later he was elected United States senator from Massachusetts, occupying that position from December 2, 1799 till June 1800, when he resigned in order to enter the cabinet of President Adams as secretary of war, to which office he had been appointed on May 13. He remained head of the War Department until December 31 of that year, when he became secretary of the treasury. His temperament and intellectual endowment ill suited him for that minute diligence and attention to intricate details which the departments of War and Finance impose on incumbents of office, but his application was intense and his success undoubted (Story, post). For a short period he, in addition, executed the office of secretary of state in order to administer the oath of office to John Marshall on the latter's appointment as chief justice of the United States. Shortly before the termination of the Adams administration the President offered him a foreign embassy but he declined and remained in office till after the accession of Jefferson, when Gallatin succeeded him on January 26, 1802. He then moved to Roxbury, Massachusetts, and resumed the practise of law. Partially withdrawing from political activities, he devoted himself to his profession, and in a short time attained a commanding position at the bar, being constantly retained in the higher state courts and particularly in the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1807 he appeared as leading counsel for the defense of Thomas O. Selfridge, charged with the murder of Charles Austin, a Harvard student. The prominent position of all the participants caused intense interest to be taken in the proceedings, which resulted in a verdict of acquittal (2 American State Trials, 544). In his address to the jury Dexter is said to have "combined the closest reasoning with the most finished eloquence" (Davis, post). He had always manifested considerable independence of thought, invariably approaching both political and legal problems in his own way, and his attitude in the matter of the War of 1812 was thoroughly characteristic. He believed that the war was a just one and, declining to follow the Federalists, actively supported the policy of the government in that respect, but was vehemently opposed to the Embargo and non-intercourse policy, and unsuccessfully contested its constitutionality. In 1815 he was offered an extraordinary mission to the Court of Spain by President Madison, which he declined. In 1814 and 1815 he was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Massachusetts, disclaiming all sympathy with Madison's policy apart from his attitude toward Great Britain. He died at Athens, New York. On March 7, 1786, he married Catherine, daughter of William Gordon of Charlestown, and Franklin Dexter [q.v.] was their son.

Dexter was inclined to be reserved, precise, and formal in manner, and his appearance on public occasions was not impressive. He had a strong dislike for mass meetings at which he never appeared to advantage. Possessed of rare intellectual gifts, however, he enjoyed a prestige both in Congress and the courts of last resort which placed him in the first rank of contemporary public men. At the same time it is doubtful whether he was profoundly learned. One who knew him well says that the impression was that he read few professional books (Sargent, post), and Story bears testimony to the fact that he referred to "black lettered law" as "the scholastic refinements of monkish ages." A poem, The Progress of Science (1780), and a biographical notice of his father in the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, July 10, 1810, are the most noteworthy of his published writings.

[Dexter's ancestry is traced in O. P. Dexter, Dexter Genealogy 1642-1904 (1904). which al so contains (p. 86) a short biography. Judge Story' s "Sketch of the life and character of the Hon. Samuel Dexter" in 1 Mason, 523, and Reminiscences of Samuel Dexter (1857), by Lucius Manlius Sargent under the pseudonym "Sigma," are authoritative surveys of his life and career. See also C. W. Bowen, History of Woodstock, Connecticut (1926), pp. 190 ff., and "Samuel Dexter, Councilor, and his son, Hon. Samuel Dexter, Secretary of War, and Secretary of the Treasury," Proc. American Antiq. Society, n.d., XXXV, 23 (April8.1825); W. T. Davis, History of the Bench and Bar of Suffolk County, Massachusetts (1894); Memoir of Theophilus Parsons (1859), by his son, T. Parsons, p. 180; and Charles Warren, History of the American Bar (1911), p. 309.]

H.W.H.K.


