Kim-Kor: Kimball through Korner

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


KIMBALL, Joseph Horace, 1813-1836, author, anti-slavery agent, editor of the Herald of Freedom newspaper of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society. (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. III, p. 537; Dumond, 1961, pp. 188, 393n25)


KIMBER, Abby, Pennsylvania, delegate to the (Garrisonian) Anti-Slavery Society, Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, Eastern Branch, Philadelphia (Dumond, 1961, p. 286; Yellin, 1994, p. 332)


KIMBER, Emmor, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Society of Friends, Quaker, member of the Association of Friends for Advocating the Cause of the Slave (Drake, 1950, p. 154)


KING, Horatio (June 21, 1811-May 20, 1897), editor, lawyer, postmaster-general,

KING, HORATIO (June 21, 1811-May 20, 1897), editor, lawyer, postmaster-general, was born at Paris, Maine, a descendant of Philip King, who had emigrated from England before 1680, settling fir st at Braintree, and then at Raynham, Ma ss. A farmer's boy, the seventh of the eleven children of Samuel and Sally (Hall) King, Horatio received a common school education and at eighteen became printer's devil on the weekly Jeffersonian of which, in the following year (1830) with his friend, Hannibal Hamlin, he became part owner. Horatio and Hannibal turned the press while the village schoolmaster for twelve York shillings a week assisted in the editing. In another six months King became sole proprietor. His paper reflected his stanch advocacy of Jacksonian Democracy. Removing his press to Portland in 1833 he continued to edit the Jeffersonian until 1838, when he sold out to the Standard (later merged with the Eastern Argus). In 1839 he received from Amos Kendall a clerkship at $1,000 a year in the Post Office Department at Washington.

For twenty-two years, under Democratic and Whig administrations, from Van Buren to Lincoln, he served in the Post Office Department and by ability and courtesy advanced in successive promotions until he achieved the distinction of rising from clerk to head of department. In charge of mail contracts in New England (1841) he became superintendent (1850) of the foreign mail service, and was instrumental in improving the existing postal conventions with Bremen and Great Britain, and extending the service to the West Indies, South American countries, France, Prussia, Hamburg, and Belgium. The convention with Bremen (1853) inaugurated cheap transatlantic postage. As first assistant postmaster-general (March 28, 1854-January 1, 1861) under Pierce and Buchanan, he satisfactorily filled a position which required infinite political tact. He became acting postmaster-general (January 1861), when Joseph Holt was transferred to the War Department, and served as postmaster- general in Buchanan's cabinet from February 1 to March 8, 1861.

"For the Union without reservations, equally against disunionists at the South and abolitionists at the North" (Turning on the Light, p. 51), King made earnest efforts during the last days of Buchanan's administration to arouse influential men on both sides to avert the impending struggle. In what has been termed the first official denial of the right of secession, he warned Representative J. D. Ashmore of South Carolina (January 28, 1861) that his continued use of the franking privilege was evidence that both he and his state were still in the Union. "For God's sake," he implored Attorney-General Black (December 14, 1860), "let us see the Government placed squarely and unequivocally on the side of the Union!" (Ibid., p. 34). To John A. Dix, later through his efforts made secretary of the treasury, he wrote (December 17, 1860): "I am determined to sustain the Union until not a hope of its continuance remains" (Ibid., p. 35). He remained a loyal Union Democrat throughout the war and served on President Lincoln's commission which determined compensation for slaves emancipated within the District of Columbia.

King's law practice before the executive departments, war claims, and international commissions at Washington won him wealth and a considerable reputation. One of Washington's foremost citizens for thirty-five years, he was secretary of the Washington Monument society, a leader of the Saturday Evening Literary Club which met at his home, and a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines on political, historical, and literary subjects. His tours of Europe (1867, 1875-76) resulted in his Sketches of Travel (1878), and his letters in rhyme delighted a wide circle of friends. Late in life he published  Turning on the Light (1895), a defense of Buchanan's administration. He was ever active in postal affairs, drafting the law requiring prepayment on transient printed matter, and devoting seven years of "vexatious, gratuitous labor" until, by the act of July 5, 1884, the economical and efficient device of the official "penalty envelope" was adopted. King was married, on May 25, 1835, to Anne Collins of Portland. She died in 1869 and on February 8, 1875, he was married to Isabella G. Osborne, of Auburn, New York. He died in Washington in his eighty-fifth year.

[In addition to King's books mentioned in the biography, see Horatio C. King, Horatio King (n.d.); Centennial Literature Reunion at the Residence of Horatio King (Washington, 1884); Enoch Sanford, Genealogy of the Families of Kings (1866); Evening Star (Washington), May 20, 1897. The Horatio King Papers are in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress]

B.M.


KING, Rufus (January 26, 1814-October 13, 1876), soldier, editor, diplomat,

KING, RUFUS (January 26, 1814-October 13, 1876), soldier, editor, diplomat, the third son of Rufus King, 1755-1827 [q.v.], and Mary (Alsop) King, and brother of Charles and John Alsop King [qq.v.], was born in New York City. Several years of his boyhood were passed in London while his father was minister to the Court of St. James's. Between the ages of seven and ten he was a student in a London boarding school. One of his masters at this period called him a "prodigy in learning" (Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, post, vol. III, p. 50). For three years he was in a Paris school, chiefly for the purpose of acquiring the French language. Returning to America, he was tutored for Harvard by the Reverend Dr. J. S. J. Gardiner, rector of Trinity Church, Boston. He was graduated from Harvard in 18ro at the age of nineteen and began reading law with the well-known jurist, Peter Van Schaick, of Kinderhook, New York, continuing his studies at the famous Litchfield, Connecticut, school under Tapping Reeve and James Gould.

In the War of 1812 he left the legal profession to serve as assistant adjutant-general of militia. At the end of the war he opened a commission house in New York, which he conducted with moderate success for three years. In 1818 he established in Liverpool the house of King & Gracie and remained as senior partner in that enterprise until 1824. He was then asked by John Jacob Astor to become manager of the American Fur Company, but declined. He accepted, however, a partnership in the New York banking house of Prime, Ward & Sands, beginning thus a long and successful career as a banker. His interests and activities extended beyond Wall Street. In 1835 he was made president of the New York & Erie Railroad and served until 1839. The road was then making its first surveys westward from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The first construction work on the line was done in King's administration, but was stopped by the financial stringency that began in 1836 and continued for over two years. King's business reputation helped to get needed support for the enterprise. In the panic of 1837, when specie payments were suspended, he was able to render an unusual service to the financial interests, not -of New York only but of the country at large. Going to London, he persuaded the officials of the Bank of England to loan £1,000,000 sterling (with the guaranty of Baring Brothers) to be distributed among the New York banks. The consignment was made to Prime, Ward & King and the responsibility for handling the money fell chiefly to the junior partner. So wisely was the apportionment made that the operation was a complete success, resulting in the resumption of specie payments in May 1838, with prompt repayment of the loan to the Bank of England. King's repeated election as president of the New York Chamber of Commerce is some indication of his standing in the business community during. that period, and the frequent references to him in Philip Hone's diary represent him as a leading spirit in the select social circles that foregathered on Manhattan Island in the early nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, King, with his brothers, had become interested in Whig politics, and having established a residence in New Jersey, where he had a home on the heights of Weehawken, he was elected to Congress in 1848. He served only one term, as a minority member of the House, his brother John holding a New York seat at the same time. He voted against the fugitive slave bill and the other compromise measures of 1850, and did what he could to uphold the Taylor administration. On February 4, 1813, he married Sarah Rogers Gracie, daughter of Archibald Gracie, and sister of Eliza, his brother Charles's wife. She with four daughters and three sons survived him.

