Doa-Dye: Doak through Dyer

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


DOAK, Samuel, 1749-1830, Virginia, educator, clergyman, anti-slavery activist, founder of Martin Academy, Little Limestone (near Jonesboro), North Carolina, founder and president of Washington College, 1795. (Dumond, 1961, pp. 91, 348; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 187-188; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 332-333; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 653)

DOAK, SAMUEL, (August 1749-December 12, 1830), clergyman, educator, was of Scotch-Irish descent, the third son of Samuel and Jane (Mitchaell) Doak, who, in their youth, came to America from the north of Ireland. They were married in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and soon after moved to Augusta County, Virginia. There Samuel was born. He worked on his father's farm until he was sixteen, when he entered a classical school conducted by Robert Alexander and later by John Brown. In order to obtain funds to continue his studies he relinquished his interest in his father's estate, and later earned additional money as assistant teacher in Brown's school. He entered Princeton in 1773, graduated in 1775. and began the study of theology under the Reverend John Blair Smith, at the same time tutoring for Mr. Smith in Prince Edward Academy (later Hampden-Sidney College). On October 31, 1777, he was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Hanover. He married Esther H. Montgomery, a sister of Reverend John Montgomery of Virginia, by whom he had two sons and two daughters. She died, July 3, 1807. His second wife was Margaretta H. McEwen of Nashville, Tennessee. He began his preaching on the frontier in what is now Sullivan County, Tennessee, but soon moved to another settlement, to what is known as the Fork Church (New Bethel) at the fork of the Holston and Watauga rivers. After a year he moved again to a settlement on the Little Limestone, eight miles southwest of the present town of Jonesboro, Tennessee, and founded Salem Church and the school which was to become the first institution of higher learning west of the Alleghanies. The founding of Salem Church is said to have come about in the following way: Riding through the woods, seeking a frontier settlement where his services might be of use, his only baggage a sack full of books, he came upon some men felling trees. When they learned that he was a clergyman they asked him to preach for them and his preaching pleased them so much that they asked him to remain. He is described as a man "of powerful frame, medium stature, with a short, thick neck. His hair was sandy, his complection ruddy and his eyes blue. His demeanor was dignified, his countenance grave. His was a stentorian voice, and he was withal a striking individuality" (S. C. Williams, post). His preaching was "original, bold, pungent, and sometimes pathetic." One of the "old side" Presbyterians, he rigidly opposed any innovations in religious tenets. When a schism arose in the Abington Presbytery over the Hopkinsianism taught by one of its members, he was active in the "old side" group opposing the new teaching. His influence in furthering the Presbyterian faith was considerable. In addition to Salem Church, he assisted in organizing churches at New Bethel, Concord, New Providence, and in Carter's Valley (Pioneer Presbyterianism in Tennessee).

Active in the affairs of the settlement, he was one of the delegates to the first general convention of representatives from Washington, Sullivan, and Greene counties of North Carolina to consider the formation of a separate state, which movement culminated in the State of Franklin, later a part of Tennessee. Probably his most important work, however, was as an educator. The school which he opened in a log cabin on his farm was, in 1783, chartered by the legislature of North Carolina as Martin Academy, named for the governor of that state. In 1795, when the region had become a territory, it was incorporated as Washington College. "For many years it was the only, and for still more, the principal seat of classical education for the western country" (Ramsey, post). Its students were found in all the learned professions in the early days of Tennessee. Especially was it successful in training men for the ministry. Anticipating modern methods, in the early days the pupils were not divided into classes by years, but were allowed to complete the course as swiftly as they could. The nucleus of the college library was a gift of books received by Doak while attending a meeting of the General Assembly in Philadelphia in 1795, and which he had to carry 500 miles on horseback to the settlement. As a teacher his chief interest was philology. Always a student, after he was sixty years old he mastered Hebrew and chemistry sufficiently to teach them. Commencement was his one gala day. " On that occasion he wore his antique wig, his shorts, and his old-fashioned shoes: the muscles of his stern brow were relaxed, and he gave himself up to an unusual urbanity and kindliness of manner" (J. G. M. Ramsey, a former pupil, in Sprague, post). In 1818 he resigned the presidency of Washington College and moved to Bethel, Tennessee, where he opened Tusculum Academy, later Tusculum College. He died at Bethel in his eighty-first year. Both of his sons were ordained to the ministry, John W. succeeding him in the presidency of Washington College and Samuel W. in that of Tusculum Academy.

[M. L. Morris, The lrvins, Doaks, Logans and Mc Campbells of Virginia and Kentucky (1916); S. C. Williams, History of the Lost State of Franklin (1924); The Scotch-Irish in America, Proc. and Addresses of the 9th Congress (1900); W. B. Sprague, Annals American Pulpit, vol. III (185 8); Pioneer Presbyterianism in Tennessee (1898); E. H. Gillett, H ist. of the Presbyterian Church (1864); H. A. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders (1911); Alfred Nevin, Presbyterian Encyclopedia (1884); J. Allison, Dropped Stitches in Tennessee History (1897); J. T. Moore and A. P. Foster, Tennessee, the Volunteer State 1769-1923 (1923); J. Phelan, History of Tennessee (1888); J. G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee (1853).]

B. R.


DONNELLY, Ignatius Loyola, 1831-1901, author, political reformer.  Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota 1863-1869.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, p. 201; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 369-371; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 730; Congressional Globe)

DONNELLY, IGNATIUS (November 3, 1831- January 1, 1901), politician, reformer, the son of Philip Carroll Donnelly, an Irish physician, and his wife Catharine Frances Gavin, was born in Philadelphia. As a boy he attended the free schools of the Quaker City, and as a young man he read law in the office of Benjamin Harris Brewster, later attorney-general of the United States. A trip to the Northwest in the "boom" period of the fifties, however, led him to abandon his native city and the law to seek wealth through land speculation. With his bride, Katharine McCaffrey, and an abundance of ambition, he removed to Nininger, Minnesota, fancying himself the founder of a future metropolis (see his Nininger City, pamphlet, 1856), but the panic of 1857 killed his town and left him heavily burdened with debts. He turned his lots into wheat-fields, and making his home on the site of his first defeat, he ever thereafter considered himself a farmer. He possessed in exaggerated degree the talent of his race for public speaking, and was thus, inevitably perhaps, drawn into politics during the exciting campaigns that preceded the Civil War. He embraced Republic ani s m wholeheartedly, spoke effectively for it, and at the age of twenty-eight became lieutenant-governor of his state. It was an easy step to Congress, where he spent three terms, 1863-69, in the lower house. Here he supported the war and reconstruction policies of his party and worked so actively for land grants to railroads in Minnesota and the Northwest that he received a stinging public rebuke from Elihu B. Washburne [q. v.], then regarded as the "Watchdog of the Treasury." Donnelly replied in kind, and the quarrel that developed seriously damaged his reputation at home. Local party leaders, already disturbed by Donnelly's ambitions, prevented his return to Congress for a fourth term, and his career as a successful politician ended forever.

His career as a regular Republican also ended. Donnelly now contended that the time had come for men to turn their backs upon the old issues arising out of slavery and the war, in order to face the new issues brought forward by th e industrial development of the country. Politics, as he saw it, would in the future be a struggle " between the few who seek to grasp all power and wealth, and the many who seek to preserve their rights as American citizens and freemen." He l eft the Republican party because it see med to him eternally wedded to the interests of the few, and in so doing he also abjured its protective tariff and hard-money principles. He  became successively Liberal Republican, Granger, and Greenbacker, proclaiming his views not only through his matchless oratory, but also through the columns of the Anti-Monopolist, an independent weekly newspaper which he edited from 1874 to 1879. He ran for office repeatedly, and as a member of the state Senate for five consecutive years (1874-78) he worked energetically, although usually unsuccessfully, for reform legislation. As a Greenback-Democrat he was defeated for Congress in 1878 by William D. Washburn [q.v.], brother of Elihu B. Washburne, and the contest which he brought before the House after the election was thrown out.

Donnelly now retired to his study to write. He was a great lover of books, had collected an excellent library, and had read more widely than most people would have guessed. In literature as in politics he made it his concern to espouse unusual and unproved theories. His first book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), purported to demonstrate the truth of Plato's story of an Atlantic island, where, according to Donnelly, original civilization developed and from which it spread to the adjoining continents. His second, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), attributed the deposits of clay, gravel, and silt on the earth's surface to contact in some bygone age with a mighty comet. His magnum opus, entitled The Great Cryptogram (1888), attempted to prove by an ingenious cipher that Francis Bacon wrote the works commonly attributed to Shakespeare. All his books attracted wide attention, and the royalties from the first two-the Cryptogram was a financial failure together with the lecture engagements which, as a noted author, Donnelly was called upon to fill, brought the reformer practically the first comfortable and secure income he had ever known. He made a trip to Europe and came back the better fitted by his observations to play the role of "Sage of Nininger," in which his amazed Minnesota friends had decided to cast him. He wrote frequently for such magazines as the North American Review, and later he produced several more books, one of which, a novel called Caesar's Column; a Story of the Twentieth Century (1891), invited comparison with Bellamy's Looking Backward and was comparable to it also in popularity.