DICKINSON, Anna Elizabeth, 1842-1932, anti-slavery activist, African American rights activist, women’s rights activist, orator, lecturer, educator, Quaker (American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 235-237; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 557; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 171-172)


DICKINSON, James T., abolitionist, Norwich, Connecticut.  Manager, 1833-1834, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833. (Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833)


DICKINSON, John, 1732-1808, founding father, statesman, political pamphleteer, Congressman from Delaware, opponent of slavery and slave trade (Appletons, 1888, Vol. II, p. 173; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 299-301; Dumond, 1961, pp. 40-41; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 566). He was the author of “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies” (Philadelphia, 1767; reprinted, with a preface by Dr. Franklin, London, 1768; French translation, Paris, 1769). In 1774 appeared his “Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great Britain over the Colonies in America.” In 1796 he received the degree of LL. D. from the College of New Jersey.

DICKINSON, JOHN (November 8, 1732-February14, 1808), statesman, was the second son of Samuel Dickinson of Talbot County, Maryland, and his second wife, Mary Cadwalader of Philadelphia. In his boyhood, the family moved to a new estate near Dover, Delaware. There were a number of children and they were educated at home by a tutor. In 1750 John became a student in the law office of John Moland, one of the leading members of the Philadelphia bar. Three years later he went to London to continue his studies in the Middle Temple, remaining there until 1757 when he returnee! to Philadelphia and at once began the practise of law. Within five years he had risen to eminence and was arguing cases before the colonial supreme court. His interests, however, were historical and political rather than legal, and after the beginning of the Revolution he left the bar completely. In October 1760 he was elected to the Assembly of the Lower Counties (Delaware), and became speaker. Two years later he was elected representative from Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania legislature. The questions of the proprietary government, taxation, military service, representation, and the frontier were then being discussed with the greatest bitterness, and Dickinson and Franklin were opposing leaders. The former, who was always intensely conservative, adopted the unpopular side. In the great debate of 1764 he admitted all the evils of the proprietary system but feared that any change might bring worse, and that any royal government granted by a British ministry of that day would be still more dangerous. As a result, he lost his seat in the Assembly and was not reelected until 1770.

In 1765 he published a pamphlet, The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies .. . Considered. He believed that the only way to secure the repeal of the Sugar and Stamp acts was to enlist the English merchants on the American side by economic interest, and his argument was therefore devoted to showing the injury that would be done to the British mercantile interests by attempting to enforce the acts. His opposition to these acts and his knowledge of the subject resulted in his appointment by the legislature, October 1765, as one of the Pennsylvania delegates to the Stamp Act Congress at New York, and he was there called on to draft the resolution (Stille, post, pp. 339-40). Although one of the leaders of the opposition to the Stamp Act, he had also opposed all violent resistance, including even the non-use of stamps by lawyers.

Owing to the continued crisis between England and the colonies, the Non-Importation agreement was proposed in Boston in 1767. In December of that year, Dickinson began publishing anonymously in the Pennsylvania Chronicle the series later known in pamphlet form as Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768). In these he pointed out the evils of the British policy, suggested force as an ultimate remedy, but stated a belief that conciliation was possible. The Letters, although very pacific in tone, showed wide knowledge both of the practical economics of the situation and of the broad legal principles underlying English liberty and created a deep impression here and abroad. He was thanked at a public meeting in Boston, given the degree of LL.D. by Princeton, and received other honors. In April 1768 he addressed a great meeting in Philadelphia and strongly urged the adoption of the Non-Importation and Non-Exportation agreement. In 1771, as a member of the legislature, he drafted the Petition to the King which was unanimously adopted. He was opposed, however, to the resort to force and because he condemned the more violent opinions and actions in New England he lost most of his popularity and influence there. In 1774, when Boston asked aid from the other colonies after her actions had precipitated a crisis, Dickinson refused to sanction anything other than friendly expressions of sympathy, as he felt she had destroyed the hope of conciliation. He became, however, chairman of the Philadelphia Committee of Correspondence. At the conference held in July to discuss the situation and consider appointing delegates to a Continental Congress, Dickinson drew up three papers which were unanimously adopted. They consisted of a series of resolutions stating the principles upon which the colonies based their claim to redress; instructions to the Congressional delegates to be chosen by the Assembly; and a treatise on the constitutional power of Great Britain to tax the colonies. These papers expressed the views of the more conservative patriots up to the time when all was thrown over on the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

