Dig-Dow: Digges through Downing

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


DIGGES, William Dudley, charter member of the American Colonization Society, Washington, DC, December 1816. 

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 258n14)


DILLINGHAM, Richard, 1823-1850, Society of Friends (Quaker), abolitionist.  Arrested, tried and convicted for aiding three fugitive slaves in Tennessee in December 1848.  Imrpisoned in Tennessee State Penitentiary.  Died of cholera while there in June 1850. 

(Coffin, 2001)


DILLWYN, William, 1743-1824, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Society of Friends, Quaker.  Traveled to South Carolina to study slavery.  He moved to England in 1774 and was involved in the abolition movement there, being a member of the Meetings for Sufferings Committee on the Slave Trade.  Petitioned New Jersey Assembly in Trenton to emancipate all slaves in province.
 
(Bruns, Roger, ed. Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688-1788. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977, pp. 270-278, 314, 486, 488; Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, pp. 87, 91; Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, p. 96).


DIMOND, Isaac M., abolitionist, New York, New York, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1833-1834.


DISOSWAY, Gabriel Poillon, 1799-1868, New York, merchant, philanthropist.  Member and supporter of the American Colonization Society.  Co-founder of Randolph Macon College at Ashland, Virginia. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 182; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 58, 196)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 182:

DISOSWAY, Gabriel Poillon, antiquary, born in New York city, 6 December, 1799; died on Staten Island, 9 July, 1868. He was graduated at Columbia in 1819, went to Petersburg, Virginia, where he resided for several years, returned to New York, and became a merchant. He was one of the founders of Randolph-Macon college, established at Ashland, Virginia, in 1832. He contributed frequently to the newspaper and periodical press, and published “The Earliest Churches of New York and its Vicinity” (New York, 1865). Appletons’ Cylcopædia of American Biography, 1888.


DIX, John Adams  1798-1879, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Governor of New York, Rail Road president, Union Major-General of volunteers, Editor, Free-Soil Party candidate for Governor of New York in 1848 (Lost).

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 325-327 Raybeck, 1970 pp. 67, 68, 177, 206, 208, Foner 1971 pp. 153-155, 160, 164.)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

DIX, John Adams, born in Boscawen, New Hampshire, 24 July, 1798; died in New York City, 21 April, 1879. His early education was received at Salisbury, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the College of Montreal. In December, 1812, he was appointed cadet, and going to Baltimore aided his father, Major Timothy Dix of the 14th U. S. Infantry, and also studied at St. Mary's College. He was made ensign in 1813, and accompanied his regiment, taking part in the operations on the Canadian frontier. Subsequently he served in the 21st U.S. Infantry at Fort Constitution, New Hampshire, where he became 2d lieutenant in March, 1814, was adjutant to Colonel John De B. Walback, and in August was transferred to the 3d Artillery. In 1819 he was appointed aide-de-camp to General Jacob Brown, then in command of the Northern military department, and stationed at Brownsville, where he studied law, and later, under the guidance of William West, was admitted to the bar in Washington. He was in 1820 sent as special messenger to the court of Denmark. On his return he was stationed at Fort Monroe, but continued ill-health led him to resign his commission in the army, 29 July, 1828, after having attained the rank of captain. He then settled in Cooperstown, New York, and began the practice of law. In 1830 he moved to Albany, having been appointed adjutant-general of the state by Governor Enos B. Throop. In 1833  Dix was appointed secretary of state and superintendent of common schools, publishing during this period numerous reports concerning the schools, and also a very important report in relation to a geological survey of the state (1836). He was a prominent member of the "Albany Regency," who practically ruled the Democratic Party of that day. Going out of office in 1840, on the defeat of the Democratic candidates and the election of General Harrison to the presidency, He turned to literary Pursuits, and was editor-in-chief of "The Northern light," a journal of a high literary and scientific character, which was published from 1841 till 1843. In 1841 he was elected a member of the assembly. In the following year he went abroad, and spent nearly two years in Madeira, Spain, and Italy. From 1845 till 1849 he was a U. S. Senator, being elected as a Democrat, when he became involved in the Free-Soil movement, against his judgment and will, but under the pressure of influences that it was impossible for him to resist. He always regarded the Free-Soil movement as a great political blunder, and labored to heal the consequent breach in the Democratic Party, as a strenuous supporter of the successive Democratic administrations up to the beginning of the Civil War. In 1848 he was nominated by the Free-Soil Democratic Party as governor, but was overwhelmingly defeated by Hamilton Fish. President Pierce appointed him assistant treasurer of New York, and obtained his consent to be minister to France, but the nomination was never made. In the canvass of 1856 he supported Buchanan and Breckenridge, and in 1860 earnestly opposed the election of Mr. Lincoln, voting for Breckenridge and Lane. In May, 1861, he was appointed postmaster of New York, after the defalcations in that office. On 10 January, 1861, at the urgent request of the leading bankers and financiers of New York, he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Buchanan, and he held that office until the close of the administration. His appointment immediately relieved the government from a financial deadlock, gave it the funds that it needed but had failed to obtain, and produced a general confidence in its stability. When he took the office there were two revenue cutters at New Orleans, and he ordered them to New York. The captain of one of them, after consulting with the collector at New Orleans, refused to obey. Secretary Dix thereupon telegraphed: " Tell Lieutenant Caldwell to arrest Captain Breshwood, assume command of the cutter, and obey the order I gave through you. If Captain Breshwood, after arrest, undertakes to interfere with the command of the cutter, tell. Lieutenant Caldwell to consider him as a mutineer, and treat him accordingly. If anyone attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot." At the beginning of the Civil War he took an active part in the formation of  the Union Defence Committee, and was its first president; he also presided at the great meeting in Union square, 24 April, 1861. On the president's first call for troops, he organized and sent to the field seventeen regiments, and was appointed one of the four major-generals to command the New York state forces. In June following he was commissioned major-general of volunteers, and ordered to Washington by General Scott to take command of the Arlington and Alexandria Department. By a successful political intrigue, this disposition was changed, and he was sent in July to Baltimore to take command of the Department of Maryland, which was considered a post of small comparative importance; but, on the defeat of the Federal forces at Bull Run, things changed; Maryland became for the time the centre and key of the national position, and it was through General Dix's energetic and judicious measures that the state and the city were prevented from going over to the Confederate cause. In May, 1862, General Dix was sent from Baltimore to Fort Monroe, and in the summer of 1863, after the trouble connected with the draft riots, he was transferred to New York, as commander of the Department of the East, which place he held until the close of the war. In 1866 he was appointed naval officer of the port of New York, the prelude to another appointment during the same year, that of minister to France. In 1872 he was elected governor of the state of New York as a Republican by a majority of 53,000, and, while holding that office, rendered the County great service in thwarting the proceedings of the inflationists in Congress, and, with the aid of the legislature, strengthening the national administration in its attitude of opposition to them. On a renomination, in 1874, he was defeated, in consequence partly of the reaction against the president under the "third-term" panic, and partly of the studious apathy of prominent Republican politicians who desired his defeat. During his lifetime General Dix held other places of importance, being elected a vestryman of Trinity Church (1849), and in 1872 comptroller of that corporation, delegate to the convention of the diocese of New York, and deputy to the general convention of the Episcopal Church. In 1853 he became president of the Mississippi and Missouri Railway Company, and in 1863 became the first president of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, an office which he held until 1868, also filling a similar place for a few months in 1872 to the Erie Railway Company. He married Catharine Morgan, adopted daughter of John J. Morgan, of New York, formerly member of Congress, and had by her seven children, of whom three survived him. He was a man of very large reading and thorough culture, spoke several languages with fluency, and was distinguished for proficiency in classical studies, and for ability and elegance as an orator. Among his published works are "Sketch of the Resources of the City of New York " (New York, 1827); " Decisions of the Superintendents of Common Schools" (Albany, 1837); "A Winter in Madeira, and a Summer in Spain and Florence" (New York, 1850; 5th ed.. 1833): "Speeches and Occasional Addressee" (2 volumes, 1864); "Dies Irae," translation (printed privately, 1863; also revised ed., 1875); and "Stabat Mater," translation (printed privately, 1868).   Son, Charles Temple, artist, born in Albany, 25 February, 1838; died in Rome, Italy, 11 March, 1873, studied at Union, and early turned his attention to art. He had made good progress in his studies when, at the beginning of the Civil War, he was chosen aide-de-camp on the staff of his father, and won credit from his faithful performance of duty. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 183-184.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 325-327.