Donnelly never succeeded, however, in retiring from politics for long. He ran for Congress in 1884, and in 1887 he appeared once more in the state legislature, this time as a Farmers' Alliance leader. He soon became president of the state Alliance, and he led it almost to a man into the Populist party, in the formation of which he had an active part. He presided frequently over Populist conventions and assemblies, whose resolutions, also, he was almost invariably called upon to draft. The ringing preamble of the Omaha platform of 1892 was entirely from Donnelly's pen. In this same year he ran for governor of Minnesota on the Populist ticket, but was decisively defeated. In 1896, although he supported Bryan, he was lukewarm as to the wisdom of fusion, and he soon came to regard it as a complete betrayal of the reform movement. Thereafter he figured prominently among the Middle-of-the-Road Populists, whose candidate for vice-president he was in the campaign of 1900, and whose views he proclaimed forcefully in a newspaper, the Representative, which he edited in his later years. He also served, less conspicuously than formerly, in the Minnesota state legislature. Survived by his second wife, Marian Hanson, whom he married February 22, 1898, he died on the first day of the twentieth century.

Donnelly was a typical nineteenth-century reformer, advocating always reform only through the ballot-box, and reform measures which a few decades later seemed innocuous enough. In his day, however, these reforms were looked upon as thoroughly radical. He was denounced as a "visionary" and the very "prince of cranks." His disregard of the conventional extended beyond the realm of politics and literature to his personal habits and beliefs. Surrounded by bewhiskered Populists, he was as smooth-shaven as a monk. Born into the Catholic Church, he ever failed to embrace that faith, and in his declining years he lent a receptive ear to spiritualism. Left a widower in his sixties, he took to himself a bride of twenty-one. Nevertheless, in spite of his peculiarities he enjoyed great personal popularity. His unfailing wit and humor made him a favorite as an orator. Let it be noised about that Donnelly was to make a speech in the legislature, and the galleries would be packed. His hospitality was unbounded, and in his well- appointed home at Nininger he was the friendly host of many prominent visitors. He was beloved by his neighbors, and by them he was rarely deserted, even at the polls. As a husband and father he possessed those homely virtues which Americans have ever esteemed highly.

[The Donnelly Papers, including numerous MSS., letter-books, and scrap-books, are in the possession of the Minnesota Historical Society, and are there available for use. E. W. Fish, Donnelliana an Appendix to "Caesar’s Column," Excerpts from the Wit, Wisdom, Poetry and Eloquence of Ignatius Donnelly (1892), is about what its title would indicate. A preliminary survey of Donnelly's life has been made by J. D. Hicks, "The Political Career of Ignatius Donnelly," in the Miss. Valley Historical Review, VIII (1921), 80-132, from which the foregoing summary has been made; this article was reviewed in Minnesota Historical Bull., IV (1922), 157. See also list of biographical sketches in Minnesota Historical Society Colts., XIV (1912), 182; R. S. Saby, "R. R. Legislation in Minnesota," and H. A. Castle, "Reminiscences of Minnesota Politics" in Minnesota Historical Society Coils., vol. XV (1915); W.W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota (4 vols., 1921); obituaries in newspapers of January 2, 1901. The quarrel with Washburne is covered in Congressional Globe, 40 Congress, 2 Sess.; pp. 2,355 ff.]

T. D. H.


DOOLITTLE, James Rood, 1815-1897, lawyer, jurist, statesman.  Democratic and Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, 1857-1869.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 201-202; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 374-375; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 746; Congressional Globe)

DOOLITTLE, JAMES ROOD (January 3, 1815-July 27, 1897), lawyer, statesman, was born in Hampton Township, Washington County, New York, the eldest child of Reuben Doolittle of Colonial and English stock and Sarah (Rood) Doolittle. Reared on a farm in western New York, he obtained his preliminary education in the rural school. He graduated from Geneva (now Hobart) College in 1834. In 1837 he was admitted to the bar in Rochester and the same year he married Mary L. Cutting. He began to practise in Rochester, but four years later settled at 'Warsaw, New York, where from 1847 to 1850 he was district attorney of Wyoming County. He also took a prominent part in politics a s a Democrat. In 1844 he campaigned extensively for Polk, and at the New York state convention of 1847 he wrote the "corner-stone resolution" in which "the democracy of New York ... declare ... their uncompromising hostility to the extension of slavery into territory now free, or which may be hereafter acquired by any action of the government of the United States." This became the essential plank in the Free-Soil platform of 1848 and, in modified phraseology, in the Republican platform of 1856. Doolittle remained a leader of the Barnburner faction of the Democratic party until 1856, except that he supported Van Buren in 1848. Meanwhile (1851) he settled in Racine, Wis., and two years later was elected judge of the first judicial circuit. In 1856 he identified himself with the Republican party.

He was elected, as a Republican, to the United States Senate in 1857 and served till March 4, 1869. His career in politics divides sharply into two periods-before the death of Lincoln and after that event. Although a "state-rights" Republican, prominent in the movement which resulted in Wisconsin's nullification of the Fugitive- Slave Law, he became as senator one of the staunchest and ablest proponents of the doctrine of no compromise with the slave states. Like Carl Schurz, Byron Paine, and other Wisconsin Republicans, he was determined to carry out the p4rty platform, restricting slavery rigorously within the states where it existed under state law. This he believed to be the constitutional method. He was a close personal friend and adviser of Lincoln. Early in 1864 he addressed at Springfield, Illinois, a great mass-meeting called to decide whether or not Lincoln must be superseded. In his first dozen words: "I believe in God Almighty ! Under Him I believe in Abraham Lincoln," Doolittle aroused such a demonstration for Lincoln that the President's opponents beat a hasty retreat. Johnson's struggle with Congress over reconstruction brought Doolittle into sharp collision with the radical Republicans, who, as he believed, were violating the Constitution in keeping states out of the Union. He ably supported the President, arguing that Johnson was merely carrying into execution Lincoln's policies. On the impeachment question he voted for acquittal; in the presidential canvass of 1868 he supported Seymour against Grant. The Wisconsin legislature, in 1867, called for Doolittle's resignation, which he refused. In 1869 he retired to make his home in Racine, but opened a law office in Chicago where he practised law extensively almost to the day of his death at the age of eighty-two.

Doolittle was an outstanding personality, physically and mentally. His presence on any platform guaranteed an interested audience. His voice was remarkably fine and so powerful that he could address 20,000 persons with perfect success. He was accounted a great lawyer, was a wide reader and popular lecturer on Bible subjects. He was in great demand for speeches on special occasions and on diverse social, religious, and economic themes. His so-called "betrayal" of the Republican party ended his political career. As a Democrat he was defeated for governor of Wisconsin in 1871, for congressman from his congressional district twice, and once for judge of his judicial circuit. His "Johnsonizing" was bitterly resented, but leading Republicans who had known him long pronounced his motives pure. His nature was strongly emotional and somewhat sentimental. He tended to "fundamentalism" in religion, lecturing on the fulfilment of Bible prophecies. The Constitution he construed with Jeffersonian strictness. In practical politics he was keen, shrewd, masterful, winning the encomium of so skilled a political tactician as E. W. (Boss) Keyes. His personality radiated good will and compelled attention.

[There is a biography in The Doolittle Family in America, pt. VII (1908), comp. by Wm. F. Doolittle, pp. 653-710. Collections of pamphlets and clippings; also several hundred letters, manuscript speeches, etc., are in State History Lib., Madison, Wis. See also D. Mowry, "Vice-President Johnson and Senator Doolittle," in Pubs. Southern Historical Assn., vol. IX, and "Doolittle Correspondence" in the same, vols. IX-XI (1905- 07); Biography Dir. of the American Congress (1928); obituary in Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1897.]