In October 1774 Dickinson was a member of the Continental Congress, although for a week only, he believing he had been excluded up to that time by Galloway's influence. It was Dickinson, however, who drew up the Petition to the King, and the address to the people of Canada. On June 23, 1775, he was made chairman of a committee of safety and defense and held the post for a year, and he became colonel of the first battalion raised in Philadelphia. At the second Continental Congress, 1775, he still wished to adopt peaceful methods of settlement if possible and wrote the second Petition to the King, although he was engaged at the same time in strengthening the military resources of the colony. His action in drawing up the petition greatly angered the New England members. He also wrote the great part, if not all, of the " Declaration of the Causes of taking up Arms." In the Assembly, November 1775, he drafted the resolutions instructing the delegates to the Congress to meet in 1776, which asked them to use every possible means to gain redress of grievances but to countenance no measures looking toward separation. The general feeling in the country was changing and by the beginning of 1776 many began to believe separation the only solution of the problem. Dickinson and some of the other leaders still clung to conciliation.

In Congress, desirous of making one more peaceful effort and fearful of the results of a civil war without foreign allies and with no federal government binding the colonies together, he cast his vote against the Declaration of Independence. It should be noted that although he did what he believed to be his duty in this voting, yet when it came to fighting he and McKean were the only two members of Congress who took up arms in defense of the measures they had been advocating. He at once went with his regiment, as ordered, to Elizabethtown, but shortly afterward, when new members of Congress were elected and his name was rejected, he resigned his commission. Soon, for other causes, he resigned from the Assembly. In November he was elected to Congress from Delaware but declined to serve. In December, when the British neared Philadelphia, he retired to his estate in Delaware. Temporarily he appears to have served as a private in a special force raised in that colony which took part in the battle of Brandywine. In 1779 he was again elected to Congress from Delaware and took his seat. In the autumn he resigned but in 1781 was elected president of the Supreme Executive Council of Delaware. Returning to live in Philadelphia he was elected to the same office in Pennsylvania. At this time he was scurrilously attacked in a series of articles signed "Valerius," which he answered in his "Vindication," published in the Philadelphia Freeman's Journal, January-February 1783. In 1787 as a delegate from Delaware he became a member of the convention to frame the Federal Constitution, and took an active and useful part in its proceedings. In a series of letters signed "Fabius" he strongly urged the adoption of the new instrument. For the seventeen years which he lived afterward he held no public office, but continued an active interest in public affairs. In 1801 he published two volumes of his writings under the title, The Political Writings of John Dickinson, Esq., Late President of the State of Delaware and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. These were republished in 1814. In 1895 P. L. Ford edited the first of what was to be a complete set, in three volumes, and it was published in that year as Vol. XIV of the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, with the title, The Writings of John Dickinson, vol. I, Political Writings 1764-74. The others have not appeared. Dickinson was married on July 19, 1770, to Mary Norris, daughter of Isaac Norris of Philadelphia. He died at Wilmington.

[The standard biography is that by C. J. Stille, The Life and Times of John Dickinson (1891), being vol. XIII of the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. In 1882 G. H. Moore prepared a paper for the New York Historical Society Pubs., as John Dickinson, the Author of the Declaration on Taking up Arms in 1775 (1890), to prove that Dickinson wrote the whole of that Declaration, a part of which has been attributed to Jefferson.]

J. T. A.


DICKSON, John, abolitionist, W. Bloomfield, New York, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-37.