[W. W. Spooner, Historic Families of America (n.d.); E. H. Mott, Between the Ocean and the Lakes, The. Story of the Erie (1899); Chas. King, "James Gore King," in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, January 1854, reprinted in Freeman Hunt, Lives of American Merchants (1858), vol. I; J. A. Scoville, The Old Merchants of New York, vols. I-III (1863-65); The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King (6 vols., 1894-1900), ed. by C. R. King; George Wilson, Portrait Gallery of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York (1890); Bayard Tuckerman, The Diary of Philip Hone (2 vols., 1889); New York Tribune, October 5, 1853.]

W. B. S.


KING, John Alsop, 1788-1867, statesman, lawyer, soldier, political leader, diplomat, U.S. Congressman, Governor of New York.  He opposed compromises on issues of slavery, especially the Fugitive Slave Law.  Supported admission of California as a free state.  Active in the Whig Party and later founding member of the Republican Party in 1856.  Elected Governor of New York in 1856, serving one term.  (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. III)

KING, JOHN ALSOP (January 3, 1788-July 7, 1867), congress man, governor of New York, was the eldest son of Rufus, 1755-1827 [q.v.], and Mary (Alsop) King and brother of Charles and James Gore King [qq.v.]. He was born in New York City, but a good part of his boyhood was pa ss ed, with his brothers, in England, while the father was United States minister to that country. He attended Harrow School under the head mastership of Dr. Joseph Drury, while Lord Byron and Robert Peel were pupils there. The discipline was a rare experience for American boys. At that time, the opening years of the nineteenth century, the curriculum was rigidly confined to Latin and Greek. From Harrow the King brothers were sent to a branch of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris for drill in the use of the French language. Their father, having been relieved of the English mi ss ion by the Jefferson administration, had returned to America. In Paris the boys took prizes and were schoolfellows of several of the Empress Josephine's young relations. When they rejoined their parents this family was settled at Jamaica, Long Island John's later studies were chiefly confined to the law. Although admitted to the bar, he had hardly begun practice when the War of 1812 interrupted his plans, and he was commissioned a lieutenant of cavalry at New York.

After the peace, King, who had married Mary Ray, January 3, 1810, cultivated a farm on Long Island not far from his father's estate. At this time his interest in agriculture became dominant. His other absorbing interest was politics. Schooled in Federalism, his earlier alliances in New York were with anti-Clintonian Democrats, or Republicans. He was a member of the state Assembly in 1819-21 and of the state Senate in 1823-25, resigning his seat to go to London as secretary of legation with his father, who was appointed minister to the Court of St. James's by President John Quincy Adams. After his return to America King was in turn allied with the anti-Masons, the National Republicans, and the Whigs, harboring also antislavery sentiments. He was sent at intervals by his district to the state Assembly (1832, 1838, 1840), suffering several defeats for the same office, however. He was a delegate to the Whig national convention of 1839 and ten years later was sent to Congress as a Whig representative, his brother James having a seat for a New Jersey district in the same House. In Congress King opposed the Clay compromise measures, particularly the Fugitive-slave Bill, and urged the admission of California as a free state. He was a delegate to the Whig national convention of 1852, but two years later he presided at the New York state anti-Nebraska convention and in the New York Whig convention of 1855 he moved the adoption of the name "Republican." He was a delegate to the first Republican National Convention in 1856. In the state convention of that year he was named for governor on the second ballot and was elected in November by a large plurality. His term of office was uneventful, the perennial New York issues of education and canal enlargement receiving the usual emphasis in his messages to the legislature. New York's attitude on the question of slavery extension was also set forth at length. The private life to which King retired at the age of seventy-one was only once interrupted, when he was appointed a member of the New York delegation to the Peace Conference of 1861 at Washington. He was stricken by paralysis while making a Fourth of July address to his Long Island neighbors in 1867 and died three days later in the homestead that had been his since his father's death in 1827. He had seven children, one of whom, Charles Ray King, M.D., edited The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King.

[W. W. Spooner; Historic Families of America (n.d.); The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King (6 vols., 1894-1900), ed. by C. R. King; D. S. Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, vol. II (1906); "Eulogium on the Late Governor John A. King," Trans. New York State Agric. Society, pt. I, vol. XXVII (1868); Union League Club of New York Proceedings in Reference to the Death of John A. King, July 11th, I867 (1867); Bayard Tuckerman, The Diary of Philip Hone (2 vols., 1889); J. A. Scoville, The Old Merchants of New York, vols. I-III (1863-65); New York Tribune, July 8, 1867.

J.W.B.


KING, Leicester, 1789-1856, Warren, Ohio, abolitionist leader, political leader, businessman, jurist, leader of the anti-slavery Liberty Party.  Manager, 1837-1839, and Vice President, 1839-1840, American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).  Ohio State Senator, 1835-1839.  Member, Whig Party.  U.S. Vice Presidential candidate, Liberty Party, in 1848.  (Dumond, 1961, p. 302; Mitchell, 2007, p. 24; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 50)


KING, Preston, 1806-1865, U.S. Congressman, politician.  Son of founding father Rufus King.  Opponent of the extension of slavery into the new territories acquired from Mexico after 1846.  Supporter of the Wilmot Proviso in Congress.  Co-founder of Free Soil Party.  Later organized Republican Party and supported William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 12, p. 708)

KING, PRESTON (October 14, 1806-November 13, 1865), politician, was born in Ogdensburg, New York, the son of John King and Margaret Galloway. His elementary education obtained in Ogdensburg was followed by a classical course in Union College where he graduated with honors in 1827. He passed the bar after a study of the law in Silas Wright's office. In 1830 he established the St. Lawrence Republican. He was a Democrat from principle and became a dogged, uncompromising Jacksonian. Through Wright's influence he served as postmaster at Ogdensburg from 1831 to 1834 at which time he was elected to the Assembly. He was hostile toward the movement to finance internal improvements at government expense and thought Whiggery was an extension of Federalism, neither of which had accomplished any good. He won the confidence and respect of his party before he became involved in the Canadian Rebellion of 1837-38. The imprisonment of some of his friends whom he had urged to participate in that war temporarily unbalanced his mind and he entered an asylum in Hartford, Connecticut, after his fourth term in the Assembly. He recovered rapidly, however, returned to politics, and entered Congress in 1843. Having long opposed the extension of slavery, he broke with the majority of his party in 1846, when he advised Wilmot to introduce his Proviso and then gave it his powerful support. He participated in the Free Soil convention at Buffalo in 1848 and supported Van Buren. He was not a candidate for election to the Thirtieth Congress, but he was elected in 1848 as a Free Sailer and was reelected in 1850. He was strong in his opposition to the Fugitive-slave Law. In 1852 he supported Pierce for President but later turned against him and the party, because of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and allied himself with its opponents. He urged the nomination of Fremont and was himself considered for the vice-presidential nomination by the Philadelphia convention in 1856. In 1857 he entered the Senate where he severely denounced Buchanan as being "false to his high trust" (Congressional Globe, 35 Congress, 1 Session, p. 1134). He proposed to establish agricultural land grant colleges in every state, but he failed to secure the passage of such a bill. The idea of secession was repugnant to him, although he advocated state rights in preference to extreme centralization. He refused to support any proposed compromises with the South in 1860, and he ardently supported Lincoln in his war policies. At the expiration of his term in 1863 he returned to his law practice. He acted as chairman of the National Committee of the Republican party from 1860 to 1864 and served as a delegate in the Republican Convention at Baltimore where he urged the nomination of Johnson for vice-president. After the latter became president, he appointed King collector of customs in New York City (August 15, 1865). King accepted the office, for which he believed himself wholly unfitted, only upon the earnest insistence of Weed. An invasion of office-seekers and the fear that he might fail to perform his duties satisfactorily caused another mental aberration. He tied a bag of shot about his body and slipped off a Hoboken ferry-boat. His remains were buried near the graves of his father and mother at Ogdensburg, New York, in May 1866. He had never married.