J. S-r.


DOUGLAS, H. Ford, 1831-1865, African American, abolitionist, anti-slavery activist, military officer, newspaper publisher, born a slave.  Active in anti-slavery movement in Ohio.  Garrisonian abolitionist.  Advocated for African American emigration.  Published Provincial Freeman.  Published in Canada.  Served as African American officer in artillery unit.  (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 4, p. 61; American National Biography, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 796)


DOUGLASS, Anna Murray, 1813-1882, African American, anti-slavery activist, conductor on the Underground Railroad, wife of Frederick Douglass. (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 4, p. 66)


DOUGLASS, Frederick, 1817-1895, African American, escaped slave, author, diplomat, orator, newspaper publisher, radical abolitionist leader.  Published The North Star abolitionist newspaper with Martin Delany.  Wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas: An American Slave, in 1845.  Also wrote My Bondage, My Freedom, 1855.  Manager, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1848-1853.  (Dumond, 1961, pp. 331-333; Filler, 1960; Foner, 1964; Mabee, 1970; McFeely, 1991;  Quarles, 1948; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 264-265; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 217; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 251-254; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 816; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, pp. 309-310; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 4, p. 67).

DOUGLASS, FREDERICK (February 1817?--February 20, 1895), abolitionist, orator, journalist, was named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but assumed the name of Douglass after his escape from slavery. He was born at Tuckahoe near Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, the son of an unknown white father and Harriet Bailey, a slave who had also some Indian blood. As a child he experienced neglect and cruelty, indulgence and hard work; but particularly the tyranny and circumscription of an ambitious human being who was legally classed as real estate. He turned at last upon his cruelest master, and by fighting back for the first time, realize d that resistance paid even in slavery. He was sent to Baltimore as a house servant and learned to read and write with the assistance of his mistress. Soon he conceived the possibility of freedom. The settlement of his dead master's estate sent him back to the country as a field hand. He conspired with a half dozen of his fellows to escape but their plan was betrayed and he was thrown into jail. His master's forbearance secured his return to Baltimore, where he learned the trade of a ship's calker and eventually was permitted to hire his own time. A second attempt to escape, September 3, 1838, was entirely successful. He went to New York City; married Anna Murray, a free colored woman whom he had met in Baltimore, and together they went to New Bedford, where he became a common laborer.

Suddenly a career opened. He had read Garrison's Liberator, and in 1841 he attended a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Nantucket. An abolitionist who had heard him speak to his colored friends asked him to address the convention. He did so with hesitation and stammering, but with extraordinary effect. Much to his own surprise, he was immediately employed as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He took part in the Rhode Island campaign against the new constitution which proposed the disfranchisement of the blacks; and he became the central figure in the famous "One Hundred Conventions" of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. It was a baptism of fire and brought out the full stature of the man. He was mobbed and mocked, beaten, compelled to ride in "Jim Crow" cars, ·and refused accommodations; but he carried the programme through to the bitter end.  

Physically, Douglass was a commanding person, over six feet in height, with brown skin, frizzly hair, leonine head, strong constitution, and a fine voice. Persons who had heard him on the platform began to doubt his story. They questioned if this man who spoke good English and bore himself with independent self-assertion could ever have been a slave. Thereupon he wrote his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass which Wendell Phillips advised him to burn. It was a daring recital of facts and Phillips feared that it might lead to his reenslavement. Douglass published the little book in 1845, however, and then, to avoid possible consequences, visited Great Britain and Ireland. Here he remained two years, meeting nearly all of the English Liberals. For the first time in his life he was treated as a man and an equal. The resultant effect upon his character was tremendous. He began to conceive emancipation not simply as physical freedom; but as social equality and economic and spiritual opportunity. He returned to the United States in 1847 with money to buy his freedom and to establish a newspaper for his race. Differences immediately arose with his white' abolitionist friends. Garrison did not believe such a journal was needed and others, even more radical, thought that the very buying of his freedom was condoning slavery. Differences too arose as to political procedure in the abolition campaign. In all these matters, however, Douglass was eminently practical. With all his intense feeling and his reasons for greater depth of feeling than any white abolitionist, he had a clear head and a steady hand. He allowed his freedom to be bought from his former master; he established the North Star and issued it for seventeen years. He lectured, supported woman suffrage, took part in politics, endeavored to help Harriet Beecher Stowe establish an industrial school for colored youth, and counseled with John Brown. When Brown was arrested, the Governor of Virginia tried to apprehend Douglass as a conspirator. Douglass hastily fled to Canada and for six months again lectured in England and Scotland.

With the Civil War came his great opportunity. He thundered against slavery as its real cause; he offered black men as soldiers and pleaded with black men to give their services. He assisted in recruiting the celebrated 54th and 55th Massachusetts colored regiments, giving his own sons as first recruits. Lincoln called him into conference and during Reconstruction, Douglass agitated in support of suffrage and civil rights for the freedmen. His last years were spent in ease and honor. He was successively secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, marshal and recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia, and finally United States minister to Haiti. His second marriage, in 1884, to Helen Pitts, a white woman, brought a flurry of criticism, but he laughingly remarked that he was quite impartial-his first wife "was the color of my mother, and the second, the color of my father." He was active to the very close of his career, having attended a woman-suffrage convention on the day of his death.

 [The chief sources of information about Frederick Douglass are his autobiographies: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), republished in England and translated into French and German; My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); Life and Times of Frederi.ck Douglass (1881). The best biographies are: F. M. Holland, Frederick Douglass, the Colored Orator (1891); C. W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass (1899); Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (1907). There are numerous references in W. P. and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879 (4 volumes, 1885-89), and throughout the literature of the abolition controversy. Many of Douglass's speeches have been published.]

W. E. B. D.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 217:

DOUGLASS, Frederick, orator, b. in Tuckahoe, near Easton, Talbot county, Maryland, in February, 1817. His mother was a negro slave, and his father a white man. He was a slave on the plantation of Col. Edward Lloyd, until at the age of ten he was sent to Baltimore to live with a relative of his master. He learned to read and write from one of his master's relatives, to whom he was lent when about nine years of age. His master allowed him later to hire his own time for three dollars a week, and he was employed in a ship-yard, and, in accordance with a resolution long entertained, fled from Baltimore and from slavery, 3 September, 1838. He made his way to New York, and thence to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he married and lived for two or three years, supporting himself by day-labor on the wharves and in various workshops. While there he changed his name from Lloyd to Douglass. He was aided in his efforts for self-education by William Lloyd Garrison. In the summer of 1841 he attended an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket, and made a speech, which was so well received that he was offered the agency of the Massachusetts anti-slavery society. In this capacity he travelled and lectured through the New England states for four years. Large audiences were attracted by his graphic descriptions of slavery and his eloquent appeals. In 1845 he went to Europe, and lectured on slavery to enthusiastic audiences in nearly all the large towns of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In 1846 his friends in England contributed $750 to have him manumitted in due form of law. He remained two years in Great Britain, and in 1847 began at Rochester, New York, the publication of '”Frederick Douglass's Paper,” whose title was changed to “The North Star,” a weekly journal, which he continued for some years. His supposed implication in the John Brown raid in 1859 led Governor Wise, of Virginia, to make a requisition for his arrest upon the governor of Michigan, where he then was, and in consequence of this Mr. Douglass went to England, and remained six or eight months. He then returned to Rochester, and continued the publication of his paper. When the civil war began in 1861 he urged upon President Lincoln the employment of colored troops and the proclamation of emancipation. In 1863, when permission was given to employ such troops, he assisted in enlisting men to fill colored regiments, especially the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. After the abolition of slavery he discontinued his paper and applied himself to the preparation and delivery of lectures before lyceums. In September, 1870, he became editor of the “New National Era” in Washington, which was continued by his sons, Lewis and Frederick. In 1871 he was appointed assistant secretary to the commission to Santo Domingo; and on his return President Grant appointed him one of the territorial council of the District of Columbia. In 1872 he was elected presidential elector at large for the state of New York, and was appointed to carry the electoral vote of the state to Washington. In 1876 he was appointed U. S. marshal for the District of Columbia, which office he retained till 1881, after which he became recorder of deeds in the District, from which office he was removed by President Cleveland in 1886. In the autumn of 1886 he revisited England, to inform the friends he had made as a fugitive slave of the progress of the African race in the United States, with the intention of spending the winter on the continent and the following summer in the United Kingdom. His published works are entitled “Narrative of my Experience in Slavery” (Boston, 1844); “My Bondage and my Freedom” (Rochester, 1855); and “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” (Hartford, 1881). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 217.