DICKSON, Reverend Moses, 1824-1901, free African American, anti-slavery leader, clergyman, activist, underground abolitionist.  Minister, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.  Founded Knights of Liberty in St. Louis, Missouri, 1846. (Rodriguez, 2007, p. 50; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 4, p. 2)


DILLWYN, William, New Jersey, Society of Friends, Quaker.  Petitioned New Jersey Assembly in Trenton to emancipate all slaves in province. (Bruns, 1977, pp. 270-278, 314, 486, 488; Drake, 1950, pp. 87, 91; Zilversmit, 1967, p. 96)


DIXON, James, 1814-1873, lawyer.  Republican U.S. Congressman and U.S. Senator representing Connecticut.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, p. 186; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 328-329; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 646; Congressional Globe)

DIXON, JAMES (August 5, 1814-March 27, 1873), congressman, was born in Enfield, Connecticut, the son of William and Mary (Field) Dixon. He prepared for college in the neighboring town of Ellington, and entered Williams at the age of sixteen, graduating with the class of 1834. Soon afterward he began the study of law under his father, and on being admitted to the bar, began practise in his home town, Enfield. In 1839 he moved to Hartford, and was taken into partnership with W. W. Ellsworth. On October 1 of the following year Dixon married Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Jonathan Cogswell, professor of ecclesiastical history in the Theological Institute at East Windsor, Connecticut. His political career began in 1837, when at the age of twenty-three he was sent to the state legislature as a representative from Enfield. He was reelected the following year. After 1839 he became a leader of the Whig party in Hartford. In 1844 he served another term as state legislator. A year later he was sent to Congress, serving until 1849. In Congress he was a conservative Whig. His speeches in the House followed accepted lines of Whig policy. In 1846 he spoke against the reduction of import duties. The point at issue was, he declared, whether this country should employ its own labor to supply its wants, or give occupation to foreign workmen. The laboring classes, he asserted, desired a protective tariff (Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, I Sess., App., pp. 1061 ff.). He spoke several times on the important question of the Mexican War. In 1847 he energetically supported the Wilmot Proviso (Ibid., 29 Congress, 2 Sess., App., pp. 332 ff.). Later he upheld the Whig point of view that the war had been unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president (Ibid., 30 Congress, 1 Sess., pp. 227 ff.). Returning to Hartford from Congress, he resumed law practise, and was also for some years president of the Hartford Life Insurance Company. In 1854 he served a term as senator in the state legislature. Two years later he was elected to the United States Senate, where he remained until 1869, throughout the trying period of the Civil War, and the early years of Reconstruction. In the Senate, in 1859, he made a strong speech against the proposed acquisition of Cuba, on the ground that the matter was a Democratic party scheme for the purpose of furthering slavery interests (Ibid., 35 Congress, 2 Sess., pp. 1335 ff.). Dixon was, of course, a loyal supporter of the Union cause during the Civil War. After the assassination of Lincoln, he became an ardent supporter of President Johnson, partly because of a desire for lenient treatment of the Southern states, and thus incurred the enmity of the radical Republicans. Having, therefore, no chance of receiving the Republican nomination for a third senatorial term, he stood for election in 1868 as a Democrat, but was defeated. In 1869, declining appointment as minister to Russia, he retired to private life, residing in Hartford, and being in rather feeble health until his death in 1873. Mrs. Dixon had died two years previously.

Outside of his political life, Dixon was something of a literary man, with a taste for poetry. He wrote several sonnets, which were published in the New England Magazine, and the Connecticut Courant. The poems are rather sweet and musical, although very amateurish. In public affairs, his attitude was thoroughly conservative. His political career was guided by ideals of abstract philosophy rather than by considerations of a purely practical, or temporary character. He was survived in 1873 by four children.

[The best source is The Harvey Book (1899), a genealogy. Supplementary details may be found in the Memorial History of Hartford County (2 vols., 1886), ed. by J. H. Trumbull; Commemorative Biography Record of Hartford County, Connecticut (1901); Biography Dir. American Congress (1928); and in an obituary notice in the Hartford Courant, March 28, 1873. A few of Dixon's poems were published in The Poets of Connecticut (1843), by C. W. Everest.]

J.M.M.


DIXON, Nathan Fellows, b. 1833, lawyer.  Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Rhode Island.  Member of 38th, 39th, 40th and 41st Congress.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, p. 187; Congressional Globe)



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.