DIX, JOHN ADAMS (July 24, 1798--April 21, 1879), soldier in two wars, cabinet officer, and governor, the son of Colonel Timothy and Abigail (Wilkins) Dix, began life in New England with a highly unusual training. This was because his father, a merchant and local leader of Boscawen, New Hampshire, was a man of marked individuality and versatile talents. After giving the boy a good elementary education in the classics, English literature, and public speaking, including a year in Phillips Exeter Academy, and helping personally to instruct him in music and drawing, the father sent him to the College of Montreal, a Catholic institution. This was for tuition in French and contact with a different civilization. After fifteen months here the boy was recalled by the outbreak of the War of 1812, and was sent to a distant relative in Boston who saw that he was privately prepared in Spanish, La tin, mathematics, and elocution. But when he chafed to enter military service, his father, who had become a major of infantry in Baltimore, consented, helped the spirited fourteen-year-old had to obtain a commission, and was proud to see him participate in the battle of Lundy's Lane as an ensign. Young Dix, large for his years, made an ardent soldier, and at Chrysler's Field wept when ordered to go to the rear with a body of prisoners.

The death of his father in the campaign of 1813 ushered in what Dix called "the most trying period of my life" (Memoirs, I, 50). His father's large family, nine children in all, were left in straitened circumstances, and the youth had not only to support himself but to contribute aid to his stepmother. During years "full of anxiety and trial" he remained in the army, gradually rising to the rank of major, and serving for a time in Washington, New York, and elsewhere as traveling aide to Major-General Jacob Brown. He read much, was a close student, and improved his social opportunities in the capital, meeting Madison, Randolph, and others of note, and becoming intimate with Calhoun. The belief that he could find a better field than the army was strengthened by the advice of friends, who were struck by his forensic talents, industry, and handsome bearing. He studied law, partly under the direction of Attorney-General William Wirt, and was admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia (1824); while he also did much newspaper writing upon political subjects in the last years of Monroe's administration.

His determination to resign from the army was fixed by his marriage in 1826 to Catharine Morgan, adopted daughter of John J. Morgan, a Representative from New York who owned large areas of land up-state and who offered Dix the position of managing agent at Cooperstown. Settling in this town in 1828, Dix practised law for three years, became county leader of the Jacksonian Democracy, and made himself so prominent that at the end of 1830 Governor Throop appointed him adjutant-general of the state. The salary was only $800, but Dix seized the place because it carried a seat in the powerful "Albany Regency." From this point his rise in political life was rapid, being checked only by occasional defeats of his party at the hands of the Whigs. He made an especial mark as secretary of state (1833-39) of New York; this position carried with it the superintendency of the public schools, and he did much to improve the training of teachers, while he also took the first steps toward organizing a geological survey of the state. Labors of this nature displayed his scholarly bent to advantage. Following the Harrison victory of 1840, he not only practised law, but established in Albany a literary and scientific journal, the Northern Light, which endured for a little more than two years (1841-43). It might have lasted longer but for a breakdown in his wife's health, which took him to Madeira and the Mediterranean, and resulted in a small volume of travel sketches.

Embarkation in national politics came immediately after Dix's return home, when he was elected (1845) to the United States Senate for the five unexpired years of Silas Wright's term. Here he manifested an especial interest in international affairs-he spoke for fixing the Oregon boundary at the 49th parallel, and against the withdrawal of the United States diplomatic agent from the Papal States-while he showed the free-soil sentiments that were ultimately to carry him out of the Democratic party. He was consistently aligned during the Mexican War with the anti-slavery or Barnburner Democrats; he supported the Wilmot Proviso; and in 1848 he was in favor of the separate nomination of Van Buren by the free-soil Democrats, though he opposed any alliance with the free-soil Whigs, and acquiesced very reluctantly in the final free-soil nomination of himself for governor (Alexander, post, II, 133). Indeed, his son said that to be associated with Whigs in this campaign was a painful and distressing surprise to him. His last speech in the Senate, in 1849, opposed the admission of New Mexico and California unless the enabling act prohibited slavery in these states.

In the next decade Dix should have been accepted as one of the leaders of Democracy. He was a cultivated writer, a fluent, vigorous speaker, a man of great courage, prompt decision, and proved executive ability. The opposition of the slavery wing of the party was, however, a fatal impediment. Franklin Pierce in 1853 intended to make him secretary of state, but party enemies interfered, and when he was offered the post of minister to France, this also was snatched from him by Southern opposition (James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, From the Compromise of 1850, volume I, 1892, pp. 387, 395). The results were a withdrawal from public life, another trip abroad, a term as president of the Chicago & Rock Island, and the Mississippi & Missouri railroads (1854-57), and practise at the New York City bar. In 1860-61, however, public sentiment in New York City forced his promotion in striking fashion. A disastrous defalcation in the post-office caused his appointment as postmaster by Buchanan to straighten out affairs; and this had no sooner been accomplished than the moneyed interests of the East, in the crisis following the secession of South Carolina, demanded that he be made secretary of the treasury. He took office in January 1861, living at the White House till March.

Dix's chief service to the Union was in his brief period at the head of the treasury. Bankers and financiers had complete confidence in him, and though other states were seceding, he quickly obtained five millions at an average rate of slightly over ten per cent (John Jay Knox, United States Notes, 1884, p. 76). Moreover, one of his dispatches was as a clarion call to the North. On January 29, 1861, he telegraphed a treasury official in New Orleans to take possession of a revenue cutter there, concluding with the words: "If anyone attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot" (Memoirs, I, 371). In a dark hour this was a heartening vindication of the national honor. He placed the chaotic department in order and handed it over to Chase in excellent condition. Lincoln rewarded him by commissioning him a major-general, and he was ordered to Washington in June to take charge of the Alexandria and Arlington Department. It was believed, however, that at sixty-three he was too old for active service, and political intrigue resulted in changing this assignment to the Department of Maryland. In Baltimore, at Fortress Monroe, and later in New York as commander of the Department of the East, he did useful but never spectacular service. His authority in New York lasted just two years (July 1863-July 1865); arriving just after the end of the draft riots, he took energetic steps to suppress sympathizers with the Confederacy.