[D. S. Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, vol. II (1906); Autobiography of Thurlow Weed (1884), ed. by Harriet A. Weed; C. B. Going, David Wilmot, Free Soiler (1924); H. D. A. Donovan, The Barnburners (1925); Diary of Gideon Welles (3 vols., 1911); S. W. Durant and H. B. Pierce, History of St. Lawrence County, New York (1878); obituary notices in the World (New York), November 15, 16, 1865, and the New York Tribune, November 15, 1865. ]

W. E. S-h.


KING, Reverend William, clergyman.  Scotch Presbyterian minister.  Founded Colony of Former Slaves in Kent County under the Elgin Association.  Took slaves to Canada.  (Dumond, 1961, p. 337)


KING, Rufus, 1775-1827, Massachusetts, statesman, founding father, lawyer, diplomat, soldier, early opponent of slavery.  Member of the Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  U.S. Congressional Representative and U.S. Senator.  Wrote clause in Northwest Ordinance excluding slavery from Northwest Territories.  It stated, in part, “that there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the states,” and that this should “remain a fundamental principle of the Constitution…”  As a Senator in 1819, he opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave state.  King entered proposals in the Senate to abolish slavery.  His son was anti-slavery activist John Alsop King. 

(Appletons’, 1888, Vol. III, pp. 542-543; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 398; Dumond, 1961, pp. 38, 40, 103, 131-132; Locke, 1901, pp. 93, 158n; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 12, p. 713)

KING, RUFUS (March 24, 1755-April 29, 1827), Federalist statesman and minister to Great Britain, was born in Scarboro, Me. (then part of Massachusetts), the eldest son of Captain Richard King, a successful merchant, and his first wife, Isabella (Bragdon) King. At the age of twelve he was sent to Dummer Academy, South Byfield, Massachusetts, under Master Samuel Moody, and then entered Harvard, graduating in the class of 1777. He studied law at Newburyport, Massachusetts, under Theophilus Parsons [q. v.], incidentally acquiring some military experience as aide to General Glover during General Sullivan's brief and ill-fated expedition to Rhode Island. Admitted to the bar in 1780, he opened an office in Newburyport. As a delegate to the Massachusetts General Court from that town in 1783, 1784, and 1785, he showed himself to be "a man of business, a ready debater, and a pleasing orator" (J. B. McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, I, 1883, p. 359), and won a place of leadership by favoring a bill granting a five per cent impost to the Continental Congress.

For three successive years, from 1784 to 1786, he was elected by the legislature as a delegate to Congress, then sitting in Trenton, New Jersey. As a member, he moved, March 16, 1785, a resolution providing that there should be neither "slavery nor involuntary servitude" in the section to be known as the Northwest Territory, The phrase employed by King was later incorporated in the Ordinance of 1787, which was drafted in part by him but introduced in Congress by his colleague, Nathan Dane, while King was serving in the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia. As chairman of a committee on finances, he offered a report (February 15, 1786) urging all the states to contribute toward federal expenses, and he was sent, with James Monroe, on an unsuccessful mission to persuade the Pennsylvania legislature to emulate Massachusetts in granting Congress a five per cent impost. Although he was already recognized as a brilliant speaker, he broke down in the midst of his prepared address and had to ask Monroe to take his place. An hour later, however, he rose and delivered extemporaneously what he always declared to be the best speech he ever made. During this period also King sat upon a commission to adjust the boundary between Massachusetts and New York.

In the Constitutional Convention, which opened May 14, 1787, King was probably the most eloquent orator. Although he had at first been fearful of the dangers which might arise from such an assembly and had been opposed to any radical action in altering the Articles of Confederation, his opinions underwent a change, and he was found during the debates arguing in favor of a vigorous central government. He was on the committee which revised the style and arranged the order of the final draft of the Constitution, and he was one of its signers. In the Massachusetts convention for ratification, as a delegate from Newburyport, he courageously pleaded for its adoption, and his logic and fervor, as well as his familiarity with the provisions of the document, were of vital assistance in securing the approval of his state.

Before the federal government was organized, King, having married, March 30, 1786, Mary Alsop, only daughter of a wealthy New York merchant, had moved to New York City and abandoned the practice of law. Shortly after his arrival, he was elected to the New York Assembly and was soon chosen by the legislature, July 16, 1789, as United States senator from that state, his colleague being General Philip Schuyler. King, who was fortunate enough to draw the long term, became perhaps the ablest Federalist in the Senate, upholding Alexander Hamilton in all his financial measures. Of the Jay Treaty, negotiated in 1794 with England, he was an earnest advocate, and he joined with Hamilton and Jay in publishing, under the signature of "Camillus," a series of papers explaining its details, King's share being a discussion of commercial matters and maritime law, on which he was an authority. He was elected in 1791 as a director of the Bank of the United States, which he had labored assiduously to create. He was chosen for a second senatorial term, January 27, 1795, by a small majority in each branch of the legislature.

Washington, after some hesitation, named King as minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain, succeeding Thomas Pinckney, in 1796. In recommending him to the President, Hamilton described him as "a remarkably well informed mail, a very judicious one, a man of address, a man of fortune and economy, whose situation affords just ground of confidence" (The Life mid Correspondence of Rufus King, VI, p. 680). King completely justified the hopes of his sponsors and is said to have been "one of the most effective representatives the United States ever had at London" (Edward Channing, A History of the United States, IV, 1917, 353). Arriving in London, July 23, 1796, at a moment when issues of a critical nature were arising almost daily between the two nations, King, by firm yet tactful diplomacy, averted any open breach. He concluded in 1803 two important conventions with the Addington ministry, and he even felt, probably too optimistically, that, if he could have remained a few months longer, he might have persuaded Great Britain to abandon her policy of impressment. He was, however, relieved at his own request in 1803 and returned to the Unit ed States. In the autumn of 1804 he was by general agreement the Federalist candidate for vice-president with Charles C. Pinckney as the presidential nominee, but they received only fourteen electoral votes-from Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland-and were overwhelmed by Jefferson and Clinton. Being out of sympathy with the Jefferson administration he settled on an estate in Jamaica, Long Island, where he interested himself in agriculture, imported a herd of Devon cattle, and kept up an extensive correspondence. In 1808 Pinckney and King were again nominated and were given forty-seven electoral votes-all New England, except Vermont, going for the Federalist nominees.

Like a true Federalist, King did not approve of the War of 1812, and when he was again elected in 1813 to the United States Senate from New York, he became the leader of the nine opposition members in that body. He made a fiery speech against the abandonment of the city of Washington after the British had burned the Capitol in 1814; and, when it became evident that the war had become one of defense, he sanctioned measures for its vigorous prosecution, thus winning the respect of his opponents for his patriotic attitude. He was suggested frequently by Republican newspapers as a possible secretary of state, the hope being that he might persuade his Federalist followers to join him in standing by the administration. In the presidential election in 1816, he won the votes of all 0 the Federalist electors, representing Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware, and thus received 34 votes to Monroe's 183. He had joined Webster, then in the House of Representatives, in opposing the establishment of the second Bank of the United States; and he was the author of the Navigation Act of 1818. He studied carefully the problem of the public lands and carried through a measure providing that they should be sold for cash, at a lower price than before. In 1820 he was reelected by the New York legislature, although the majority of the members differed with him politically. The following year he was a member of the New York constitutional convention.