DOUGLASS, Grace Bustill, 1782-1842, African American activist, abolitionist.  Co-founder of the Female Anti-Slavery Society.  (Yellin, 1994, p. 11; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 4, p. 71)


DOUGLASS, Sarah Mapps, 1806-1882, African American, abolitionist leader, educator, writer, lecturer.  Organizer, member and manager of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Participant and organizer of the Anti-Slavery Conventions of American Women in 1838-1839. (Yellin, 1994, pp. 10-11, 71, 76-77, 96-97, 116-117, 117n, 148, 156, 164-165, 169, 237-238; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 255-256; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 6, p. 821; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 4, p. 76)


DOW, NEAL (March 20, 1804-October 2, 1897), temperance reformer, the ''father of the Maine Law," was born in Portland, Maine, the only son of Josiah and Dorcas (Allen) Dow, both parents being of English and Quaker descent. He was early trained in those principles of temperance, industry, and thrift for which the Society of Friends has always stood, and to these principles he remained constant throughout his life, although eventually dismissed from the Society because of his changing views on the use of "carnal weapons." This break was inevitable, for Dow was a man of intense convictions with the moral and physical courage to support them. To these characteristics he added from childhood robust health, and, although a man of medium size and weight, marked physical strength and vitality. He was educated in the schools of Portland, and at the Friends' Academy in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and desired to go on to college and enter the law, but to this his parents objected, and, in consequence, he entered his father's tanning business, eventually becoming a partner. His interest in books continued, however, and at his death he possessed one of the largest and finest private libraries in the state.

On January 20, 1830, he married Maria Cornelia Durant Maynard, by whom he had nine children, four of whom died in infancy. In business he was as successful as his ambition demanded. He was active on the directorates of several manufacturing and other corporations, becoming, in fact, one of Portland's leading men of affairs. After 1857, however, his connection with business became little more than nominal, owing to his increasing participation in the temperance crusade.

The intolerable amount of intemperance prevailing in Maine during his youth, together with his Quaker training and the interest of his parents in temperance reform, constitute the general background of Dow's interest in the temperance movement. Later, his own experiences with the drink evil as an employer of labor, as a member of the Portland fire department, and as an overseer of the poor, definitely convinced him of the serious need of reform, and led to his active interest in furthering it. At the age of twenty-four, when clerk of the Deluge Engine-Company, he made his first temperance address, successfully opposing the presence of liquor at a Company dinner, while about the same time he interested himself in the temperance program of the Maine Charitable Mechanics' Association of which he was a member. In 1834, as a delegate of the Portland Young Men's Temperance Society, he attended the first state temperance convention at Augusta where the Maine State Temperance Society was organized to discountenance the use of ardent spirits. Four years later, he withdrew from this last society to organize, with others, the Maine Temperance Union which was pledged to total abstinence and resolved to consider the expediency of petitioning the legislature for prohibitory legislation. Not until 1845, however, could the Union be committed definitely to the cause of legislative prohibition, and then only following an intensive campaign of popular education on the wisdom of so radical a step. In this task of educating public sentiment Dow was an indefatigable worker, speaking wherever opportunity offered throughout the state. That the reformers were making progress became evident in 1846 when a prohibitory measure based largely upon the report of General James Appleton [q.v.], which had been tabled by the legislature nine years before, was finally enacted. This law, however, proved to be unsatisfactory in the provisions for its enforcement, and the campaign for a more severe law continued. In 1851 Dow was elected mayor of Portland, and the city council at once made him chairman of a committee to visit the legislature and urge the passage of a law "stringent in its provisions and summary in its processes" which would make it possible to drive the illegal liquor traffic from the city. Dow drew up the bill he desired, and, May 26, 1851, was given a public hearing at Augusta in the House of Representatives. So convinced was the legislature that Dow had the popular sentiment of the state behind him that his bill promptly passed both houses by large majorities, and, June 2, 1851, was signed by Governor Hubbard. Backed by this legislation, Dow returned to Portland and summarily cleaned up the city, despite some interesting opposition. With the passage of the "Maine Law" his reputation as a temperance reformer became world-wide. Extensive speaking tours throughout the North followed, and in 1853 he served as president of the World's Temperance Convention in New York City.

Again elected mayor of Portland in 1855, he was scarcely in office when there occurred the "June riot," the work of elements within the city hostile to prohibition. In the reaction which followed this unfortunate affair the "Maine Law" was repealed by the legislature, but the popular sentiment of the state was in favor of prohibition and in 1858 it was again enacted. In 1857, at the request of the United Kingdom Alliance, Dow had visited England and lectured widely on prohibition.

On the outbreak of the Civil War, Dow, whose hostility to slavery had been only less than his opposition to the liquor traffic, offered his services to his state, and in the fall of 1861 became colonel of the 13th Regiment of Maine Volunteers. In February 1862, he joined General Butler's command and went to the Gulf Department, where he was commissioned a brigadier-general of volunteers on April 28, 1862. At the battle of Port Hudson he was twice wounded, and while recuperating in a private home within the Union lines was captured by the enemy and spent eight months as a prisoner in Libby prison, Richmond, and at Mobile. Eventually, March 14, 1864, he was exchanged for General Fitzhugh Lee. Temporarily broken in health he returned to Portland, and resigned from the army on November 30, 1864. Following the war, he wrote and spoke extensively in behalf of prohibition, not only traveling throughout the United States but, in 1866-67 and 1873-75, again visiting Great Britain. In 1880 he ran for president of the United States as the candidate of the Prohibition party, receiving 10,305 votes. Four years late r the people approved a prohibitory amendment to the state constitution and in the campaign for this amendment he took an active part, although then eighty years of age. He died in Portland, retaining to the end an active and vigorous interest in the cause he had done so much by his zeal and courage to further.

[Dow's autobiography, The Reminiscences of Neal Dow, Recollections of Eighty Years (1898); H. S. Clubb, The Maine Liquor Law, its Origin, History and Results, including a Life of Hon. Neal Dow (1856); a campaign biography by T. W. Organ, Biography Sketch of General Neal Dow (1880); A. A. Miner, "Neal Dow and his Life Work," New England Mag., June 1894; Intimate pictures of Dow in his la ter years by Frances E. Willard, "Neal Dow's Ninetieth Birthday" and Mrs. Jos. Cook, "Neal Dow as Guest and Host," Our Day, January, February and July, August 1894, respectively.]

W. R. W.


DOWNING, William, New York, American Abolition Society (Radical Abolitionist, Vol. 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


DRAKE, CHARLES DANIEL (April 11, 1811-April 1, 1892), lawyer, jurist, United States senator, was the son of Dr. Daniel Drake [q.v.] and Harriet Sisson. The boy received cultural and literary training in his home, supplemented by academic instruction in Kentucky and Cincinnati schools. In 1827 he entered the naval academy at Annapolis where he remained for three years, resigning because of his sudden decision to study law. Arriving at St. Louis in 1834, he entered the practise of law, but was not a recognized leader of the local bar. Following a brief residence in Cincinnati, he returned in 1850 to St. Louis and shortly became active in politics. In the confused and chaotic political situation of the fifties he appeared, successively, as a Whig, a Know-Nothing, and a Democrat. He was elected as a Democrat to fill a vacancy in the legislature in 1859 and served out the term. In the critical campaign of 1860, Drake supported Douglas for president and the proslavery candidate, C. F. Jackson, for governor. He opposed secession but was not active in the spectacular events of the spring and summer of 1861 which culminated in the military defeat and political elimination of the disloyalists and assured the ultimate success of the Unionist cause. Early in the war, however, he became a leader in the attack on slavery as a legalized institution, an issue which to most Missouri leaders had been distinctly secondary to the preservation of the Union. Drake energetically led the radical or "charcoal" wing of the Unionist party, but from 1861 to 1863 was unsuccessful in his demand for immediate and uncompensated emancipation; the conservatives, led by Governor Gamble and supported by Lincoln, maintaining control of the situation. By 1863 the radical faction had become a distinct group, well organized under Drake and with a definite program, including immediate emancipation, a new constitution, and a system of drastic disfranchisement (Proceedings of the Missouri State Convention Held in Jefferson, City, June, 1863). The Radicals increased in strength and were successful in securing the authorization of a constitutional convention. In this body Drake, the vice-president, was easily the most active and conspicuous member. He was the directing force in the formation of the new constitution and the author of the sections dealing with the elective franchise (Journal of the Missouri State Convention, Held at the City of St. Louis, January 6-April10, 1865). He was peculiarly adapted to this position, for, as Carl Schurz wrote, "in politics he was inexorable ... most of the members of his party, especially in the country districts, stood much in awe of him" (Reminiscences, vol. III, 1908, p. 294). So pervasive and masterful was his influence that the adopted constitution became known as the "Drake constitution." The Radicals maintained absolute control of the state from 1865 to 1871, with Drake as their leader.