Dix's career after the war was that of a distinguished and honored man well past his prime, chosen to public offices with the expectation that he would occupy them with passive dignity. As minister to France for three years, 1866-69, he was popular with the American colony but played no important role in diplomacy. Returning to America, he was the recipient in 1872 of an extraordinary compliment. Though still a Democrat, he was nominated for governor by the New York Republicans as the candidate who could best help defeat Horace Greeley in Greeley's own state, and he was elected by a majority of 53,000. Though then in his seventy-fifth year, he was still vigorous, and discharged the routine duties of his office capably. His was not the hand, however, to carry through the great task of cleansing the state's Augean stables, and in 1874 he was defeated for reelection by Samuel J. Tilden. His last years were spent in peaceful retirement in New York City, with occasional appearances in behalf of civil service reform and other causes dear to him. He left behind him a reputation for loftiness of purpose, serene purity of life, and an amount of learning remarkable in politics. For a number of years he was a vestryman of Trinity Church, New York, of which, in 1862, his son Morgan Dix [q.v.] became the rector.

His published works include: A Winter in Madeira; and a Sumner in Spain and Florence (1850), a popular book which went through five editions; Speeches and Occasional Addresses (2 volumes, 1864); translations of Dies Irae (1863), and Stabat Mater (1868), in which he took especial pride.

[The all-sufficient source upon Dix's life is the Memoirs of John Adams Dix (2 volumes, 1883) compiled by Morgan Dix. This is supplemented by some of his own works, notably the first two mentioned above. Brief characterizations may be found in the Atlantic Monthly, August 1883, in D. S. Alexander, Political History of the State of New York, II (1906), 2 ff., and in C. C. Coffin, The History of Boscawen and Webster(1878), pp. 348-56, with a genealogy of the Dix family on pp. 518-20. See also obituaries in New York Times, April 21, 22, 23, 1879, and New York Herald, April 22, 23, 1879.]

A.N.


DIXON, James, 1814-1873, lawyer.  Republican U.S. Congressman and U.S. Senator representing Connecticut.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 186; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 328-329; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 6, p. 646; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 328-329:

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

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

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

J.M.M.

Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume II, p. 186:

DIXON, James, senator, born in Enfield, Connecticut, 5 August, 1814; died in Hartford, 27 March, 1873. He was graduated at Williams with distinction in 1834, studied law in his father's office, and began practice in Enfield, but soon rose to such eminence at the bar that he removed to Hartford, and there formed a partnership with Judge William W. Ellsworth. Early combining with his legal practice an active interest in public affairs, he was elected to the popular branch of the Connecticut legislature in 1837 and 1838, and again in 1844. In 1840 he married Elizabeth L., daughter of the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Cogswell, professor in the Connecticut theological institute. Mr. Dixon at an early date had become the recognized leader of the Whig party in the Hartford congressional district, and was chosen in 1845 a member of the U. S. house of representatives. He was re-elected in 1847, and was distinguished in that difficult arena alike for his power as a debater and for an amenity of bearing that extorted the respect of political opponents even in the turbulent times following the Mexican war, and the exasperations of the sectional debate precipitated by the “Wilmot Proviso.” Retiring from congress in 1849, he was in that year elected from Hartford to a seat in the Connecticut senate, and, having been re-elected in 1854, was chosen president of that body, but declined the honor, because the floor seemed to offer a better field for usefulness. During the same year he was made president of the Whig state convention, and, having now reached a position of commanding influence, he was in 1857 elected U. S. senator, and participated in all the parliamentary debates of the epoch that preceded the civil war. He was remarkable among his colleagues in the senate for the tenacity with which he adhered to his political principles, and for the clear presage with which he grasped the drift of events. Six years afterward, in the midst of the civil war, he was re-elected senator with a unanimity that had had no precedent in the annals of Connecticut. During his service in the senate he was an active member of the committee on manufactures, and during his last term was at one time appointed chairman of three important committees. While making his residence in Washington the seat of an elegant hospitality, he was remarkable for the assiduity with which he followed the public business of the senate, and for the eloquence that he brought to the discussion of grave public questions as they successively arose before, during, and after the civil war. Among his more notable speeches was one delivered 25 June, 1862, on the constitutional status created by the so-called acts of secession—a speech that is known to have commanded the express admiration of President Lincoln, as embodying what he held to be the true theory of the war in the light of the constitution and of public law. To the principles expounded in that speech Mr. Dixon steadfastly adhered during the administration alike of President Lincoln and of his successor. In the impeachment trial of President Johnson he was numbered among the Republican senators who voted against the sufficiency of the articles, and from that date he participated no longer in the councils of the Republican party. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 186.


DIXON, Nathan Fellows, born 1812,   Lawyer.  Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Rhode Island.  Member of 38th, 39th, 40th and 41st Congress.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 187; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe)

Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume II, p. 187:

DIXON, Nathan Fellows, lawyer, born in Westerly, Rhode Island, 1 May, 1812; died there, 11 April, 1881, was graduated at Brown in 1833, attended the law-schools at New Haven and Cambridge, and practised his profession in Connecticut and Rhode Island from 1840 till 1849. He was elected to congress from Rhode Island in 1849, and was one of the governor's council appointed by the general assembly during the Dorr troubles of 1842. In 1844 he was a presidential elector, and in 1851 was elected as a Whig to the general assembly of his state, where, with the exception of two years, he held office until 1859. In 1863 he went to congress as a Republican, and served as a member of the committee on commerce. He was a member of the 39th, 40th, and 41st congresses, and declined re-election in 1870. He, however, resumed his service in the general assembly, being elected successively from 1872 till 1877. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 187.


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, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 91, 348; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 187-188; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 332-333; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 6, p. 653)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 332-333:

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, Volume 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.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 187-188:

DOAK, Samuel, clergyman, born in Augusta county, Virginia, in August, 1749; died in Bethel, North Carolina, 12 December, 1830. He was graduated at Princeton in 1775, became tutor in Hampden Sidney college, studied theology there, and was licensed to preach by the presbytery of Hanover in 1777. He removed to the Holston settlement (then part of North Carolina, but now a part of east Tennessee), and two years later to a settlement on the Little Limestone, in Washington county, where he bought a farm, built a log school-house and a small church, and founded the “Salem Congregation.” The school he established at this place was the first that was organized in the valley of the Mississippi. In 1785 it was incorporated by the legislature of North Carolina as Martin academy, and in 1795 became Washington college. He presided over it from the time of its incorporation till 1818, when he removed to Bethel and opened a private school, which he named Tusculum academy. Mr. Doak was a member of the convention of 1784 that formed the constitution of the commonwealth of Frankland. The degree of D. D. was conferred upon him by Washington and Greenville colleges in 1818. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 187-188.