During his last term in the Senate he took a decisive stand on negro slavery. He resisted the admission of Missouri as a state, with slavery, and opposed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 on the ground that it merely prolonged the controversy and postponed its adjustment. He argued that further extension of slavery would be unfair to the free states and fatal to their welfare. For the abolition of slavery he proposed applying the proceeds of the sale of the public lands toward the emancipation of negroes and toward their removal to some territory outside of the national borders. Upon the expiration of his term King declined a reelection. He had suffered badly from the gout. But his desire to resume private life was overcome by the insistence of President John Quincy Adams that he should once more accept the ministry to the Court of St. James's. Shortly after his arrival in Liverpool, June 26, 1825, he was taken ill and was obliged to return to America the following summer. Within a year he died, worn out by the exhausting demands of a long and creditable career in the service of his country. He was buried in the cemetery of Grace Church, in Jamaica.

In the estimation of one who knew him well, King "had the appearance of one who was a gentleman by nature and had improved all her gifts" (William Sullivan, Familiar Letters on Public Characters and Public Events, 2nd ed., 1834, p. 21), but he was sometimes thought to be haughty and austere in manner. The existing portraits of him by John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and Charles W. Peale would indicate that he was handsome. The testimony as to his ability is ample. Jeremiah Mason, King's colleague in the Senate, thought him to be "the most able man and the greatest orator" he had ever met (Memoir, Autobiography and Correspondence of Jerimiah Mason, 1917, p. 57). Webster wrote of him, February 5, 1814, to his brother Ezekiel: "You never heard such a speaker. In strength, and dignity, and fire; in ease, in natural effect, and gesture as well as in matter, he is unequalled" (The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, National Edition, 1903, XVII, 241). During a long and stormy political career, he never had a serious quarrel nor was there the slightest imputation against his public or private life. He reared a notable family of children of whom several attained distinction, among them being John Alsop, Charles, and James Gore King [qq.v.].

The standard authority on Rufus King is The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King (6 vols., 1894- 1900), edited by his grandson, Charles R. King. Other sources include: C. E. Fitch, Encyclopedia of Biography of New York (1916), I, 34-37; W. W. Spooner, Historical Families of America (n.d.); Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (1920), published as Vol. II of the annual reports of the American History Association for the year 1918; D. S. Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, vol. I (1906); Max Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (3 vols., 1911); D.R. Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York (1919); E. H. Brush, Rufus King and His Times (1926).]

C.M.F.


KING, Rufus (January 26, 1814-October 13, 1876), soldier, editor, diplomat,

KING, RUFUS (January 26, 1814-October 13, 1876), soldier, editor, diplomat, was born in New York City, the son of Charles [q. v.] and Eliza (Gracie) King, and g rand son of Rufus King [q. v.]. He attended the preparatory department of Columbia College, entered the United States Military Academy, West Point, July 1, 1829, graduated in 1833, and was commissioned in the corps of engineers. Resigning, Sept. 30, 1836, because he felt that the army in peace time offered little opportunity for a career, he became assistant engineer in surveying for the New York & Erie Railroad, of which his uncle, James Gore King [q.v.], was president. In 1839 he went to Albany and was editor of the Albany Daily Advertiser until 1841, after which year till 1845 he was associated with Thurlow Weed in editing the Albany Evening Journal. From 1839 to 1843 he was adjutant-general of New York under Governor William H. Seward and commanded the troops called out to suppress the anti-rent disturbances.

Removing to Milwaukee in 1845, he became part owner and editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette (later the Milwaukee Sentinel). In 1857 he sold his share but remained as editor until 1861. He made the paper one of the leading journals of the Northwest. He himself engaged actively in many public affairs. He was a leader in the fight to defeat the first constitution proposed for Wisconsin (1846), and was an influential member of the second convention which framed the constitution adopted in 1848. Especially interested in education, he served for years as superintendent of school s of Milwaukee without the title or compensation, and was formally superintendent, 18 59-60. He was an earnest proponent of "free instruction in all the institutions of the state, from the primary schools to the university," and was one of the first regents of the University of Wisconsin (1848-54).

His old friend, Secretary Seward, secured his appointment, March 22, 1861, as minister to the Papal States, but as he was about to sail for Rome, Fort Sumter was fired upon. He returned to Washington and on May 17, 1861, was commissioned a brigadier-general, organized the famous "Iron Brigade," and served in the defenses of Washington until March 1862, when he was given a division. On August 28, 1862, near Gainesville, his division, a part of Pope's army, was unexpectedly attacked by Stonewall Jackson with a large force. King held his ground until nightfall, then retreated. Next day Jackson and Lee united and defeated Pope in the battle of Manassas. After this disastrous engagement the false impression got abroad that King, when he retreated, disobeyed Pope's orders, and that he was therefore responsible for the junction of Jackson with Lee. "For long years he had to bear the stigma," says his son, General Charles King (post, p. 380), "and it ruined his health and broke his heart." He continued in the army until October 20, 1863, when ill health-he was a victim of epilepsy-forced him to resign.  

He had, on October 7, been reappointed minister to Rome. While there he apprehended John H. Surratt, implicated in the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and Seward, who had fled to Italy. In 1867 Congress failed to appropriate funds for continuing the mission at the Papal Court on what King called "the alleged but erroneous grounds that the Pope refuses to permit Protestant worship within the walls of Rome" (Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 1867, pt. 1, p. 708). King protested, but Congress at its next session having again made no appropriation for the continuance of the mission, he resigned January 1, 1868. He served as deputy collector of customs for the port of New York until 1869, when ill health compelled his retirement from public life. In 1836 he married Ellen Eliot, who died in 1838; in 1843 he married her sister Susan, by whom he had a son and a daughter.

[W. W; Spooner, Historic Families of America (n.d.); Charles King, in Wisconsin Magazine of History, June 1921; Wisconsin History Society Collections, vol. XXVIII (1920), vol. XXIX (1928); files of the Milwaukee Sentinel, 1845-61; G. W. Cullum, Biographical Register Officers and Grads. U. S. Military Academy, vol. I (3rd ed., 1891); War of the Rebellion, Official Records (Army), 1 series XII, pt. 1; Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 1866, pt. 2, pp. 127ff., 1867, pt. 1, pp. 69,ff.; Milwaukee Sentinel, October 14, 1876; information from General Charles King.]

W. E. M.


KING, Thomas Starr (December 17, 1824- March 4, 1864), Unitarian clergyman, lecturer, and writer,

KING, THOMAS STARR (December 17, 1824- March 4, 1864), Unitarian clergyman, lecturer, and writer, was of German, French, and English descent. His mother's father, Thomas Starr, was a native of the Rhineland, but was brought by his father to America in the latter part of the eighteenth century, where he married a woman of French extraction, Mary Lavinus. Starr King, as he was commonly called, was the oldest child of their daughter Susan and Reverend Thomas Farrington King, a Universalist minister, of English ancestry. The boy was born in New York while his mother was on a visit to her parents. His father, then in charge of a circuit in Connecticut, was living in Norwalk, but soon settled in Hudson, New York. In 1828 he, removed to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and seven years later became pastor of the Universalist society in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In Portsmouth and Charlestown Thomas had all the formal schooling which he ever received. Before he was fifteen years old and while he was preparing for college, the physical breakdown and subsequent death of his father compelled him to help support the family, which now included five younger children. He first worked as clerk and bookkeeper in a drygoods store, but in December 1840, although barely sixteen, he was appointed assistant teacher in the Bunker Hill Grammar School, Charlestown. Two years later he became principal of the West Grammar School, Medford. Because of the larger compensation offered and the prospect of more leisure time, in 1843 he accepted the position of bookkeeper in the Charlestown Navy Yard.