Never personally popular, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1867 as a recognition and reward for his services to his party. He took his stand with Morton, Wilson, and other extreme Radicals, in enthusiastic support of the Reconstruction measures, which permitted him to give full play to his dogmatism and intolerance. He regarded the wide-spread political and social disorder in the South as a sinister expression of the rebellious spirit in the whites and of a fixed purpose to prevent by violence the operation of the Republican party in the reconstructed states. He acted in accordance with the view that he was "a representative of radical radicalism"; and supported with obvious enthusiasm the Reconstruction legislation of 1867-70 (Congressional Globe, 40 Congress, l Sess., pp. 41, 99, 109, 356). He regarded the Civil War as a social conflict, the South as a conquered province, and introduced proposals so radical that even his Republican colleagues refused to support them (Ibid., pp. 2,600, 3,920). In the trial of Johnson and in the consideration of the Fifteenth Amendment, Drake took an active part. In the meantime, his dictatorship of the Radical party in Missouri had been questioned, then successfully challenged, by the election of Carl Schurz [q.v.] to the Senate in 1869, despite Drake's bitter opposition. The factional division thus created between radicals and liberals came to a decisive test in the state campaign of 1870, where a combination of bolting liberals and Democrats triumphantly carried the state, and so amended the constitution as to end the various discriminations. With the passing of his leadership and almost of his party, Drake's position became precarious. He was unwilling and unable to adjust himself to the changed conditions, and realized that the Democrats would shortly regain control of Missouri. He accepted, therefore, from Grant in December 1870 the appointment as chief justice of the United States Court of Claims, and announced his definite withdrawal from politics. He served with distinction until his retirement in 1885. During his latter years Drake abandoned many of his former extreme views.

[Drake's Autobiography, MS., is useful for his early life, but disappointing for his political career. His views on the issues of the Civil War are in Union and Anti-Slavery Speeches (1864). His rise as a leader of the Missouri radicals is traced in the Missouri Democrat, 1863-71. A comprehensive account of that period is T. S. Barclay, Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 1865-1871 (1926).]

T.S.B.


DRATON, Daniel, captain of the Pearl, in 1848 attempted to transport and free 76 slaves; arrested and imprisoned.  (Rodriguez, 2007, p. 51)


DRESSLER, Amos, anti-slavery agent, educator, Lane University alumnus.  Worked in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  Was beaten, tarred and feathered by mob.  (Dumond, 1961, p. 186; Mabee, 1970, pp. 31-33, 35, 37, 152, 153, 257; Van Broekhoven, 2002, pp. 199-200)


DRESSLER, Horace, d. 1877, lawyer, defended fugitive slaves in New York courts (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 231).

DRESSER, Horace, lawyer, d. 27 January, 1877. He was graduated at Union in 1828. Mr. Dresser was one of the first lawyers who spoke in the New York courts in behalf of the negro race, and his best energies were devoted to defending and assisting fugitive slaves. He wrote much on constitutional questions, and published “The Battle Record of the American Rebellion” (New York, 1863), and “Internal Revenue Laws as Amended to July, 1866” (New York, 1866).  Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 231.


DUNBAR, Reverend Duncan, 1791-1864, New York, clergyman, abolitionist.  Executive Committee, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1837-1840. (Goodell, 1852, p. 188; Yellin, 1994, pp. 39, 43n; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 255)


DUNCAN, James, Vevay, Indiana (near Cincinnati), clergyman.  Published influential anti-slavery tract, “A Treatise on Slavery, in which is Shown Forth the Evil of Slaveholding, Both from the Light of Nature and Divine Revelations,” 1824.  Wrote Slaveholders Prayer, published by American Anti-Slavery Society in New York and Cincinnati in 1840.  (Dumond, 1961, pp. 140-141)


DWIGHT, Theodore, 1764-1846, lawyer, author, editor, Massachusetts.  Opposed slavery.  Gave noteworthy anti-slavery speech at Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, May 8, 1794.  (American National Biography, 2002, Vol. 7, p. 189; Dictionary of American Biography, 1936, Vo. 3, Pt. 1, p. 569)

DWIGHT, THEODORE (December 15, 1764- June 12, 1846); lawyer, author, editor, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, seventh of the thirteen children of Maj. Timothy and Mary (Edwards) Dwight, whose first-born was Timothy Dwight [q.v.]. His father was a well-to-do merchant, 1.andowner, and local office-holder; his mother, a daughter of Jonathan Edwards [q. v.], was a woman of remarkable strength of character. Maj. Timothy Dwight died when Theodore was in his thirteenth year, and the boy was brought up by his mother on the farm in Northampton. When he was about twenty, an injury obliged him to give up farming. He studied law with his uncle, Pierpont Edwards [q.v.], of New Haven, was admitted to the bar in 1787, and began practise at Haddam, Connecticut. In 1791 he moved to Hartford and practised there until 1815. He is reported to have been at one time in the early period of his practise on the point of forming a partnership with his cousin, Aaron Burr, the agreement falling through because of a political dispute. He was married on September 9, 1792, to Abigail, daughter of Richard and Mary (Wright) Alsop of Middletown, Connecticut, and sister of Richard Alsop [q.v.], the poet. Dwight soon acquired a reputation as a competent lawyer, an able writer, and an eloquent speaker. A number of his speeches on various occasions during his years at Hartford have survived. One of the most interesting was delivered May 8, 1794, before the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and is noteworthy as an early arraignment of slavery; it contains passages which resemble utterances of Garrison and Phillips. His political addresses show that he shared with most of his contemporaries the enthusiasm for the French Revolution which later turned to fear and aversion. It was during this same period that he became identified with the group of writers known as the "Connecticut Wits." He was himself the author of much verse, but his poetical effusions are of antiquarian rather than literary interest (Parrington, post). Some of the New Year addresses, however, contributed to the Connecticut Courant and Connecticut Mirror are clever imitations of Hudibras and have been frequently quoted by historians.

He was ultra-Federalist in politics, and his views of the opposing party and its doctrines are to be found in his published addresses and in frequent editorial contributions, essays, and verses in the Connecticut Courant and Connecticut Mirror. His journalistic writings are characterized by the scurrility and personal abuse which were so common in American newspapers of the period. In 1806-07 he served for a single session in Congress, in place of John Cotton Smith, resigned; and from 1809 to 1815 was a member of the Council. He was less prominent as an office-holder, however, than as a party worker, pamphleteer, and editor. He was well known throughout New England, his writings were widely quoted, and he corresponded with leading Federalists in other states. In Connecticut he fought all the reforms proposed by the Republicans prior to the War of 1812, and was earnestly opposed to the latter contest. At the same time he had numerous business interests, maintained a law practise, and was active in various local societies. In 1814 he acted as secretary of the Hartford Convention and in 1833 published the journal of that ill-starred gathering together with a review of the steps leading up to the War of 1812. It is an able defense of the Federalist party, although somewhat too polemical for good historical writing, as is also The Character of Thomas Jefferson as Exhibited in his own Writings (1839). In 1815 he moved to Albany, New York, where he founded the Daily Advertiser; but he remained there less than two years. In 1817 he founded the New York Daily Advertiser, and continued in New York City in active management of the paper until 1836, when he returned to Hartford to spend his declining years. His death took place in New York, however, as had that of his wife less than three months earlier.

[W. W. Spooner, Historic Families of America (n.d.), p. 110; Dwight Loomis and J. G. Calhoun, Judicial and Civil History of Connecticut (1895), p. 236; B. W. Dwight, History of the Descendants of John Dwight (1874), I, 227-3 1; V. L. Parrington, in The Connecticut Wits (1926), pp. xxxiii-xxxv, giving a list of Dwight's principal writings; S. G. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime (1856), II, 123; R. J. Purcell, Connecticut in Transition, 1775-1818 (1918), giving an excellent historical setting for Dwight's earlier career; obituary in New York Tribune, June 13, 1846.]