DOBBINS, George W., Maryland.  Manager, Maryland State Colonization Society. 

(Campbell, Penelope. Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831-1857. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1971, p. 154)


DODGE, William B., abolitionist, Salem, Massachusetts, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1834-1837.


DODGE, William Earle, Sr., 1805-1883, Hartford, Connecticut, merchant, abolitionist. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, pt. 1, p. 352)

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888:

DODGE, William Earl, merchant, born in Hartford, Connecticut, 4 September, 1805; died in New York city, 9 February, 1883, received a common-school education, and worked for a time in his father's cotton mill. At the age of thirteen he removed to New York city with his family, and entered a wholesale dry-goods store, remaining there eight years. Afterward he engaged in the same business on his own account, continuing till 1833, when he married the daughter of Anson G. Phelps, and became a member of the firm of Phelps, Dodge & Co. He continued at the head of this house till 1879. Mr. Dodge was one of the first directors of the Erie railroad, and was interested in other railways and in several insurance corporations. He also owned large districts of woodland, and had numerous lumber and mill interests, besides being concerned in the development of coal and iron mines. He was elected president of the New York chamber of commerce three times in succession. He was a trustee of the Union theological seminary, one of the founders of the Union league club of New York city, vice-president of the American Bible society, president of several temperance associations, and took great interest in the welfare of the freedmen. He was a member of the peace convention of 1861, and in 1866-'7, having successfully contested the election of his Democratic opponent, James Brooks, was a representative in congress, serving on the committee on foreign affairs. President Grant appointed him a member of the Indian commission. He left a large fortune, and made several bequests to religious and charitable institutions. A bronze statue of him has been placed at the junction of Broadway and Sixth Avenue, New York city. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888.


DOLE, Ebenezer Hallowell, Maine.  Vice president, 1833-1835, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.

(Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833)


DOLE, S. F., abolitionist, Middletown, Connecticut.  Manager, 1833-1835, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.

(Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833)


DOLLANGER, John Jr., Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Abolition Society, Executive Committee, 1843-, 1846-.


DONALD, Samuel, abolitionist, Indiana, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1839-40.


DONALDSON, Christian, Cincinnati, Ohio, Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-38.


DONALDSON, Thomas, abolitionist, Clermont County, Ohio, American Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1846-64.


DONALDSON, William, abolitionist, Cincinnati, Ohio, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1838-1840.


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’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 201; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 369-371; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 6, p. 730; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 369-371:

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 left the Republican party because it seemed 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 Mississippi Valley Historical Review, VIII (1921), 80-132, from which the foregoing summary has been made; this article was reviewed in Minnesota Historical Bulletin, 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., Volume XV (1915); W.W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota (4 volumes, 1921); obituaries in newspapers of January 2, 1901. The quarrel with Washburne is covered in Congressional Globe, 40 Congress, 2 Session; pp. 2,355 ff.]

T. D. H.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 201:

DONNELLY, Ignatius, author, born in Philadelphia, 3 November, 1831. He was educated in the public schools of his native city, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and practised. He went to Minnesota in 1857, was elected lieutenant-governor in 1859, and again in 1861, and was then elected to congress as a republican, serving from 7 December, 1863, till 3 March, 1869. Besides doing journalistic work he has written an “Essay on the Sonnets of Shakespeare”; “Atlantis, the Antediluvian World” (New York, 1882), in which he attempts to demonstrate that there once existed in the Atlantic ocean, opposite the straits of Gibraltar, a large island, known to the ancients as “Atlantis”; and “Ragnarok” (1883), in which he tries to prove that the deposits of clay, gravel, and decomposed rocks, characteristic of the drift age, were the result of contact between the earth and a comet. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 201.


DOOLITTLE, James Rood, 1815-1897, lawyer, jurist, statesman.  Democratic and Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, 1857-1869.  “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.” As a senator he voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 201-202; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 374-375; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 6, p. 746; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 374-375:

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 as 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, Wisconsin, 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 Library, Madison, Wisconsin See also D. Mowry, "Vice-President Johnson and Senator Doolittle," in Pubs. Southern Historical Assn., Volume IX, and "Doolittle Correspondence" in the same, volumes IX-XI (1905- 07); Biography Dir. of the American Congress (1928); obituary in Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1897.]

J. S-r.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 201-202:

DOOLITTLE, James Rood, senator, born in Hampton, Washington county, New York, 3 January, 1815. After attending Middlebury academy, he entered Geneva (now Hobart) college, where he was graduated in 1834. He then studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1837, and practised at Rochester and at Warsaw, New York. He was elected district attorney of Wyoming county, New York, in 1845, and also served for some time as a colonel of militia. He removed to Wisconsin in 1851, and was elected judge of the first judicial circuit of that state in l858, but resigned in 1856, and was elected U. S. senator as a Democratic Republican, to succeed Henry Dodge, serving two terms, from 1857 till 1869. He was a delegate to the peace convention of 1861. While in the senate, he served as chairman of the committee on Indian affairs and as member of other important committees. During the summer recess of 1865, he visited the Indians west of the Mississippi as a member of a special senate committee. He took a prominent part in debate on the various war and reconstruction measures, upholding the national government, but always insisting that the seceding states had never ceased to be a part of the Union. He opposed the fifteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States, on the ground that each state should determine questions of suffrage for itself. Mr. Doolittle retired from public life in 1869, and has since resided in Racine, Wisconsin, though practising law in Chicago. He was president of the Philadelphia national union convention of 1866, and also of the Baltimore national Democratic convention of 1872, which adopted the nomination of Horace Greeley for the presidency. Judge Doolittle has been a trustee of Chicago university since its foundation, served for one year as its president, and was for many years a professor in its law school. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 201-202.


DORRANCE, Gardner, Amherst, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Abolition Society, Vice-President, 1839-.


DOTEN, David, abolitionist, Sumner, Maine, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1840-1842.


DOUAI, Adolph Karl Daniel, 1819-1888, Germany, socialist, abolitionist, newspaper editor and publisher, educator.  Published newspaper, San Antonio Deutsche Zeitung [German News], which strongly editorialized against slavery.  Opposed slavery in the territory of Texas in articles, a very unpopular editorial position, which caused him to lose the publication. 

(Randers-Pehrson, 2000)


DOUGHERTY, Alexander M., abolitionist, Newark, New Jersey, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1838-40.


DOUGHERTY, Sara, free African American, co-founder Free African Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1878.

(Rodriguez, 2007, p. 156)


DOUGHERTY, Thomas

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961)


DOUGHTY, George, abolitionist, Jamaica, New York, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1843-1844.


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, Volume 4, p. 61; American National Biography, 2002, Volume 6, p. 796)


DOUGLAS, Richard H., Maryland, ship owner.  Manager, Maryland Society of the American Colonization Society. 

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 111)


DOUGLAS, William, 1804-1862, African American abolitionist, church community leader in Baltimore, Maryland, and later in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  He was active in the Anti-Slavery Society.