The responsibilities laid upon his youthful shoulders interrupted his schooling but not his education. He gathered knowledge from every side with the spontaneity and delight of a child at play. Having an agile and retentive mind, he absorbed the contents of books with great rapidity. He gathered his acquaintances together for reading, debate, and dramatics, and attended lectures in Boston and Cambridge. At seventeen he was deep in metaphysics, and astonished older men by his quick understanding of abstruse problems. Edwin H. Chapin, the younger Hosea Ballou, and Theodore Parker [qq.v.] became his advisers and friends. Meeting him in Medford, Parker wrote in his diary under date of April 13, 1843: "Saw Schoolmaster Thomas Starr King,-capital fellow, only nineteen. Taught school three years. Supports his mother .. .. Reads French, Spanish, Latin, Italian, a little Greek, and begins German. He is a good listener." (Quoted by Frothingham, post.) From his earliest years onward, he captivated all who met him. "Slight of build, golden haired, with a homely mouth which everyone thought beautiful on account of the beaming eyes, the winning smile, and the earnest desire of always wanting to do what was best and right," is the portrait drawn by one of his schoolmasters (Simonds, post, p. 4). A generous disposition, sunny temperament, and almost rollicking mirthfulness were also a part of his attractiveness. Soon he began to preach, for from boyhood he had considered no calling but the ministry, and people were held by his clear thought, electric delivery, and rich, resounding voice. "He has the grace of God in his heart and the gift of tongues," wrote Parker (Ibid., p. 6). Later the rough settlers of California were equally charmed. "I say, Jim, stand on your toes and get a sight of him!" exclaimed an old miner to a companion as on the edge of a crowd they listened to one of his speeches in support of the Union: "Why, the boy is taking every trick" (Wendte, post, p. 196).

His first pastorate began in 1846 at the Universalist church, Charlestown, which his father had formerly served. Two years later he was installed over the Hollis Street Church, Unitarian, Boston; and on December 17, 1848, he married Julia Wiggin of East Boston. During his eleven years' stay he became one of the leading preachers of the city and one of the most popular Lyceum lecturers in the country, rivaling Beecher in his ability to draw large audiences. An enthusiastic lover of natural scenery, he did much to make the beauties of New Hampshire widely known through the publication in 1860 of an elaborate descriptive work, The White Hills, Their Legends, Landscapes, and Poetry. This same year he accepted a call to the struggling Unitarian parish in San Francisco. "We are unfaithful," he wrote to a friend, "in huddling so closely around the cosey stove of civilization in this blessed Boston, and I, for one, am ready to go out into the cold and see if I am good for anything" (Ibid., p. 69). People flocked to hear him preach and lecture. He soon freed his parish of a $20,000 debt and built a new church costing $90,000, to which amount he contributed $5,000 · from the proceeds of his lectures. An enthusiastic explorer and mountain climber, he introduced the East to the beauties of the Pacific Coast through vivid letters to the Boston Transcript. When the Civil War came and with it the danger of California's secession from the Union and the formation of a Pacific republic, his arguments and patriotic appeals were a powerful factor in keeping the state loyal. He was the mainstay of the United States Sanitary Commission in California. According to a recent writer, "It was the eloquence of Starr King that saved the Commission's work from financial ruin. Of the total of $4,800,000 cash received from the country California alone supplied upwards of $1,234,000." (Rockwell D. Hunt and Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, A Short History of California, copyrighted 1929, p. 526.) Unfortunately, his career was cut short in his fortieth year by an attack of diphtheria followed by pneumonia. In four years he had become one of the best known and most beloved men on the Pacific Coast. At the news of his death, places of business, the United States Mint, government offices, and the courts were closed. The state legislature adjourned for three days. In the East, Whittier, and in the West, Bret Harte, commemorated him in poems. His portrait was hung in the State House at Sacramento, and in resolutions passed by the legislature he is described as "the man whose matchless oratory saved California to, the Union." A monument was erected to him in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco; a peak in the White Mountains and one in the Yosemite National Park are named for him; and in 1931 a statue, the gift of the state of California, was unveiled in the Capitol at Washington. A number of his sermons and ad dresses were published during his lifetime, and after his death there were issued Christianity and Humanity, A Series of Sermons (1877) and Substance and Show and Other Lectures (1877), both edited by Edwin P. Whipple, the former with a memoir.

[Richard Frothingham, A Tribute to Thomas Starr King (1865); C. D. Bradlee, The Life, Writings, and Character of Reverend Thomas Starr King (1870); H. W. Bellows, In Memory of Thomas Starr King (1864); Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators (1903); S. A. Eliot, Heralds of a Liberal Faith (1910), vol. III; C. W. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, Patriot and Preacher (1921); W. D. Simonds, Starr King in California (1917); Christian Register, March 12, April 9, 1864; Unitarian Review, December 1877; Boston Transcript, March s, 1864; Bulletin (San Francisco), March 4, 1864; San Francisco Chronicle, March 1, 1931.]

H. E. S.


KINGSLEY, Calvin (September 8, 1812-April 6, 1870), bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church,

KINGSLEY, CALVIN (September 8, 1812-April 6, 1870), bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, was born in Annsville, Oneida County, New York, the oldest of twelve children. His father, Oran Kingsley, Jr., was a native of Connecticut, and his mother, of the north of Ireland. When Calvin was about twelve years old the family moved to Ellington, Chautauqua County. His parents were not actively affiliated with any church, but here the boy came under Methodist influence, was converted, and made up his mind to get an education. He worked on the farm summers, attended school winters, and at the end of three years was employed by the trustees to teach the school. Later he taught at Randolph, Cattaraugus Comity. It was not until he was twenty-four that he found opportunity to go to college. With no means of support other than his hands and brains, he entered Allegheny College in 1836, eking out a bare living, first by acting as janitor, and then by cutting wood, which he found more remunerative. Twice his course was interrupted by periods of teaching. He had a keen, logical mind, and showed especial aptitude for mathematics and such science as was then taught. During his senior year he was made instructor in mathematics and after his graduation in 1841 he continued to teach at Allegheny, becoming in 1843 professor of mathematics and civil engineering. The year he graduated he was admitted to the Erie Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church on trial and married Delia Scudder. Except for the period 1843 to 1846, when the withdrawal of state aid necessitated the dosing of the college, he was connected with the institution until 1856. Ordained deacon in 1843 and elder in 1845, he held preaching appointments at Saegerstown, Pennsylvania (1841), Meadville (1842), and Erie (1844-46). In these earlier years he became known as an able controversialist and defender of the doctrines and polity of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1843, first at Salem, New York, and later at Jamestown, he met in debate Luther Lee [q.v.], one of the organizers of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, the question being whether the Methodist Episcopal Church justified slavery, and in government was arbitrary and unscriptural. In Erie he took a tilt at the Universalists; in Meadville, at the Unitarians; and in 1847, having read Anastasis by George Bush [q.v.], he published The Resurrection of the Dead: A Vindication of the Literal Resurrection of the Human Body: in Opposition to the Work of Prof. Bush, which went through several editions.