W. A. R.


DWIGHT, Theodore, 1796-1866, Connecticut, abolitionist, author, reformer, son of Theodore Dwight, 1764-1846. (Dumond, 1961, pp. 47, 113; Locke, 1901, pp. 93, 103f, 103n, 126, 151, 155, 166, 170, 171, 178, 183; Mason, 2006, pp. 31, 86, 147, 225, 229, 293-294n157; ; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 570; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 7, p. 195)

DWIGHT, THEODORE (March 3, 1796-0ct. 16, 1866), author, educator, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Theodore [q.v.] and Abigail (Alsop) Dwight. His father was the secretary of the Hartford Convention; his mother was a sister of Richard Alsop [q.v.]. With such parents it was natural that Theodore should be fed from early childhood on unadulterated Federalism and Calvinism and that the diet should be topped off with a four-year course at Yale, where he graduated in 1814, under his uncle Timothy [q.v.], whose memory he revered and whose classroom utterances, taken down in shorthand, he published as President Dwight's Decisions of Questions Discussed by the Senior Class in Yale College in 1813 and 1814 (1833). He had intended to study theology under his uncle, but an attack of scarlet fever followed by a hemorrhage of the lungs made him relinquish his plans and turn to less strenuous employment. He traveled abroad for his health in 1818-19 and in October 1820 went again to England and France for a longer stay. In Paris he engaged with the Reverend Francis Leo in distributing free copies of De Sacy's French New Testament and was arrested for collecting an unlawful number of persons on the streets. He spoke French, Spanish, and Italian well and had a fair command of German, Portuguese, and modern Greek. At home in New York and in Brooklyn, where he lived from 1833 till his death, he taught school, worked on his father's paper, the New York Daily Advertiser, busied himself as author, editor, and translator of English books into Spanish, and engaged in various philanthropic, religious, and educational enterprises. At one time or another he worked for the Protestant Vindicator, the Family Visitor, the Christian Alliance and Family Visitor, the New York Presbyterian, and the Youth's Penny Paper. A venture of his own was Dwight's American Magazine and Family Newspaper, 1845-52. On April 24, 1827, he married Eleanor Boyd of New York. He has the distinction of having introduced vocal music into the New York public schools. From 1854 to 1858 he worked with George Walter to send Free-Soil settlers to Kansas; together they persuaded about 3,000 persons to emigrate to the new territory. His knowledge of the Romance languages, his republicanism, and his de sire to protestantize Catholic countries led him to entertain many political exiles from the Latin countries of Europe and the Americas. Of these guests the most famous was Garibaldi, who intrusted to him his autobiography for publication in the United States.

Dwight's more important books are: A Journal of a Tour in Italy in the Year 1821 (1824); The Northern Traveller, containing the Routes to Niagara, Quebec, and the Springs (1825; 6th ed., 1841); Sketches of Scenery and Manners in the United States (1829); A New Gazetteer of the United States of America (1833, with William Darby [q.v.], Dwight being responsible for New York, New Jersey, and New England); Lessons in Greek (1833, an interesting attempt at a rational method of instruction); The Father's Book, or Suggestions for the Government and Instruction of Young Children on Principles Appropriate to a Christian Country (1834, also published i n London), of considerable interest; The School-Master's Friend, with the Committee-Man's Guide: Containing Suggestions on Education, Modes of Teaching and Governing, ... Plans of School Houses, Furniture, Apparatus, Practical Hints, and Anecdotes on Different Systems (1835); Open Covenants, or Nunneries and Popish Seminaries Dangerous to the Morals and Degrading to the Character of a Republican Community (1836); Dictionary of Roots and Derivations (1837); The History of Connecticut (1840); Summer Tours, or Notes of a Traveler through some of the Middle and Northern States (1847, originally published in 1834 as Things as They Are; republished in Glasgow in 1848 as Travels in America); The Roman Republic of 1849 (1851); an edition with much new material of Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures (1855); Life of General Garibaldi, Translated from his Private Papers with the History of his Splendid Exploits in Rome, Lombardy, Sicily, and Naples to the Present Time (1861). Dwight's admiration for Garibaldi, it may be added, was unbounded. During his last years he worked in the New York Customs House. He died from s hock and injuries received in jumping from a moving train in Jersey City.

[B. W. Dwight, The History of the Descendants of John Dwight of Dedham, Massachusetts (1874); F. B. Dexter, Biography Sketches Grads. Yale College, vol. VI (1912).]

G.H.G.


DWIGHT, Timothy, 1752-1817, anti-slavery writer, educator, clergyman.  Pastor, Congregational Church at Greenfield Hill.  President of Yale College.  Condemned slavery and its brutality in his writings.  (Dumond, 1961, pp. 77, 87; Mason, 2006, pp. 52, 102, 220, 266nn80-81; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 281-282; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 7, p. 192)

DWIGHT, TIMOTHY (May 14, 1752-January 11, 1817), Congregational divine, author, president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, and throughout these years the dominant figure in the established order of Connecticut, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, a descendant of John Dwight who came from Dedham, England, in 1635 and settled in Dedham, Massachusetts. His father, Major Timothy, was a successful merchant and the proprietor of a considerable estate. Some light is thrown on his character by the fact that although a graduate of Yale and destined for the law, he "had such extreme sensibility to the beauty and sweetness of always doing right, ... and regarded the legal profession as so full of temptations to doing wrong, in great degrees or small," that he preferred not to be a lawyer (Benjamin W. Dwight, History of the Descendants of John Dwight of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1874, I, 130). His conscientiousness was indirectly the cause of his death. As judge of probate he had sworn fealty to the Crown, and therefore felt himself debarred from taking any part in the Revolution. To escape the situation to which his scruples gave rise, he bought part of a Crown grant to his deceased brother-in-law, Phineas Lyman, in West Florida, and, with the latter's widow and children and two of his own sons, in 1776 he went to take possession of it. In this unhealthful region he died June 10, 1777, although news of the fact did not reach his family in Northampton until a year later. Six feet and four inches tall and well proportioned, he was by actual test as strong as an ox. In contrast, his wife, Mary, daughter of Jonathan Edwards, was so petite that, according to tradition, he could hold her at arm's length on the palm of his hand. She bore him thirteen children, of whom Timothy was the first-born.

Mary Edwards Dwight was a woman of remarkable character and mental ability. At her death Timothy said that he owed all that he was to her, although in this statement he was not quite fair to his father to whom some of his spiritual traits, as well as his physical stature, may certainly be attributed. She was but seventeen years old at his birth, but almost from the cradle she proceeded to educate him according to ideas of her own. He early displayed a tenacious memory, acquisitiveness, and determination. He learned the alphabet in one lesson, and by the time he was four he was reading the Bible with ease and correctness. When he was six years old he was sent to grammar school, where, contrary to the wishes of his father, who thought him too young, and without the knowledge of his master, he acquired familiarity with Latin by studying the books of the other boys while they were at play. Had the school not been discontinued, he would have been ready for college at the age of eight. His mother continued his instruction, which was supplemented by a short period of schooling under Reverend Enoch Huntington of Middletown, Connecticut, and at thirteen he entered Yale, having already done much of the work of the first two college years. He graduated in 1769, sharing highest honors with Nathan Strong, and at once became principal of the Hopkins Grammar School, New Haven, returning to Yale in 1771 to remain six years as tutor.

During the first half of his college course he seems to have been guilty of some of the ordinary frailties of humanity, card playing especially, but having reached the mature age of fifteen, he was converted to a more serious view of life, and his native ambition to make a conquest of all knowledge took full possession of him. A resolve to devote fourteen hours a day to study was rigorously kept, and although the college schedule began at 5:30 winters, and at 4:30 summers, he was up an hour earlier reading by candle light. He thus laid the foundation for an affection of the eyes, which subjected him to suffering and limitation for the remainder of his life. While a tutor, in order not to have to take time for exercise, he reduced his eating until his dinners consisted of twelve mouthfuls, asceticism which resulted in a physical breakdown. He recuperated by walking upward of 2,000 miles and riding on horseback 3,000 more, thus beginning the peregrinations and observations, the fruits of which appeared later in records of much value. In 1774 he united with the college church, and soon gave up his original intention to become a lawyer, and turned to theology. The conventional subjects of the day were not his only interest, however. He made a study of sacred music and wrote several anthems. With his fellow tutors, Joseph Howe and John Trumbull, he developed an interest in literature, composition, and oratory at Yale, and sought to broaden its curriculum. Upon receiving his master's degree in 1772 he delivered A Dissertation on the History, Eloquence, and Poetry of the Bible which was published that same year. To this literary interest at Yale may be traced the origin of the school known as the "Connecticut" or "Hartford Wits," of which Dwight was one of the most prolific members-a school devoted to the cultivation of belles-lettres, and ambitious to give to America a worthy body of poetry. As a tutor he was noted for his skill as an administrator and was extraordinarily popular. When in 1777 Naphtali Daggett resigned as president pro-tem, the students wanted Dwight appointed president. That others also had him in mind is revealed by the appointee, Dr. Stiles, who records: '' I have heard of but one Gentleman that disapproves the Choice ... and he is Hon. Col. Davenport of Stanford a Gent. of Learning & great Merit. He says the Corporation have clone wrong in electing me; they should have chosen Mr. Tutor Dwight" (F. B. Dexter, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1901, II, 231). Before leaving Yale Dwight broke an old tradition by marrying while a tutor, taking for his wife, March 3, 1777, Mary, daughter of Benjamin Woolsey.