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, Volume 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, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 331-333; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960; Foner, 1964; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970; McFeely, 1991;  Quarles, 1948; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 264-265; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume 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, Volume 6, p. 816; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume 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, Volume 4, p. 67).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936;  Volume 3 pt. 1 pp. 406-407:

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, Volume II, p. 217:

DOUGLASS, Frederick, orator, born 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 Colonel 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, Volume II, pp. 217.

Chapter: “Position of the Colored People. - Frederick Douglass,” by Henry Wilson, in History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 1872.

While the free colored people instinctively distrusted the Colonization Society, and withheld their confidence from it, they at once and heartily accepted the abolition movement. This was especially true of the more intelligent and well-informed. Among the colored ministers there were several who, seeing its religious as well as humane bearings, rendered essential aid to the cause. A few others did something in the same direction, arousing public attention and quickening the zeal of the friends of freedom.

But in 1841 a champion arose in the person of Frederick Douglass, who was destined to play an important part in the great drama then in progress. In him not only did the colored race but manhood itself find a worthy representative and advocate; one who was a signal illustration, not only of self-culture and success under the most adverse circumstances, but of the fact that talent and genius are " color-blind," and above the accidents of complexion and birth. He, too, furnished an example of the terrible necessities of slavery, and its purpose and power to crush out the human soul; as also of the benign energies of freedom to arouse, to develop, and enlarge its highest and noblest faculties, --the one aiming, and almost succeeding in the attempt, to make him a mere mindless and purposeless chattel; the other actually and indissolubly linking his name and labors with the antislavery cause, both in this country and in Europe. As few of the world's great men have ever had so checkered and diversified a career, so it may be at least plausibly claimed that no man represents in himself more conflicting ideas and interests. His life is in itself an epic which finds few to equal it in the realms of either romance or reality.

Frederick Douglass was born on the Eastern Shore, Maryland, about the year 1817. According to the necessities of slavery and the usual practice of slave-masters, he was taken from his mother when an infant, consequently deprived of even the rude care which maternal instinct might have prompted, and placed under the guardianship of his grandmother, with whom he lived until he was seven years of age. At the age of ten he was sent to Baltimore, to be the companion and protector of the son of a young married couple, who, in consequence of general refinement of character and his proposed relation to their darling boy, treated him, at first, kindly. This change Mr. Douglass ever regarded as a providential interposition, as the turning-point where his pathway, leaving the descending grade of slave life, entered upon that which led him in that widely divergent and upward direction it has since pursued. Leaving the rude experience of the plantation, with the barren and desert-like surroundings of the Eastern Shore, for the bustle and necessary companionship of the city, an opportunity of learning to read was afforded him, which he most sedulously and successfully, though surreptitiously, improved. But the friendliness which his master and mistress had so generously extended to him as an ignorant slave, they felt obliged, by the necessities of the system, to withhold from him now that he could read, and had learned to question the rightfulness of slavery and to chafe under its chains.

Returned to the Eastern Shore, he encountered the rigors of plantation life, greatly increased by the drunken caprices of an intemperate master, and doubtless aggravated by his own impatient and contumacious rebellings under such slave-holding restraint. This, however, was but a prelude to an experience graver and still more tragic. Despairing of controlling young Douglass himself, his owner placed him - as men place their unbroken colts under the care of horse-trainers in the hands of a professed negro-breaker, known through the region as a cruel and merciless man, who had, not only gained that reputation, but found it necessary or for his interest to maintain it. Concerning this change Mr. Douglass remarks, after referring to the " comparative tenderness " with which he had been treated at Baltimore: " I was now about to sound profounder depths in slave life. The rigors of a field less tolerable than the field of battle were before me." That his apprehensions were not groundless these extracts, taken from his autobiography, abundantly show: “I had not been in his possession three whole days before he subjected me to a most brutal chastisement. Under his heavy blows blood flowed freely; the wales were left on my back as large as my little finger. The sores on my back from this whipping continued for weeks." "I remained with Mr. Corey one year, cannot say I lived with him, and during the first six months that I was there I was whipped either with sticks or cowskins every week. Aching bones and a sore back were my constant companions. Frequently as the lash was used, however, Mr. Corey thought less of it, as a means of breaking down my spirit, than of hard and long-continued labor. He worked me steadily up to the point of my powers of endurance. From the dawn of day in the morning till the darkness was complete in the evening, I was kept at hard work in the field or the woods."
He gave accounts of individual cases of brutal chastisement which were revolting almost beyond conception; while his concise description of himself" as a living embodiment of mental and physical wretchedness” seems but a natural result. "A few months of discipline," he says," tamed me. Mr. Corey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute." 

Having completed his year with Corey, he was hired out to another and more humane master. But the iron of slavery rankled in his soul, and he could not endure its galling restraints, however softened by kindness. After long rumination upon the subject, and conferences with four or five of his companions in bondage, he proposed and planned an attempt to escape. Betrayed, however, by a confederate, they were prevented from carrying their attempt into execution, and were arrested and imprisoned. Instead of being “sold South"-- that dreaded alternative of success, which held back thousands from making the attempt --he was sent again to Baltimore. Being nearly murdered by the carpenters of a ship-yard, because of their jealousy of slave competition with white labor,--a crime for which no indictment could be found, though sought, because no white witnesses would testify against his brutal assailants, --he was sent to another yard to learn the trade of a calker. Becoming an expert workman, he was permitted to make his own contracts, returning his week's wages every Saturday night to his master. At the same time --which was of more importance to him, he was permitted to associate with some free colored men, who had formed a kind of lyceum for their mutual improvement, and by means of which he was enabled to increase materially his knowledge and mental culture. All of this, however, did but increase his sense of the essential injustice of slavery, and make him more restive under its galling chains. Accordingly he made his plans, now successful, and on the third day of September, 1838, he says, “I bade farewell to the city of Baltimore, and to that slavery which had been my abhorrence from childhood." For prudential reasons the particulars of his mode of escape were withheld from the public knowledge, as they were of little comparative importance; while, had they been known then, they might have compromised some and hedged up the way of escape of others. Landing in New York, a homeless, penniless, and friendless fugitive, he thus describes his feelings: " In the midst of thousands of my fellow-men, and yet a perfect stranger! In the midst of human brothers, and yet more fearful of them than of hungry wolves! I was without home, without friends, without work, without money, and without any definite knowledge of which way to go or where to look for succor." In the midst of his perplexities he met a sailor, whose seeming frankness and honesty won, as they deserved, his confidence. He introduced him to David Ruggles, chairman of the Vigilance Committee, a colored gentleman of much intelligence, energy, and worth, who by his position and executive ability did much for his people. This gentleman advised him to go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, assisted him in reaching that city, and introduced him to trustworthy friends there. Here he was employed, mostly as a day laborer on the wharves, encountering the same shameful and unmanly jealousy of colored competition that had nearly cost him his life at Baltimore, and which would not allow him to work at his trade as calker by the side of white men. Being a professing Christian, he was interested in religious meetings, where he was accustomed to pray and exhort, a practice which probably had something to do with his wonderful subsequent success as a public speaker.