He was a delegate from the Erie Conference to the General Conference of 1852, and had by this time become well enough known and highly enough esteemed to receive a respectable number of votes for bishop. At the succeeding General Conference (1856), he was elected editor of the Western Christian Advocate, Cincinnati. The question of slavery was causing strife and division in the Church, and Kingsley made the Advocate aggressively anti-slavery. He was chairman of the committee on slavery at the General Conference of 1860, and presented and ably supported the substituted chapter in the Discipline, which admonished the membership of the Church to seek the "extirpation" of slavery "by all lawful and Christian means." Throughout the Civil War the Advocate gave strong support to the Union cause. At the General Conference of 1864 he was elected bishop. Although he was a comparatively young man, his service was brief. He made his home in Cleveland, but his duties carried him far. In 1865 and 1866 he presided at Conferences on the Pacific Coast, and the following year attended the mission Conference in Switzerland and Germany. In 1869 he was again on the Pacific Coast, and from there went to India and China and then again to Switzerland and Germany. While on a trip to the Holy Land he died suddenly of heart disease at Beirut, where he was buried. A monument erected by American Methodists marks his grave. His account of some of his travels, Round the World: A Series of Letters, in two volumes, with a biographical sketch, was published in 1870.

[Samuel Gregg, The History of Methodism Within the Bounds of the Erie An1i. Conference of the M. E. Church, vol. II (1873); J. N. Fradenburg, History of Erie Conference (1907), vol. II; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the M. E. Church for the Year 1870; Western Christian Advocate, April 13, 20, 1870; E. A. Smith, Allegheny-A Century of Education, 1815-1915 (1916); John McClintock and James Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theol. and Eccl. Literature, vol. V (1873); J. P. Downs and F. Y. Hedley, History of Chautauqua County, New York, and Its People (3 vols., 1921); Autobiography of the Reverend Luther Lee (1882); Ladies' Repository, May 1865.]

H. E. S.


KIRK, Edward Norris (August 14, 1802- March 27, 1874), clergyman, pastor of Presbyterian and Congregational churches and promoter of revivals,

KIRK, EDWARD NORRIS (August 14, 1802- March 27, 1874), clergyman, pastor of Presbyterian and Congregational churches and promoter of revivals, was born in New York. His father, George, a Scotchman, came to that city when eighteen years old, and married for his second wife Mary Norris, of Welsh and Irish ancestry, daughter of Thomas and Mary (Wade) Norris of Princeton, New Jersey. Edward was the third of her four children, and her only son. The head of the family was a store-keeper, without much ambition, but displaying all the stubbornness and piety commonly attributed to his race. After he was ten years old, Edward made his home with an uncle and aunt at Princeton, Robert and Sarah (Norris) Voorhees, the former a merchant of some means. At fifteen he was enrolled in the sophomore class of the College of New Jersey, and after his graduation in 1820 entered a New York law office. He had not been particularly studious at college, and lived a care-free life until his conversion in 1822. Thereafter the spiritual welfare of his fellow men absorbed him utterly. He immediately entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he spent four years, and in June 1826 was licensed to preach.

After two years' service in the Middle and Southern states as agent of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, he accepted an invitation to supply the Second Presbyterian Church, Albany, New York, during the ill health of its pastor, Dr. John Chester. Intensely evangelistic, plain-spoken, sometimes denunciatory, always uncompromising, his preaching was not acceptable to a fashionable congregation which included Martin Van Buren, Benjamin F. Butler, and William L. Marcy, and he was soon summarily dismissed. Some of his sympathizers then organized the Fourth Presbyterian Church of which he was installed pastor on April 21, 1829, having been ordained in the Second Presbyterian Church, New York, October 24, 1828. In the eight years that followed the new church grew rapidly and its pastor became widely known as a promoter of revivals and a lecturer in behalf of missions, temperance, and the anti-slavery movement. He also prepared young men for the ministry, uniting his class with that of Dr. Nathaniel S. S. Beman [q.v.] of Troy in 1833 and establishing the Troy and Albany Theological School, first located at Port Schuyler, later at Troy, and discontinued in 1837, when Kirk resigned his pastorate. From April of this year until September 1839 he was in Europe, studying conditions there and frequently preaching and lecturing. Upon his return he became secretary of the Foreign Evangelical Society (American and Foreign Christian Union) and helped to conduct revivals in the principal cities of the East, attracting crowds wherever he spoke. Calls to pastorates came to him from many places, and in 1842 he consented to settle in Boston where a Congregational church was organized for him.

For more than a quarter of a century he was one of the outstanding preachers of the city, and under his leadership the Mount Vernon Church became an aggressive agency of evangelism and reform. In 1846 he was prominent in the gathering at London which gave birth to the Evangelical Alliance. He was sent to Paris by the American and Foreign Christian Union in 1857 to establish an American chapel there, a mission which he successfully performed. Throughout the Civil War he was a fiery supporter of the Union, and when in 1865 the American Missionary Association was free to extend its work among the colored people of the South he was elected president. Besides scores of sermons and addresses which appeared in periodicals or in pamphlet form, he published: Sermons Delivered in England and America (1840); Theopneusty, or the Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scripture (1842) and The Canon of the Holy Scriptures (1862), both translations from the French of Louis Gaussen, the latter an abridgment; Louis Fourteenth and the Writers of His Age (1855), a translation from the French of Jean Frederic Astie; Lectures on the Parables of Our Saviour (1856); Discourses Doctrinal and Practical (1857). He also edited and compiled Songs for Social and Public Worship (1868). His Lectures on Revivals, edited by D. 0. Mears, appeared in 1875. He never married, and died at his home in Boston.

[D. O. Mears, Life of Edward Norris Kirk, D.D. (1877); Justin Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston (1881), vol. III; F. G. Beardsley, A History of American Revivals (1904); John Ross Dix, Pulpit Portraits of Distinguished American Divines (1854); Princeton Theolog. Seminary. General Catalog (1894); Boston Transcript and Boston Daily Advertiser, March 28, 1874.)

H. E. S.


KIRKWOOD, Samuel Jordan, 1813-1894, statesman, political leader.  Governor of Iowa, 1860-1864, 1876-1877.  U.S. Senator, 1865-1867, 1877-1881.  Secretary of the Interior, 1881-1882.  Anti-slavery Senator.  Early leader in the Republican Party.  Strong supporter of Abraham Lincoln and the Union.  (Clark, 1917; Lathrop, 1893)

KIRKWOOD, SAMUEL JORDAN (December 20, 1813-September 1, 1894), secretary of the interior, senator, and "war governor" of Iowa, was born in Harford County, Maryland, the son of well-to-do Scotch-Irish parents, Jabez Kirkwood and his second wife, Mary (Alexander) Wallace. His grandfather, Robert Kirkwood, coming from Londonderry, Ireland, had settled at Newcastle, Del., in 1731. Jabez Kirkwood, a farmer and blacksmith, was so desirous that his sons should have a thorough education that he sent Samuel to school when he was so small his older brothers had to carry him. In 1823 he went to Washington and for four years studied Latin and Greek in the private school of a family connection, John McLoed. After teaching a year and working for a time as a drug clerk, he returned to his family, who had met with financial reverse s and were starting we st in an effort to regain their fortunes. The family settled in Richland County, Ohio, and young Kirkwood spent his first few years there in clearing land for the new farm and occasionally teaching school or acting as deputy county assessor. In 1841 he moved to the county seat and after two years' study was admitted to the bar. In 1843 he married Jane Clark, whose people soon moved to Iowa City, Iowa. Twelve years later, after much urging from his wife's relatives, Kirkwood also moved to Iowa and purchased an interest in the Clark grist and flour mill.

