Published September 26, 2021
By Reg Ankrom
Tall grass growing along the
Mississippi River hid the Rev. Dr. David Nelson from pro-slavers looking for
him on Sunday, May 22, 1836. Public opinion had been seething against Nelson, the
founder and president of Marion College at Palmyra, Missouri. Nelson was an
agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society for Missouri and one of the
society’s vice presidents.
The
people of Palmyra uneasily tolerated him. A few days before he was chased out
of Missouri under a death threat, Nelson had agreed to leave. The college had turned
against him. “The faculty . . . utterly condemn any interference with rights
guaranteed by the State of Missouri to the owners of slaves.” Nelson decided to
move to Quincy.
David
Nelson, a medical doctor, volunteered as a surgeon in a Kentucky regiment
during the War of 1812 and was with General Andrew Jackson in his invasion of Florida
in 1818. Jaded by what he saw and experienced in war; Nelson shed his religion.
After
military service he returned home to Jonesboro, Tennessee, and established a medical
practice that generated income of $3,000 a year. The money proved to be unsatisfying
as did his lack of religious affiliation.
Nelson
joined the Jonesboro Presbyterian Church, “deploring his long rejection of the
Saviour he now delighted to honor and resolving to redeem the time by the
unreserved consecration of all his powers to Him.” He attended Centre College
at Danville, Kentucky, and helped start the Danville Theological Seminary. At
college he developed an anti-slavery spirit, freed his slaves and sent them to
Liberia. His form of abolition favored the colonization of emancipated slaves.
The
Rev. Nelson was imposing at six feet tall and 250 pounds. As a preacher whose
emotions during a sermon could move him to tears, he was said to have few
equals in eloquence and effusion in the spirit of Christ. In January 1832, he
preached in St. Louis’s First Presbyterian church to hundreds of men and women who
felt his “surgeon’s knife probe deeply” into their conviction to sin.
Among
the attendees was Elijah Lovejoy, who had resisted Nelson’s “knife” but found
himself converted by the end of two weeks of revival. Lovejoy’s conversion was
so complete that he became a Presbyterian minister determined to end the sin of
slavery. His firebrand anti-slavery
Alton
Observer
cost him diminishing support in Alton. Friends in Quincy
repeatedly urged him to move his press there. Lovejoy declined. In November 1837 he was
martyred by a pro-slavery mob in Alton. Nelson sought to multiply the spirit
that had moved infidels like him and Lovejoy. It was this spirit that “led him
to lay the foundation of Marion College in Missouri.”
He chose to establish
his college at Green’s Landing on the Mississippi, renamed Marion City, which
was approximately eight miles north of Palmyra. Col. William Muldrow had
invested huge sums in land there. His plan was to locate a rail terminus to the
Pacific. The plan lured money and easterners to Marion County, whose ideas
about slavery were unpopular. Muldrow expected Marion City to replace Quincy as
the commercial center on the Upper Mississippi. The river intervened. In 1835
it flooded over Marion City and dissolved Muldrow’s plan.
It was Muldrow who
ran Nelson afoul of his neighbors that Sunday in May of 1836. Against his
better judgment, Nelson consented after a camp meeting that day to read an
appeal by Col. Muldrow, a college founder and now a board member, for
contributions to colonize free blacks in Africa.
For several
listeners, the request represented the final insult against their institution. It
demonstrated to them that Marion County had become “. . .a selected theatre of
action for the dissemination of the principles, and the accomplishment of the
objectives, which form the band of union of anti-slavery associations of the
east.”
Many owned small
numbers of slaves in Marion County. Fighting—some called it rioting—erupted, and
Dr. John Bosely, a slave owner who had stirred it, was stabbed. Nelson was blamed for the altercation.
His frantic wife persuaded him to flee for Quincy. For the next three days he sneaked
wet and muddied along the river bank.
Quincy
abolitionists John Burns and George Westgate found Nelson, who by then had
traversed the bottoms of the South Fabius River to a point across from Quincy. Nelson’s
rescuers had brought dried codfish and crackers for him to eat. It was unusual but welcome food for the
fugitive. He told his deliverers they would make a Yankee of him and that he “may
as well begin on crackers and codfish.”
Nelson
spent the night in Rufus Brown’s log cabin hotel, on the southeast corner of
Fourth and Maine Streets in Quincy. His sleep was disturbed the next morning by
several men. Word had circulated that Nelson
had stabbed Dr. Bosely. When it became clear that Nelson planned to move to his
family and his troublesome college to Quincy, the “self-constituted committee
of citizens” demanded he return to Missouri. “The men of this committee . . .
were not bad men, but simply Democrats,” wrote Henry Asbury, a lawyer and local
historian, about the altercation.
Democrats
or not, John Wood and thirty armed men showed up to confront the mob at Brown’s
hotel. If they were going to take Nelson, Wood warned, “they would have to take
him over their dead bodies.” Wood’s determination
broke up the crowd. It was the first time since 1823, when he fought a
pro-slavery legislature’s attempt to make Illinois a slave state, that Wood
once again put his own sensibilities about slavery on the record.
Two
weeks after Nelson’s arrival, a notice was placed in the
Illinois Bounty Land Register
, Quincy’s first newspaper, “for a
‘county meeting’ in the public square of all citizens of Adams County friendly
to peace and good order and opposed to the introduction of Abolition Societies
and opposed to the discussion of the subject in the pulpit.” The struggle over
slavery had crossed the river.
Sources:
Asbury, Henry,
Reminiscences of Quincy
. Quincy, Illinois: D. Wilcox & Sons,
Printers, 1882.
Blackwood, James, “Quincyans and
the Crusade Against Slavery: The First Two Decades, 1824-1844. Macomb,
Illinois: Master’s
Thesis, Western
Illinois University, Macomb, Illinois, 1972.
Deters, Ruth,
The Underground
Railroad Ran Through My House!
Quincy, Illinois: Eleven Oaks Publishing,
2008.
Dillon, Merton L.,
Elijah P. Lovejoy, Abolitionist Editor.
Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1961.
Lovejoy, Elijah P.,
Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy.
Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.
Nelson, The Rev. David, M.D.,
The Cause and Cure of Infidelity.
New
York: American Tract Society, 1841.
Richardson, William A. Jr., “Dr.
David Nelson and His Times,”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society,
Vol. XIII, Springfield, Illinois: Illinois
State Historical Society, 1921.
Simon, Paul,
Freedom’s Champion, Elijah Lovejoy.
Carbondale, Illinois: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1994.
Tillson, Col. John Jr.,
History of Quincy,
in William H. Collins
and Cicero F. Perry,
Past and Present of
the City of Quincy and
Adams County, Illinois.
Chicago: S.J.
Clarke Publishing Co., 1905.