The first demonstration of his eloquence which attracted public attention was at a meeting mainly of colored people, in which were specially considered the claims of the Colonization Society. Here began to be emitted specimens of that fiery eloquence from his capacious soul, burning with the indignant and unfading memories of the wrongs, outrages, and the deep injustice which slavery had inflicted on him, and which it was now inflicting upon his brethren in bonds. Of course, the few white Abolitionists of New Bedford were not long in finding out the young fugitive, appreciating his gifts and promise of usefulness, and in devising ways of extending his range of effort for their unpopular cause. Attending an antislavery convention at Nantucket, he was persuaded to address the meeting. His speech here seems to have been singularly eloquent and effective. Among those present was Mr. Garrison, who bore his testimony, both then and afterward, to "the extraordinary emotion it exerted on his own mind, and to the powerful impression it exerted upon a crowded auditory." He declared, too, that “Patrick Henry had never made a more eloquent speech in the cause of liberty than the one they had just listened to from the lips of that hunted fugitive." Nathaniel P. Rogers, editor of the "Herald of Freedom," thus characterized a speech made by him the same year. After speaking of his “commanding figure and heroic port," his head, that “would strike a phrenologist amid a sea of them in Exeter Hall," he adds: "As a speaker he has few equals. It is not declamation, but oratory, power of debate. . . He has wit, argument, sarcasm, pathos, all that first-rate men show in their master efforts."
This language, especially that of Mr. Garrison, seems extravagant, and the laudation excessive; nor could it be accepted as a general and critical estimate of Mr. Douglass as an orator, great as his powers confessedly were and are. His Nantucket speech was unquestionably one of those rare bursts of eloquence, little less than inspiration itself, which are sometimes vouchsafed to a man in his happiest moods; when the speaker seems to rise above himself and to take his audience with him. Besides, there was certainly much in the circumstances and surroundings of that meeting to impress the minds and stir the sensibilities of such an assembly. On that isle of the sea, at some distance from the mainland, one could easily imagine a picture of the nation overshadowed by the dark cloud of slavery, and prostrate beneath a despotism pressing alike on the slaves at the South and on their advocates at the North. Indeed, the latter had just passed through a baptism of fire and blood, during those fearful years of mobs and martyrdom, which had measurably ceased, but had been succeeded by what the earnest Abolitionist deprecated more than violence, and that was the general apathy which then reigned.
In the conflict for freedom of speech and the right of free discussion Abolitionists had achieved a victory. What they had contended for had, at length, been conceded; at least, the principle was no longer contested. They had conquered a peace; but their opponents were determined it should be the peace of the grave. For the wordy warfare of discussion and the brutal violence of lynch laws they would substitute the policy of neglect. To let them severely alone, to belittle their cause, to pass them by with a supercilious sneer, and to frown contemptuously upon their attempts to gain a hearing, became at that time the tactics of the enemies against the advocates of human rights. Of course, what were termed antislavery measures had lost much of their zest and potency; meetings became less numerously attended, and, consequently, less frequent; organizations, losing their interest and effectiveness, began to die out. Something was necessary to revive and reanimate the drooping spirits and the languid movements of the cause and its friends. It was then, at this opportune moment, while they were thus enveloped in the chill and shade of this most uncomfortable and unsatisfactory state of affairs, the young fugitive appeared upon the stage. He seemed like a messenger from the dark land of slavery itself; as if in his person his race had found a fitting advocate; as if through his lips their long pent up wrongs and wishes had found a voice. No wonder that Nantucket meeting was greatly moved. It would not be strange if the words of description and comment of those present and in full sympathy with the youthful orator should be somewhat extravagant.

The Massachusetts Antislavery Society at once made overtures to Mr. Douglass, and he became one of its accredited agents. For this new field of labor, which he reluctantly and hesitatingly entered, and for which he modestly said he “had no preparation," the event proved that he was admirably fitted. In addition to that inborn genius and those natural gifts of oratory with which he was so generously endowed, he had the long and terrible lessons which slavery had burned into his soul. The knowledge, too, which he had stolen in the house of bondage, had enabled him to read the " Liberator " from week to week, as he was engaged in his hard and humble labors on the wharves of New Bedford, and thus to become acquainted with the new thoughts and reasonings of others. Doubtless many things which had long lain in his own mind formless and vague he found there more clearly defined and more logically expressed; while the fierceness and force of its utterances tallied only too well with the all-consuming zeal of his own soul. Thus fitted and commissioned he entered upon the great work of his life. Though distrustful of his abilities, no knight-errant ever sallied forth with higher resolve, or bore himself with more heroic courage. With whatever diffidence he undertook the proposed service, there was no lack of earnestness and devotion. Nor was his range a limited one. Fitted by his talents to move thousands on the platform, he was prepared by his early experience to be equally persuasive in a little meeting in a country school-house. In hall or church or grove he was alike effective. He could make himself at home in the parlors of the great or by the firesides of the humble: He could ride in the public conveyances from State to State, or tramp on foot from neighborhood to neighborhood. Fertile in expedients and patient in endeavor, he was not easily balked or driven from his purpose. In the midst of the prejudices of caste, hardly less strong and cruel in Massachusetts than in Maryland, he never permitted these, however painful, to divert him from his purpose. If he could not ride inside the stage, he would ride outside; if he could not ride in the first-class car, he rode in the second class; if he could not occupy the cabin of the steamer, he went into the steerage; but to these insults to his manhood he generally interposed his earnest protest, and often only yielded to superior force.