In Ohio he had served as prosecuting attorney of Richland County, 1845-49, and had been a member of the state constitutional convention of 1850-51. Becoming established in his new home just as the Iowa Republican party was being organized, he was immediately accepted as a leader. After a term in the state Senate, he was nominated for governor in 1859. In one of the hottest campaigns ever conducted in Iowa, the unpolished miller-farmer triumphed over his Democratic rival, Augustus Cesar Dodge [q.v.], just returned from the Court of Spain. Two years later he was reelected. Kirkwood's office brought to him the responsibility of directing a state lacking in financial strength and divided by the political issue of the day. Before the end of his first term the nation was plunged in civil war. Rising to the situation, Kirkwood called a special session of the legislature, pledged his personal fortune, and borrowed from his friends to equip volunteers in the Union cause with the necessary arms and supplies. During his second term the pro-slavery element, or "Copperheads," gained great strength and at several times threatened insurrection, but the Governor's prompt dispatch of home-guard troops so successfully quelled internal dissension that the seriousness of the situation in Iowa at that time has often been overlooked. Kirkwood's vigor and promptness in action won him a place of prominence among the Northern war governors. In March 1863 he was appointed minister to Denmark, but fearing that it was a move to keep him from the United States Senate, he declined the appointment. With his term as governor completed, he returned to private life and the practice of law; but he was soon called to fill the unexpired term (1866-67) of James Harlan [q.v.], who left the Senate to become secretary of the interior.

Against his wishes, Kirkwood was again nominated in 1875 for governor, and in an uneventful campaign was returned to office for a third term by an overwhelming majority. In the following year, however, he was elected to the Senate, and consequently relinquished the governor's office in 1877. In 1881 he was appointed secretary of the interior. He held the office commendably but not brilliantly until some months after the death of Garfield, resigning April 17, 1882. His last political adventure was unsuccessful; in 1886 he was Republican candidate for the United States House of Representatives and was defeated by Walter I. Hayes, who won his victory through a split in the Republican party that even the old War Governor could not mend. This was the last political activity of the now aging man, who spent the remaining years of his life at his home in Iowa City, where he died.

[Dan E. Clark, Samuel Jordan Kirkwood (1917); H. W. Lathrop, The Life and Times of Samuel J. Kirkwood (1893); B. F. Shambaugh, The Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of Iowa, vols. II, IV (1903); Civil War letters of Kirkwood in Iowa History Record, July, October 1886, January 1887, October 1890, January 1891; Biographical sketch, Ibid., October 1894; Annals of Iowa, October 1873, October 1894, January 1898, October 1900; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928).]

F. E. H-k.


KNEELAND, Abner (April 7, 1774-August 27, 1844), Universalist clergyman, antitheist,

KNEELAND, ABNER (April 7, 1774-August 27, 1844), Universalist clergyman, antitheist, was descended through his father from Edward Kneeland who settled at Ipswich, Massachusetts, about 1630; and through his mother, Moriah Stone, from Captain John Stone, an early member of the Plymouth colony. His father, Timothy Kneeland, was a soldier in the Revolution. Abner was born in what became Gardner, Massachusetts. After attending the common schools he spent one term in Chesterfield (New Hampshire) Academy. He joined the Baptist Church at Putney, Vermont, doing some preaching. On April 9, 1797, he married Waitstill Ormsbee, and subsequently moved to Alstead, New Hampshire. In 1803 he became a Universalist and the following year was licensed to preach. In 1805 the Congregationalists united with the Universalists in making him the town minister at Langdon, New Hampshire. During this pastorate, his first wife having died in 1806, he married Lucinda Mason. He represented the town in the legislature (1810-11), and published A Brief Sketch of a New System of Orthography (1807), setting forth a phonetic system. He also brought out spelling books which had some vogue. In 1812 he became minister of a Universalist Society at Charlestown, Massachusetts, and in August 1813, again a widower, he married Mrs. Eliza Osborn of Salem. The following year he went into business in that town.

He had commenced to doubt the divine origin of the Scriptures, and about this time undertook a somewhat extensive correspondence on the subject with his friend Hosea Ballou [q.v.]. This correspondence was published in 1816 as A Series of Letters in Defence of Divine Revelation. In 1817, his doubts being somewhat allayed, he resumed preaching at Whitestown, New York, and in the fall of the following year was settled over the Lombard Street Universalist Church in Philadelphia. There he edited successively the Christian Messenger, 1819-21, the Philadelphia Universal Magazine and Christian Messenger, 1821-23, and the Gazetteer (1824), in all his papers championing liberal views. He also published, among other works, a translation of the New Testament (1822). In 1825 his preaching and editorial activity were transferred to New Street Universalist Society, resigning after a controversy with the trustees and becoming pastor of the newly organized Second Universalist Society. He began editing the Olive Branch in May 1827 (in 1828 the Olive Branch and Christian Inquirer), a paper devoted to "free inquiry, pure morality and rational Christianity." During this period he became intimate with Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright [qq.v.], and was a frequent contributor to the Free Enquirer. His radicalism gradually estranged him from the Universalists, and at the meeting of the Southern Association in Hartford, May 1829, upon the advice of Hosea Ballou, he asked and was granted permission to suspend himself from fellowship.

Kneeland then went to Boston where he became the leader of a group known as the First Society of Free Enquirers, lectured frequently on Rationalism, and in 1831 began to expound his pantheistic views in the Boston Investigator, probably the first Rationalist journal in the United States. In the issue of December 20, 1833, he used language and illustrative material which led to his indictment for publishing "a certain scandalous, impious, obscene, blasphemous and profane libel of and concerning God." Tried in January 1834, he was convicted, but appealed. In two further trials the juries disagreed, but conviction was again secured at the fourth trial, November term, 1835. The appeal was postponed from term to term until 1838, when James T. Austin [q.v.], attorney-general of Massachusetts, obtained a confirmation of the judgment, and sentence of sixty days was pronounced (20 Pickering, 206-46). When the Governor's Council met a few days later, a petition for pardon bearing about 170 names and a remonstrance signed by some 230 citizens were referred to the committee on pardons. The petition for pardon was signed by such men as William Ellery Channing, George Ripley, George W. Briggs, A. Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Three eminent pastors of Boston Baptist churches, though men of conservative theological views, also signed. The committee took no action, however, and sentence was enforced. Theodore Parker wrote: "Abner was jugged for sixty days; but he will come out as beer from a bottle, all foaming, and will make others foam" (Sanborn and Harris, post, I, 281).

About 1838 the First Society of Free Enquirers had planned to found a colony in the West, and in the spring of 1839, some months after his release from jail, Kneeland emigrated to the chosen site, which he had named Salubria, on the Des Moines River some two miles from Farmington, Iowa. Here, although the colony project did not materialize, he made his home for the remaining five years of his life. In 1840 he was a Democratic candidate for the territorial council, and in 1842 was chairman of the Democratic convention of Van Buren County, but in both in stances the "infidel ticket" which he supported was defeated by a combination of Whigs and "church Democrats."

Though he was anathema to the straitly orthodox churchmen, Kneeland was held in high esteem by free-thinkers. Since re to the point of fanaticism-he "saw in every effort made by these who differed with him a determination to bind his conscience" (Frederick Hancock, quoted by Whitcomb, post, p. 355)-he was a man of indisputable courage and purity of character. Personally he was refined and sensitive, with a calm, courteous manner. For some months after he moved to the West he taught school at Helena, Arkansas, and was remembered by a former pupil for his noteworthy kindness and gentleness. He died at Salubria in his seventy-first year. By his four marriages-the last in 1834 to Mrs. Dolly L. Rice-he was the father of twelve children.

