Finding Moses

Origin Story (1824-1844)

Due to a lack of supporting historical records, much of what is known about Moses Dickson’s early life comes from his own written accounts, or from biographies included in the institutional lore of the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor. As the story goes, on April 5, 1824, shortly after Robert Dickson and his former slave Hannah settled in Cincinnati, their son Moses was born. Robert had reportedly freed all of his slaves in Virginia and gave them land in Ohio, although no manumission records matching those names and dates have thus far been located, and no matching names show up in directories of free Black families or in census records. Moses said that he had five sisters and three brothers, all baptized by future AME Bishop William Paul Quinn. His father passed away by the time Moses was eight, and his mother five years later, although no death records have been located as of yet.¹ Our team continues to search for documentation on his childhood.

Dickson spoke of being educated in Cincinnati’s early schools for African American children, and also at “Smith’s private academy” in Platteville, Wisconsin, although no further specifics were given.² There was a Platteville Academy that opened in 1839, who had a teacher named Dixon, not Smith, although according to their own accounts, they did not admit Black students until decades later. Dickson also trained to be a barber under William Darnes, who later in life was Mark Twain’s barber.

Although Cincinnati’s boomtown status afforded numerous opportunities for free Blacks, and Ohio’s state constitution outlawed slavery, racial tensions were still high and slavery was thriving just across the river in Kentucky. Large race riots broke out in Cincinnati in 1829. Ohio had recently announced that they would start enforcing the old Black Codes of 1805-1807, which required all Black residents to enter into a bond and pay exorbitant fees or be expelled from the state. Large white mobs wanting to speed the process along attacked the city’s largely African American Fourth Ward, attacking residents, burning buildings, and destroying businesses and churches. More than half of the city’s Black residents moved out of the city. Tensions remained and race riots again erupted in 1836, and again yet in the 1850s. Although Dickson never mentions these events when talking about his childhood, if his origin story is true, both would have occurred while the Dicksons lived there. Around 1841, a teenage Dickson put his training with Darnes to good use and began a three-year stint working as a barber on steamships. As he later noted, after seeing first-hand the horrors of slavery in the South, he felt motivated to help as a free man.³

Abolitionist Years in the Midwest

(1846-1863)

After a few years traveling throughout the South, Dickson was inspired to act. Along with eleven others, Dickson launched a secret organization in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 12, 1846, with lofty goals: plan a national insurrection to put an end to slavery. As he noted in an interview published in the Minneapolis Journal decades later, the Knights of Liberty “was determined to organize the slaves throughout the south, drill them, and in ten years from that time strike for freedom.” The founders took an oath of secrecy, promising: “I can die, but I cannot reveal the name of any member until the slaves are free.”⁴

The plan was to recruit and train their militia before sparking a rebellion out of Atlanta in the summer of 1857. Dickson reportedly raised funds from individuals near and far who were in support of their mission, including General Cassius Clay of Kentucky, and overseas supporters who sent boatloads of arms and ammunition. Dickson claimed that Lord William Wilberforce was a supporter, but logistically, Wilberforce passed away when Dickson was a child. When the time came, the militia would be instructed to, “March, fight and conquer, or leave their bodies on the battlefield,” although they should “spare women and children” and treat noncombatants and prisoners fairly.⁵

Until recently, only these few details were known about Dickson’s life during this period in which the Knights of Liberty reportedly organized over 40,000 people. Records show Dickson moved from St. Louis, to Galena, Illinois, then a major river port town and transportation hub. He continued to work on steamships like the Oronoco and the Nominee on the Mississippi River through the late 1840s. It was in Galena that he met a young widow named Mary Elizabeth Peters (nee Butcher), whose husband Caleb Peters passed away a few years prior. The two married on October 4, 1848. The couple also started a second secret abolitionist organization known as the Order of Twelve that year in Galena. Dickson wrote that the Order of Twelve members that were still living following the Civil War included A. H. Richardson, R.H. Cain, Wm. P. Emery, James T. Smith, J. Garrett Johnson and G. Christopher. Members of both the Knights of Liberty and Order of Twelve were known to have aided people to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Dickson claims to be one of the masterminds behind the noted 1849 escape of Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed himself from Virginia to freedom in Pennsylvania, but the memoirs of Brown and William Still make no mention of Dickson.⁶

The above is the entirety of what historians have known about Dickson’s whereabouts and actions during this time period until a recent discovery in the archives.