The character, culture, and eloquence displayed by his addresses provoked the insinuation that he was an impostor, and that he had never been a slave. To silence this imputation, he prepared and published, in the spring of 1845, an autobiography, which was widely circulated. As in it he gave the names of persons, places, and' dates, by which his claims and statements could be verified, it was soon known in Maryland, and he and his friends were given to understand that efforts would be made for his recapture. To place himself out of the reach of his pursuers, and, at the same time, help forward his great work, it was proposed that he should visit England. He was very kindly received there, and visited nearly all the large towns and cities of the kingdom. In a lecture in Finsbury's Chapel, in London, to an audience of three thousand, he thus answered the question why he did not confine his labors to the United States.
“My first answer is, because slavery is the common enemy of mankind, and that all mankind should be made acquainted with its abominable character. My second answer is, that the slave is a man, and as such is entitled to your sympathy as a man and a brother. He has been the prey, the common prey, of Christendom during the last three hundred years; and it is but right, just, and proper that his wrongs should be known throughout the world. I have another reason for bringing this matter before the British public, and it is this: slavery is a system of wrong so blinding to all around it, so hardening to the heart, so corrupting to the morals, so deleterious to religion, so sapping to all the principles of justice in its immediate vicinity, that the community thus connected with it lack the moral power necessary to its removal. It is a system of such gigantic evil, so strong, so overwhelming in its power, that no one nation is equal to its removal. It requires the humanity of Christianity, the morality of the civilized world, to remove it. Hence I call upon the people of Britain to look at this matter, and to exert the influence I am about to show they possess for the removal of slavery from America. I can appeal to them as strongly by their regard for the slaveholder as by 'their regard for the slave to labor in this cause. There is nothing said here against slavery that will not be recorded in the United States. I am here, also, because the slaveholders do not want me to be here. I have adopted the maxim laid down by Napoleon, never to occupy ground which the enemy would like me to occupy. The slaveholders would much rather have me, if I will denounce slavery, denounce it in the Northern States, where their friends and supporters are, who will stand by them and mob me for denouncing it…The power I exert here is something like the power that is exerted by the man at the end of the lever; my influence now is just in proportion to my distance from the United States."
In the same speech, referring to the barbarous laws of the slave code, denying that he was inveighing against the institutions of America, and asserting that his only purpose was to strip this anomalous system of all concealment, he said: " To tear off the mask from this abominable system; to expose it to the light of heaven, ay, to the heat of the sun, that it may burn and wither it out of existence, --is my object in coming to this country. I want the slaveholder surrounded as by a wall of antislavery fire, so that he may see the condemnation of himself and his system glaring down in letters of light. I want him to feel that he has no sympathy in England, Scotland, or Ireland; that he has none in Canada, none in Mexico, none among the poor wild Indians; that the voice of the civilized, ay, the savage world is against him. I would have condemnation blaze down upon him in every direction, till, stunned and overwhelmed with shame and confusion, he is compelled to let go the grasp he holds upon the persons of his victims and restore them to their long-lost rights." That, like other prominent Abolitionists of those days, he overrated the power of truth, and underestimated the power of slavery and its tenacity of life, appears in the same speech, and in this connection, when he says: “I expose slavery in this country because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death. Expose slavery, and it dies. Light is to slavery what the heat of the sun is to the root of a tree; it must die under it." Mr. Douglass had not to live long --his own career furnishing the most convincing evidence of the fact --to see that something more than “light " was necessary to destroy slavery. To expose it was not to kill it.

Of this, too, he received substantial evidence in England and Scotland, especially the latter; in England, by the refusal of the Evangelical Alliance, at the instance of the American delegation, to exclude the representatives of slaveholding churches from its platform in Scotland, where he found the Free Church not only receiving contributions for its church-building fund from such churches, but sturdily defending its propriety by the voice of its prince of scholars and clergymen, Dr. Chalmers, and by that of its hardly less honored leaders, Dr. Cunningham and Dr. Candlish. And this latter was done in spite of the earnest remonstrances of himself and others, among them that most eloquent Englishman, George Thompson, urging them not to receive that “price of blood," but to "send back the money."
Mr. Douglass remained in Great Britain nearly two years; in which time he visited England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, everywhere pressing upon the public mind the evils of slavery and the duty of laboring for its overthrow. He was cordially received, and treated with the utmost consideration. His friends, without solicitation from him, raised one hundred and fifty pounds for his manumission, and twenty-five hundred dollars with which to establish a press in this country, which he subsequently did, at Rochester, New York. His journal was first called the “North Star," and afterward "Frederick Douglass's Paper," and was ably conducted and well sustained till after the abolition of slavery. Thus by voice, pen, and personal influence has he contributed in no small measure to those manifold labors which the last thirty years have witnessed for the removal of slavery, and for the rehabilitation of his race with those rights of which it had so long been despoiled, and for the still higher purpose of preparing it for the new position it now occupies.

The main interest and importance, however, of Mr. Douglass's career, are public, rather than personal. Full of thrilling adventure, striking contrasts, brilliant passages, and undoubted usefulness, as his history was, his providential relations to some of the most marked facts and features of American history constitute the chief elements of that interest and importance which by common consent belong to it. Lifting the curtain, it revealed with startling vividness and effect the inner experience and the workings of slavery, not only upon its victims, but upon all connected with it. In it, as in a mirror, are seen how unnatural, how inhuman, and how wicked were its demands. Torn from his mother's arms in infancy, he was treated with the same disregard of his comfort and the promptings of nature as were the domestic animals of the farm-yard. As he was transferred from one master to another, everyone can see what the hazards of a “chattel personal” were, and how the kindness of one only aggravated the harshness of another. In the extreme solicitude manifested by his kind master and mistress at Baltimore that he should not learn to read, and their marked displeasure and change of treatment when he had thus learned, are seen not only the stern necessities of slavery, but how it quenched the kindlier feelings and turned to bitterness even affection itself. In the terrible struggle with Corey which he so graphically describes, when " the dark night of slavery shut in upon him," and he was "transformed to a brute," is disclosed something of the process by which manhood was dethroned, and an immortal being was transformed by something more than legal phrase into a chattel,--a thing. Had he, after his first unsuccessful attempt to escape, been " sold South," as he had reason to apprehend, and had not been sent north to Baltimore, that night would have remained unbroken, and that transformation would have been complete; and the world now knows what a light would have been extinguished and what a sacrifice would have been made. He escaped, indeed; but how many did not? Not all were so richly endowed, though none can tell how many " village Hampdens," how many " mute, inglorious Miltons" have thus been lost to letters and to man; while many have learned to sympathize with Dr. Campbell, at Finsbury's Chapel, when he exclaimed: " My blood boiled within me when I heard his address to-night, and thought that he had left behind him three millions of such men."

And sadder still when it is seen that all this was done, if not in the name of the Christian religion, in spite of it, by those professing its holy faith, -- his owner, and tormentor, Corey, both being members of the church; the latter punctilious and pretentious in his church-going, praying, and psalm singing, adding the latter generally to his daily family worship, -- and saddest of all, that, when Mr. Douglass, rescued as from the lion's den, bore a testimony which could not be gainsaid, the multitudes, though fascinated by his thrilling story and matchless eloquence, withheld from him what he earnestly sought, while only the few were willing to receive the unpopular doctrines of his Abolitionism. For twenty years he labored as few others could, addressing thousands upon thousands in the New England, Middle, and Western States; and yet till the beginning of the Rebellion he belonged to a despised minority, while the system that had so outraged him and his people still dominated the State, and  was sanctioned, if not sanctified, by the  church. In the light of such a history this mountain of national guilt assumes more towering proportions, and its base is seen to rest not upon the South alone, but upon the whole land. The crime was gigantic; and, though its expiation has already been terrible, who shall say that it has been commensurate with the crime itself?
Few have forgotten the closing utterances of Mr. Lincoln's second Inaugural concerning the war still raging, sounding as if they fell from the judgment-seat and were the words of doom itself: " Yet, if God will that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondmen's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so it still must be said, ' The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" The solemn significance .of this language is still worthy of thought, though the war has ceased and the great armies then in the field have been recalled.

Source:  Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 1.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 499-511.


DOUGLASS, Grace Bustill, 1782-1842, African American activist, abolitionist.  Co-founder of the Female Anti-Slavery Society. 

(Yellin, Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne (Eds). The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, p. 11; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 4, p. 71)

DOUGLASS, Hezekiah Ford


DOUGLASS, Roswell, Lowell, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Abolition Society, Vice-President, 1842-44.


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, Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne (Eds). The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 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, Volume 6, p. 821; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 4, p. 76)


DOUGLASS, William, 1804-1862, Baltimore, Maryland, African American, clergyman, abolitionist, opposed colonization. 