[S. F. Kneeland, Seven Centuries of the Knee land Family (1897); L. C. Browne, Review of the Life and Writings of M. Hale Smith (1847); Voltaire Paine Twombly, sketch of Kneeland in the State Line Democrat (Keosauqua, Ia.), Aug. 27, 1903; Mary R. "Whitcomb, "Abner Kneeland: His Relations to Early Iowa History," Annals af Iowa, April 1904; Thos. Whittemore, Life of Reverend Hosea Ballou (4 vols. 1854-55); F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris, A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy (1893); A. C. Thomas, A Century of Universalism in Philadelphia and New York (1872); Memoirs of the Life of Nathaniel Stacy (1850); W. D. Herrick, History of the Town of Gardner, Worcester County, Massachusetts (1878); History of Van B1wen County, Ia. (1878); J.M. Wheeler, A Biographical Directory of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations (London, 1889); S. P. Putnam. 400 Years of Freethought (1894); Jos. McCabe, A Biographical Directory of Modern Rationalists (London, 1920); obituary in Boston Investigator, September 25, 1844; records of trials in the office of the clerk of the superior court of Massachusetts papers relating to the petitions for pardon and the remonstrance against it in the Massachusetts Archives.]

W.H.A.


KNAPP, Isaac, Boston, Massachusetts, printer, newspaper editor and publisher, abolitionist.  Helped William Lloyd Garrison found abolitionist newspaper, Liberator, in 1831.  Manager, 1833-1837, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.  He was indicted in Raleigh, North Carolina, for circulating the paper there.  Co-founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society.  Served as editor and publisher of the Liberator until 1842.  Published and distributed numerous anti-slavery pamphlets.  (Rodriguez, 2007, p. 463; Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892)


KNOWLTON, Ebenezer, 1815-174, Pittsville, New Hampshire, abolitionist, clergyman.  Member of the Maine House of Representatives and the U.S. House of Representatives, 1855-1857.  Early member of the Republican Party.  Lifelong opponent of slavery and temperance activist.  Founder of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.  Coordinator of Free Will Baptist newspaper, Morning Star.


KORNER, Gustav Philipp (November 20, 1809-April 9, 1896), jurist, statesman, historian, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 2.

KORNER, GUSTAV PHILIPP (November 20, 1809-April 9, 1896), jurist, statesman, historian, son of Bernhard and Marie Magdelena (Kampfe) Korner, was born in the free city of Frankfurt-am-Main where his father, an ardent German patriot, was a bookseller and dealer in works of art. Gustav received his early instruction in the model school (Musterschule) of Frankfurt and continued his preparation in the Gymnasium. In 1828 he entered the University of Jena to study jurisprudence. Here he joined forthwith the flourishing Burschenschaft, the patriotic student society which aimed at the unity and freedom of Germany, and which had its members in most German universities. Continuing his studies at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate, he returned to Frankfurt where for a time he practised law. He took part in the revolutionary movements which had broken out in many parts of Germany. In the Frankfurt revolt of 1833 he was wounded, fled to France, and at Havre  joined a number of friends who were about to sail for America. They arrived in New York on June 17, 1833, and proceeded at once to St. Louis, then the goal of many German immigrants who were attracted thither by Gottfried Duden's glowing description of Missouri. Korner and his party were, however, keenly disappointed when they discovered that the institution of slavery prevailed in this state. They therefore decided to settle in St. Clair County, Illinois, where a number of their relatives and friends, mostly men and women of education and culture, had already purchased land. This colony, frequently known as the "Latin settlement," gradually became a cultural center which exerted a decided influence upon the intellectual and political life of the state, and eventually, under the leadership of Korner, upon national politics. On June 17, 1836, Korner was married to Sophie Engelmann, with whose family he had come to the United States.

To become acquainted with American law and to improve his English, Korner took a law course at Transylvania University at Lexington, Kentucky. Returning to Belleville, Illinois, his future permanent residence, he practised his profession but soon found himself drawn into local and national politics, taking an active part in the campaigns of 1840 and 1844. In 1845 he was appointed justice of the Illinois supreme court, a post which he held until 1850. After the new constitution of Illinois, adopted in 1848, had made all state offices elective and reduced the salary of supreme court judges to the ridiculously small sum of $1,200, Korner refused the nomination for the position. In 1852 he was, however, nominated and elected lieutenant governor, which office he occupied until 1856.

In the meantime, the growing antislavery movement was engaging Korner's attention. Though originally a Democrat, like most of the older generation of Germans of this period, he did not hesitate to join the new Republican party, and by his example as well as by his eloquent speeches in the campaign of 1856 he did much to win over his countrymen to the Republican cause. A close friend of Abraham Lincoln, he took over some of the latter's law cases at Springfield and was consulted occasionally on important matters. Finally, in recognition of the many services which Korner had rendered the Union cause· at the beginning of the Civil War, Lincoln, in 1862, appointed him minister to Spain, to succeed Carl Schurz. His chief task in this position was to counteract English and French attempts to bring about a joint recognition of the Confederacy, and to cultivate the traditional friendly relations with Spain. Difficult as his tasks were, Korner, with delicate diplomatic tact and fine understanding of the Spanish national character and culture, succeeded remarkably well. His book on Spain (Aus Spanien, 1867) shows how thoroughly he had studied and appreciated Spanish art, the natural beauties of the country, and the ethnic characteristics of its diverse population. After his return from Spain (1864) he took little or no interest in active politics for a number of years. When the corruption of the Grant administration was growing more and more intolerable, however, he joined the Liberal Republican movement in 1872 and supported, though reluctantly, Horace Greeley. Again in 1876 he asserted his political independence as well as his steadfast devotion to the principles of the liberal movement by advocating the candidacy of Samuel Tilden against Hayes. Disappointed by the course of events following the election of 1876, he retired from his former active participation in politics and devoted the remaining years of his life almost exclusively to literary work. It was then that he wrote his valuable historical study entitled Das Deutsche Element in den Vereinigten Staaten van Nordamerika (1880). A keen observer of men, a profound and sympathetic student of American institutions, politics, and life in general, and a man of calm judgment, he was exceptionally qualified to write the history of one of the great constituent parts of the composite American population during a period the greater part of which he had followed as an eye witness. His object was "to show how strongly and to what extent the arrival of the Germans in large numbers since 1818 had influenced this country politically and socially." He was one of the first thus to recognize the importance of the ethnic problem in American historiography.

While it may be regretted that Korner did not include the German immigration of 1848 and the subsequent years in his history, the omission is partly compensated for by his autobiography which he finished shortly before his death. Although these reminiscences were written at the suggestion of his children and, therefore, record many matters pertaining to his immediate family, they unfold at the same time a fascinating picture of the cultural and political life of the nation and the important part which the German element played in it during the nineteenth century.

[The chief source of information is Kurner's autobiography published under the title, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1809-1896: Life Sketches Written at the Suggestion of His Children (1909), ed. by Thomas J. McCormack. H. A. Rattermann's German biography, Gustav Korner, Deutsch-Amerikanischer Jurist, Staatmann, Diplomat und Geschichtschreiber (1902), is based essentially upon Kurner's "Memoirs," the manuscript of which was placed at the author's disposal by the family. Other sources include: J. M. Palmer, Bench and Bar of Illinois (1899), vol. I; Newton Bateman and others, History Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of St. Clair County (1907), vol. I; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 10, 1896.

J. J. G.



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