His resignation, September 1777, was due to the war. The preceding June he had been licensed to preach by a committee of the Northern Association of Massachusetts, and on October 6, Congress appointed him chaplain of General S. H. Parson's Connecticut Continental Brigade, and he soon joined the army at West Point. He threw himself into the work of instructing and inspiring the soldiery with his characteristic vigor, and according to tradition with notable practical results. He also wrote patriotic songs which became popular in the army, among them " Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise."

The death of his father and the necessity of taking charge of the family affairs in Northampton, compelled him to resign, January 28, 1779 (F. B. Heitman, Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army, 19r4). The next five years spent in this Massachusetts town were full of strenuous and varied labors. He ran two large farms, constantly supplied churches, and established a school for both sexes which attracted so many students that he had t0 employ two assistants. He also became prominent in political affairs, representing his town in county conventions and in 1781 and 1782 in the state legislature, where his activities won him such favor that his friends wished to nominate him for the Continental Congress. Had he been willing to abandon the ministry for public life, he would undoubtedly have risen high. Calls came to him to settle over churches in the vicinity of Boston, which he declined. Connecticut attracted him more, and on July 20, 1783, he accepted an invitation to the pastorate of the Congregational church at Greenfield Hill, where on November 5, he was ordained.

During his twelve years here his fame as an educator, preacher, author, and man of affairs spread. Again he established a school for both sexes to which, in addition to many other enterprises, he gave six hours a day. It became widely and justly celebrated, drawing its students from the Middle and Southern states as well as from New England. Approximately a thousand pupils were educated by him, many of them in all the studies of the college curriculum. Among the clergy his learning and force of character speedily gave him leadership. In 1785 The Conquest of Canaan, written several years before, was published, the first epic poem, according to the author, to appear in America. It consists of eleven books in rhymed pentameters, and was an audacious attempt to give the New World an epic such as the Iliad was to Greece, and the Aeneid, to Rome. The Bible story is told with such changes as suited the writer's purpose, and interjected are allusions to contemporary characters and events. It is unbearably tedious to the modern reader, but increased Dwight's prestige, was republished in England in 1788, and was charitably reviewed by Cowper in the Analytical Review (III, 1789, 531). A second ambitious work, Greenfield Hill, appeared in 1794. In form imitative of eighteenth-century English poets, it describes the scenery, history, and social conditions of the country, and has the patriotic purpose of contributing to the moral improvement of the author's countrymen and of demonstrating to Europeans that America offers the makings for a native poetry of interest and excellence. A rigid Calvinist and a stanch Federalist, Dwight exerted all his personal influence, intellectual equipment, and literary ability against the rising tide of democracy and infidelity, the two being in his mind synonymous; a warfare which he was to continue with a stubborn closed-mindedness for the remainder of his life. He took up the weapon of satire and published, The Triumph of Infidelity, a Poem (1788), dedicated to "Mons. de Voltaire," in which he uncorks vials of abuse. Satire was not one of Dwight's gifts. "Probably there can now be left for us on this planet few spectacles more provocative of the melancholy and pallid form of mirth, than that presented by those laborious efforts of the Reverend Timothy Dwight to be facetious at the expense of David Hume, or to slay the dreadful Monsieur de Voltaire in a duel of irony" (Moses Coit Tyler, Three Men of Letters, 1895, p. 92). His own religious, social, and political views are set forth in sermons and addresses, among which are: A Discourse on the Genuineness, and Authenticity of the New Testament (1794); The True Means of Establishing Public Happiness (n.d.), delivered July 7, 1795; The Nature, and Danger, of Infidel Philosophy (1798); The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis (1798), and in Fast Day discourses delivered in 1812. At the request of the citizens of New Haven, on February 22, 1800, he gave an address on Washington, with whom he had personal acquaintance, which was published that same year under the title: Discourse ... on the Character of George Washington, Esq. After the duel between his cousin, Aaron Burr, and Hamilton he preached a sermon on the Folly, Guilt, and Mischiefs of Duelling (1805).

The height of his ambition was perhaps achieved when on June 25, 1795, a few weeks after the sudden death of Ezra Stiles, Dwight, having just declined a call to the presidency of Union College, was elected president of Yale. That he was ambitious for position and power he himself confessed shortly before his death "Particularly," he says, "I have coveted reputation, and influence, to a degree which I am unable to justify." (Sereno E. Dwight's Memoir prefixed to T. Dwight's Theology, p. xliii). President Stiles, who had an extreme dislike for Dwight, accusing him of decoying students from Yale for his schools, and suspecting him of trying to undermine him in his own position, also states: "He meditates great Things & nothing but great things will serve him-& every Thing that comes in the Way of his preferment must fall before him. Aut Cresar, aut null us" (Dexter, ante, II, 531). For more than twenty-one years he administered the college with great ability, exerted an influence over the students such as few presidents achieve, instructed the senior class in rhetoric, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, acted as professor of theology, supplied the college pulpit, gave counsel of weight in the affairs of state, and was altogether the most conspicuous figure in New England. The unregenerate dubbed him "Pope Dwight," while the children of the elect were taught to regard him as second only to St. Paul.

His real greatness has been questioned. Even some of his contemporaries had difficulty in accounting for the exalted place he held in public regard. An admirer, S. G. Goodrich, admits that his greatness was not that of genius and that he was only a man of large common sense and a large heart, inspired by high moral principles, a " Yankee, Christian gentleman-nothing more nothing less" (Recollections of a Lifetime, 1856, I, 355). Unquestionably he had serious limitations. His outlook was narrow; his views of life, his political and social doctrines, all his judgments and all that he wrote, were determined or colored by his theological system. He had a little of the bigotry and uncharitableness of Puritanism at its worst. His literary work was without originality, and of all his poetry, so laboriously constructed, the only bit now generally known is the hymn, "I love thy Kingdom, Lord." Theologically he belonged to the school of his grandfather, Jonathan Edwards, but here he displayed some independence. His views are set forth in a series of sermons, repeated every four years at Yale, that all the students might hear them, and published after his death, Theology, Explained and Defended (5 vols., 1818-19), popular in America and abroad. (For analysis of his system, see Williston Walker, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States, 1894, pp. 301-03). His one work which is likely to survive is Travels in New England and New York (1821-22), in four sizable volumes, written to record how " New England appeared, or to my own eye would have appeared, eighty or a hundred years before," and to refute foreign misrepresentations of America. It is an astonishingly varied collection of descriptions of natural scenery, agricultural, political, religious, and social conditions, including historical, biographical, and statistical information, and is interlarded with shrewd practical comments.

"On account of his noble person," Goodrich was persuaded, "the perfection of the visible man -he exercised a power in his day and generation somewhat beyond the natural scope of his mental endowments" (ante, I, 353). In appearance "he was about six feet in height, and of a full, round, manly form. His head was modeled rather for beauty than craniological display .... Dr. Dwight had, in fact, no bumps: I have never seen a smoother, rounder pate than his, which being slightly bald and close shorn, was easily examined. He had, however, a noble aspect-a full forehead and piercing black eyes though partly covered up with large spectacles in a tortoiseshell frame .... His voice was one of the finest I have ever heard from the pulpit-clear, hearty, sympathetic-and entering into the soul like the middle notes of an organ" (Ibid., I, 348-49). Dwight's reputation and influence, however, were not due to his looks and manner alone. They are to be attributed in part to his mental equipment. He had a tenacious memory, a wide range of interests, and capacity for keen and minute observation. His mind was stored with a wealth of information on the most diverse subjects. He could talk intelligently with men in almost every walk of life, and frequently demonstrated that he knew how to do a job better than those whose business it was. Forced, because of the condition of his eyes, to depend upon amanuenses, such was his power of concentration that he could dictate to several at one time, turning from one to the other and unaided beginning where he had stopped. With all else he also had sound judgment and common sense. In certain aspects of character, moreover, he was great. However open to criticism his social and political views, he displayed a noble devotion to his country's interests, and no one ever doubted his religious integrity. He had disciplined himself to inflexible conformity to duty, and his industry, perseverance, and self-command came well up 0 to the height of human possibilities. Anyone who could accomplish what he did, so handicapped as to be unable to use his eyes for close work for but a short time each day, forced often to get up in the night and walk miles to gain relief from intense pain, compelled to compose both prose and poetry through dictation, and finally keep on his way with fortitude through slow death from cancer, had in him the stuff that compels admiration. By all, too, he was conceded to have been a great teach er. He probably came nearer to exemplifying what the name Mark Hopkins symbolizes than did Hopkins himself. He not only inspired the interest of his students in the studies he taught, but he made his class-work a means of enriching them out of his own great stock of general knowledge, so that to be under him alone was a liberal education. As a college president he had qualities which would have given him high rank in any generation, and from his administration Yale dates her modern era. He made the faculty in cooperation with the president a part of the college government; abolished obsolete customs and methods of discipline; gathered about him able instructors; encouraged the teaching of science; established a medical department, and contemplated the establishment of theological and law departments. His interest in the extension of education and religion led him to give much thought and labor to the founding of institutions which have had permanence and wide influence. He was one of the projectors of Andover Theological Seminary; of the Missionary Society of Connecticut; and of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. His whole life in fact was devoted to great interests, and if he was the personification of the "venerable status quo," an exemplifier of Connecticut Puritanism, he was also the personification of all that was finest in it.