(Sinha, 2016, pp. 219-220, 270, 340-341)


DOW, Lorenzo, 1777-1834, abolitionist. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 218-219; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, p. 410)

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 218-219:

DOW, Lorenzo, clergyman, born in Coventry, Connecticut, 16 October, 1777; died in Georgetown, D. C., 2 February, 1834. In his youth he was disturbed by religious speculations until he accepted Methodist doctrines, and determined, in opposition to the wishes of his family, to become a preacher of that denomination, though his education was very limited. In 1796 he made an unsuccessful application for admission into the Connecticut conference; but two years later he was received, and in 1799 was appointed to the Cambridge circuit, New York. During the year he was transferred to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and afterward to Essex, Vt., but remained there only a brief time, as he believed he had a divine call to preach to the Catholics of Ireland. He made two visits to Ireland and England, in 1799 and 1805, and by his eccentric manners and attractive eloquence drew after him immense crowds, who sometimes indulged in a spirit of bitter persecution. He introduced camp-meetings into England, and the controversy about them resulted in the organization of the Primitive Methodists. In 1802 he preached in the Albany district, New York, “against atheism, deism, Calvinism, and Universalism.” He passed the years 1803 and 1804 in Alabama, delivering the first Protestant sermon within the bounds of that state. In 1807 he extended his labors into Louisiana, and followed the settlers to the extreme borders of civilization. After 1799 he had no official relation to the ministry of the Methodist church, but continued to adhere to and to preach the prominent doctrines of that communion till his death. During his later years his efforts were more specially directed against the Jesuits, whom he regarded as dangerous enemies to pure religion and to republican government. His singularities of manner and of dress excited prejudices against him, causing him to be called “Crazy Dow,” and counteracted the effect of his eloquence. Nevertheless he is said to have preached to more persons than any man of his time. Among his numerous writings are “Polemical Works” (New York, 1814); “The Stranger in Charleston, or the Trial and Confession of Lorenzo Dow” (Philadelphia, 1822); “A Short Account of a Long Travel, with Beauties of Wesley” (Philadelphia, 1823); “Journal and Miscellaneous Writings,” edited by John Dowling (New York, 1836); and “History of a Cosmopolite, or the Writings of the Reverend Lorenzo Dow, containing his Experience and Travels in Europe and America up to near his Fiftieth Year; also his Polemic Writings” (Cincinnati, 1851; often reprinted). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 218-219.


DOW, NEAL (March 20, 1804-October 2, 1897), temperance reformer.  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.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 218-219; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936;  Volume 3 pt. 1 pp. 411-412) 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936;  Volume 3 pt. 1 pp. 411-412:

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 Magazine, 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.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 218-219:

DOW, Neal, temperance reformer, born in Portland, Maine, 20 March, 1804. He is of Quaker parentage, attended the Friends' academy in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and was trained in mercantile and manufacturing pursuits. He was chief engineer of the Portland fire department in 1839, and in 1851 and again in 1854 was elected mayor of the city. He became the champion of the project for the prohibition of the liquor traffic, which was first advocated by James Appleton in his report to the Maine legislature in 1837, and in various speeches while a member of that body. (See APPLETON, JAMES.) Through Mr. Dow's efforts, while he was mayor, the Maine liquor law, prohibiting under severe penalties the sale of intoxicating beverages, was passed in 1851. After drafting the bill, which he called “A bill for the suppression of drinking-houses and tippling-shops,” he submitted it to the principal friends of temperance in the city, but they all objected to its radical character, as certain to insure its defeat. It provided for the search of places where it was suspected that liquors intended for sale were kept; for the seizure, condemnation, and confiscation of such liquors, if found; and for the punishment of the persons keeping them by fine and imprisonment. Notwithstanding the discouragement of friends, he went to the legislature, then in session at Augusta, had a public hearing in the hall of representatives, which was densely packed by the legislators and citizens of the town, and at the close of the hearing the bill was unanimously accepted by the committee. It was printed that night, was laid on the desks of the members the next morning, and on that day, the last of the session, was passed through all its stages, and was enacted without any change whatever. Mr. Dow was a member of the Maine legislature in 1858-'9. On 31 December, 1861, he was appointed colonel of the 13th Maine volunteers, and with his regiment he joined General Butler's expedition to New Orleans. He was commissioned a brigadier-general of volunteers, 28 April, 1862, and placed in command of the forts at the mouth of the Mississippi, and afterward of the district of Florida. He was wounded twice in the attack on Port Hudson, 27 May, 1863, and taken prisoner while lying in a house near. After imprisonment for over eight months in Libby prison and at Mobile, he was exchanged. He resigned on 30 November, 1864. In 1857, and again in 1866 and 1874, Mr. Dow went to England at the invitation of the United Kingdom temperance alliance, and addressed crowded meetings in all the large cities. He has spent many years in endeavoring, by public speeches in the United States and Canada, as well as in Great Britain, and by frequent contributions to magazines and newspapers, to win the popular sanction for prohibitory legislation. In 1880 he was the candidate for the national prohibition party for president of the United States, and received 10,305 votes. In 1884 an amendment to the constitution of Maine was adopted by a popular vote of nearly three to one, in which it was declared that the manufacture, sale, and keeping for sale of intoxicating beverages was for ever forbidden, and commanding the legislature to enact suitable laws for the enforcement of the prohibition. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 218-219.


DOWLING, John, 1807-1878, Newport, Rhode Island, abolitionist, clergyman, educator, author.  Vice President, American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), 1834-1835.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 220:

DOWLING, John, clergyman, born in Pavensey, Sussex, England, 12 May, 1807; died in Middletown, New York, 4 July, 1878. In an irregular way he acquired a classical education, and became a tutor in a classical institution in London in 1826. Three years later he established a boarding-school a few miles from Oxford, where he taught until 1832. In that year he emigrated to the United States and united with the Baptist church in Catskill, New York, where he was ordained. In 1834 he removed to Newport, R.I., and two years later was called to a church in New York. He afterward preached in Providence, Philadelphia, Newark, and other places. The degree of D. D. was conferred upon him by Transylvania university. Dr. Dowling's published works include “Vindication of the Baptists” (New York); “Exposition of the Prophecies” (1840); “Defence of the Protestant Scriptures” (1843); “History of Romanism” (1845), of which 30,000 copies were sold in less than ten years; “Power of Illustration”; “Nights and Mornings”; and “Judson Offering.” He edited a Conference hymn-book (1868); Noel's work on “Baptism,” the works of Lorenzo Dow, Conyer's “Middleton, on the Conformity of Popery and Paganism”; “Memoir of the Missionary Jacob Thomas”; and a translation from the French of Dr. Cote's work on “Romanism.” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 220. 


DOWLING, Thomas, abolitionist, Catskill, New York, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-1839.


DOWNER, Joel G., New York, abolitionist leader.

(Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971, p. 105)


DOWNING, George Thomas, 1819-1903, African American, civil rights activist, abolitionist.

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Boks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 4, p. 81)


DOWNING, L. S., New York, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


DOWNING, William, New York, member American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)



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

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.