[F. B. Dexter, Biography Sketches Grads. Yale College, vol. III (1903) gives list of publications and a copious bibliography. See also Dexter, Sketch of the History of Yale University (1887). and "Student Life at Yale under the first President Dwight" in Proc. American Antiquarian Society, October 1917; W. B. Sprague, "Life of Timothy Dwight" in Jared Sparks, The Lib. of American Biography, 2 series, IV (1845), 225-364; Henry A. Beers, The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays (1920); Vernon L. Parrington, The Connecticut Wits (1926), and Main Currents in American Thought: The Colonial Mind (1927); Cambridge History of American Lit., vols. I and II (1917-18); M.A. DeWolfe Howe, Classic Shades (1928); R. J. Purcell, Connecticut in Transition (19 18); Frank H. Foster, A Genetic History of the New England Theology (1907); A. P. Stokes, Memorials of Eminent Yale Men (1914), esp. vol. I; J.B. Reynolds, S. H. Fisher, H. B. Wright, Two Centuries of Christian Activity at Yale (1901).]

H.E.S.


DYER, Charles V., Dr., 1808-1878, abolitionist, jurist.  Co-founded Chicago chapter of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1838 with Philo Carpenter.  Station master on the Underground Railroad.  Gubernatorial candidate with Liberty Party in 1848.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 285; Campbell, 2009)


DYER, LOUIS (September 30, 1851-July 20, 1908), classical scholar, writer, and lecturer, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Charles Volney Dyer, M.D., and Louisa Maria (Gifford) Dyer. His father ·was descended from William and Mary Dyer [q.v.], who came from Somersetshire to Boston in 1635, became adherents of Mrs. Hutchinson, and were driven from Massachusetts Bay to Rhode Island, where they joined the Society of Friends. Charles Dyer practised medicine in Newark, New Jersey, in New York, and in Chicago, and was prominent in the anti-slavery movement and active in the work of the "Underground Railroad." In 1862 President Lincoln appointed him judge for the United States in the Anglo-American Mixed Court at Sierra Leone. Louis Dyer's independent habit of thinking, his quiet and efficient friendliness, and his interest in social problems, undoubtedly derived from these antecedents. Educated by private tutors in Geneva and near Lyons, he entered first the University of Chicago (1867), then the University of Munich, and finally the sophomore class at Harvard (September 1871). Older than mo st undergraduates, and matured by extensive travel, he was none the less liked by his classmates, and interested himself in many college activities. At graduation (June 1874) he obtained highest honors in classics. Entering Balliol College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1874, he won the Taylorian Scholarship for proficiency in Italian, and studied there until February 1877, when the illness of his father required his return to Chicago. He became tutor in Greek at Harvard, and in 1881 assistant professor of Greek, a post which he held until June 1887. During this period he published: A Consideration of the Use of Form in Teaching (1881); The Greek Question and Answer (1884); and an excellent edition of Plato's Apology and Crito (1886). After 1887 his life was spent mostly in Oxford, where he had been given the B.A. degree in 1878. In December 1889, he returned to Boston to deliver eight lectures in the Lowell Institute course, late r published under the title Studies of the Gods in Greece at Certain Sanctuaries Recently Excavated (1891).

In 1893 he was made master of arts at Oxford, and appointed lecturer in German and French at Balliol; he was examiner of schools for the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Committee. In 1893 he published An Introduction to the Study of Political Economy, translated from the Italian of Luigi Cossa. During the year 1895-96 he was acting professor of Greek at Cornell University, and in 1899 he delivered three lectures on Machiavelli before the Royal Institution of Great Britain, la ter published as Machiavelli and the Modern State (1904). In 1899 also he contributed to Nates and Queries for Somerset and Dorset a series of notes on the career of his ancestor, under the title, "William Dyer [q.v.], who came from Somersetshire to Boston in 1635, became adherents of Mrs. Hutchinson, and were driven from Massachusetts Bay to Rhode Island, where they joined the Society of Friends. Charles Dyer practised medicine in Newark, New Jersey, in New York, and in Chicago, and was prominent in the anti-slavery movement and active in the work of the "Underground Railroad." In 1862 President Lincoln appointed him judge for the United States in the Anglo-American Mixed Court at Sierra Leone. Louis Dyer's independent habit of thinking, his quiet and efficient friendliness, and his interest in social problems, undoubtedly derived from these antecedents. Educated by private tutors in Geneva and near Lyons, he entered first the University of Chicago (1867), then the University of Munich, and finally the sophomore class at Harvard (September 1871). Older than most undergraduates, and matured by extensive travel, he was none the less liked by his classmates, and interested himself in many college activities. At graduation (June 1874) he obtained highest honors in classics. Entering Balliol College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1874, he won the Taylorian Scholarship for proficiency in Italian, and studied there until February 1877, when the illness of his father required his return to Chicago. He became tutor in Greek at Harvard, and in 1881 assistant professor of Greek, a post which he held until June 1887. During this period he published: A Consideration of the Use of Form in Teaching (r88r); The Greek Question and Answer (1884); and an excellent edition of Plato's Apology and Crito (1886). After 1887 his life was spent mostly in Oxford, where he had been given the B.A. degree in 1878. In December 1889, he returned to Boston to deliver eight lectures in the Lowell Institute course, later published under the title Studies of the Gods in Greece at Certain Sanctuaries Recently Excavated (1891).

In 1893 he was made master of arts at Oxford, and appointed lecturer in German and French at Balliol; he was examiner of schools for the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Committee. In 1893 he published An Introduction to the Study of Political Economy, translated from the Italian of Luigi Cossa. During the year 1895-96 he was acting professor of Greek at Cornell University, and in 1899 he delivered three lectures on Machiavelli before the Royal Institution of Great Britain, later published as Machiavelli and the Modern State (1904). In 1899 also he contributed to Nates and Queries for Somerset and Dorset a series of notes on the career of his ancestor, under the title, "William Dyer, a Somerset Royalist in New England." Returning to the United States, he delivered in 1900 the Hearst Lectures on Greek art in the University of California, visiting, in the next year, many of the American universities, where he lectured on Mycene and Cnossus. Oxford as it is, published in 1902, was a small but useful volume for the guidance of Rhodes scholars. In 1904 he became a member of a committee of the Oxford Congregation interested in the maintenance of Greek as a compulsory requirement in the university. At the same time he engaged in the work of promoting the Egypt Exploration Fund, which was to yield papyri of inestimable worth, and he was also a prominent member of the council of the Hellenic Society. In all these enterprises his activities were untiring and fruitful. He married, in London (November 23, 1889), Margaret Anne Macmillan, daughter of the publisher, Alexander Macmillan. In June 1890, he purchased Sunbury Lodge, which thereafter became known in Oxford as a center from which radiated kindness, hospitality, and helpfulness, "one of the first places to which cultivated American visitors in England turned, and where they met sympathetic Oxford colleagues." There he was the recognized intermediary between the university and the young American students who began to flock to Oxford under the Rhodes Foundation.

As a classical scholar, Dyer had read widely and with fine appreciation the literatures of Greece and Rome, and his exposition of them was enriched by illustrations from many modern writers of different tongues. His work as a teacher was sound and enduring. He contributed many reviews, letters, and articles to the Nation (New York), A thenceu1n, Classical Review, Journal of Hellenic Studies, and Harvard Studies in Classical Philology; he preferred, however, to sacrifice further achievement as a scholar to the making of human contacts at Oxford, and his diversity of interests, the warmth of his enthusiasm for the young student's development, his devotion to social work connected with his church or with the succor of neglected children, drew friends to him wherever he went. Domestic affliction, which would have distracted lesser men, never closed his door to the service of others. Gifted with a wide knowledge of men and things, with a joyous wit and humor, and sweetness of disposition, he possess ed a charm that few or none could resist.

[Ninth Report of the Class Secretary of the Class of 1874, Harvard University (1909), pp. 34-37; Harvard College Class of 1874, Fiftieth Anniversary, Eleventh Report (1924), pp. 91-95; Educational Review, September 1908; Nation (New York), July 23, October 15, 1908; London Times, July 21, 1908.]

C. B. G.



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