After many years of following Dickson’s trail in Illinois and Missouri, I recently located him in St. Paul during those missing years of his life story between 1850-1856. Moses and Mary were among the first Black residents and business owners in St. Paul during Minnesota’s territorial years before statehood. Earlier scholars of Dickson, and those studying early Black settlers in Minnesota, had missed the notable leader in records there, or did not recognize the name’s significance. Dickson himself neglected to mention his time in Minnesota in later reminiscences, although he mentions Wisconsin Territory, which included this area of Minnesota through 1848. As Moses and Mary show up in census records and directories taken in both Galena and St. Paul, it is likely that they kept dual/seasonal residences given Moses’s constant travels and ice that made river travel impassable for a third of the year. It also gave them more safe spaces in which they could operate.

Moses Dickson in Minnesota Territory

Dickson was the first of a number of influential African Americans to arrive in St. Paul from Galena. Joseph Farr and his uncle William Taylor, also known actors along the Underground Railroad (and part of later features on this site) arrived the following year in 1851. Farr and Dickson’s connection would remain for decades to come through politics and fraternal organizations, but curiously, Farr makes no mention of Dickson is later printed accounts of Underground Railroad memories in Minnesota.⁷

Newly discovered newspaper records from 1853 show that Moses started Dickson & Co with a man named Nelson Runnelds, running a restaurant called Nonpareil on St. Anthony Street, near present-day Kellogg Boulevard between the Hill Library and Summit Ave. Little has been located thus far about Runnelds. By the close of that year, the pair ran a public announcement dissolving their partnership, potentially stemming from a November 1853 incident. According to newspaper accounts, Dickson was attacked in the restaurant by another Black man named Louis Monroe after confronting the drunk customer and asking him to leave. After Dickson reportedly pushed Monroe out of the door, Monroe shot at Dickson, hitting him in the wrist and elbow. Despite being found guilty by a jury in the spring of 1854, Monroe was pardoned by Territorial Governor Willis A. Gorman and Judge Moses Sherburne that May.⁸ The jury members responded in a letter to the Weekly Minnesota Times their disappointment in the overturned verdict, writing in support of Dickson.

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Despite the attack, and amid the court case, Moses and Mary immediately opened another restaurant in January of 1854. Called “Dickson’s Eating Saloon”, the business was also located on St. Anthony Street, and was possibly just a rebranding. The business took out regular ads in the Weekly Pioneer and Democrat and The Daily Minnesota Pioneer promoting their offerings, using a description to find them in a boom town that was still without a regular addressing system:  “St. Anthony Street. A Big Tree stands in front of the door.”

Over the next three years, Moses and Mary continued to show up in both Minnesota and Illinois records, listed in the 1854 Galena city directory while operating Dickson’s Eating Saloon in St. Paul. The saloon was seemingly short-lived, as Dickson was back to working as a barber under the Winslow House by 1856, and later at the Fuller House from 1858-9, owned by the slaveholder Steven Long. A later newspaper article also named Moses as the first teacher for Black students in St. Paul in 1857. The Dicksons can be found again in the Ramsey County territorial census records that October, below.

Additionally, noted (future) Black surgeon John H. Rapier, Jr. wrote in his diary that he lived and worked for Dickson in St. Paul from 1857 until possibly as late as 1860.⁹ During his time in Minnesota, Rapier also wrote numerous articles and letters to the editor across Minnesota in papers like the Northern Herald (Little Falls, MN), The Saint Paul Daily Pioneer and Democrat, and others, with articles on topics like, “Have Colored Children Rights?”¹⁰ The nationwide slave revolt that was planned for the summer of 1857 never came to fruition, and the Knights of Labor seemingly never regrouped. 

Although no reason was given for the canceled summer of 1857 uprising, one potential theory (beyond the impending Civil War) is the impact of the Dred Scott case. In its 1857 decision, which came at the end of a ten-year court battle, the United States Supreme Court, five of whom came from slaveholding families, upheld slavery in the United States territories. This effectively denied Black citizenship in America and deemed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to be unconstitutional. While unconfirmed, certain family trees on genealogical sites count Dickson and Dred Scott as siblings, although documentation thus far fails to support that theory. At the very least, the Dickson and Scott families were acquainted through St. Louis circles and potentially Minnesota circles. Moses writes a passionate and thoughtful open letter in the Weekly Minnesotan about the final ruling in response to Rev. T.M. Fullerton’s earlier piece published in the Pioneer. Dickson writes:

“I cannot help asking you if you have ever read a genuine copy of the American Declaration of Independence? …In what have I offended that this injustice should be heaped upon me and mine? Is it because I love my country less than you? No! For you have all the advantages of education and refinement that society can furnish, and are eligible to any office at the gift of the People, your affection for your native land is only enough to put her in chains; while I, though depressed and downtrodden by my country ever since I saw the light of day, loves her still….What kind of institution is a negro? Who am I? I am not an alien, for I was born on American soil. I am not a citizen, for you and your subordinates, the five slaveholders, say I am not. I am a thing. I live, breathe, eat, work, think, die, and if I have a soul–does it go before the eternal judge? Or does the Supreme Court take care of that, too?”¹⁰    

Yours, an Alien American,
MOSES DICKSON

READ THE FULL LETTER from the Minnesota Weekly Times, March 28, 1857

Dickson disappears from records again over the next 2-3 years. By his own accounts, he reportedly met with John Brown in Davenport, Iowa, in March of 1959, just before Brown and his entourage moved east to raid Harpers Ferry. Dickson claimed that he tried to convince Brown to pause a beat, but the group continued on with their deadly plan. Other than Dickson himself, no one has ever directly connected the two freedom fighters.¹¹ 

By 1860 Moses and a pregnant Mary were living back in Missouri at a boarding house in St. Louis operated by a Black woman named Nancy Lyons. Mary gave birth to their daughter Mamie Augusta Dickson that December. The following year, Moses signs what is known as a “free negro bond” with former St. Louis mayor John How acting as his guarantor. If Moses fled the state, despite being free, both men would lose the $500 guarantee money. This bond was meant to act as a form of security to prove freedom, but in reality, was not that unlike bonds required of the Black Codes of Dickson’s Cincinnati youth. Just exactly how Moses Dickson and the former two-time mayor of St. Louis knew each other is unknown.¹² 

Records are inconclusive about Moses Dickson’s service in the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) during the Civil War. Some records claim him as a soldier, yet in other accounts Moses himself claims to have been an independent fighter. There is a potential Moses Dickson who shows up in St. Louis area draft records in Missouri listed as Class II, which means that he was married and over 35, limiting his options for participating in the war and matching the correct demographical information. Potentially this same Moses Dickson pops up again with no dates or other identifiers on a list related to soldier pensions (see below). If that record is the correct Moses Dickson, it says that he served in the 18th Missouri Colored Infantry, Company D. Learn more about that company’s service here. Unfortunately, while someone requested pension funds under that name, no Moses Dickson shows up in USCT service records matching that company on the comprehensive Civil War Soldiers and Sailors database that the National Park Service organizes. There is a second (white) Moses Dickson who enlisted in Clay County, Missouri. The son of the noted Kentucky gunmaker Moses Dickson, this Moses’s records are all connected to Clay County. There is also a Moses Dixon, born in Chillicothe, Ohio, who served in the USCT out of a Massachusetts regiment, who is likely not the correct Moses. A few other Confederate soldiers with matching names were also eliminated from potential matches. Tracking down pension records and other further documentation about the correct Moses Dickson’s service is needed. 

Post-Civil War Life (1864-1901)

After the Civil War, Moses Dickson continued to make his mark in politics, education, religion, and fraternal organizations to ensure that freedom and equality were realized across all areas of Black life. His influence in each of those arenas can still be felt today. This final section of his biography is organized thematically rather than chronologically.

Moses Dickson’s Influence on Reconstruction Era Politics

Dickson immediately jumped into politics during the Reconstruction period. He was a delegate at every Republican State Convention in Missouri between 1864 to 1878, and served as an elector-at-large for President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.¹³ He served on the Colored Men’s Executive Committee, and attended national conventions in 1869-1870 representing Missouri. Note that Joseph Farr, Dickson’s acquaintance from Galena and St. Paul, is listed as the representative from Minnesota.¹⁴

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Dickson also founded the Missouri Equal Rights League in 1865 with future Senator of Mississippi Blanche K. Bruce, and future Minister to Liberia James Milton Turner. The group stated that they would not support the re-enfranchisement of former Confederates until there was a “universal right to the ballot box.” Dickson continued to use the power of the pen, and of the press, to make his arguments. He wrote an op-ed titled, “The Suffrage Question: What Colored Men Think” in the Warrenton Banner in 1870 about his steadfast support for the Radical Republicans, the Reconstruction amendments, and Enforcement Acts stating,

“They are radical measures, adopted by a radical legislature, and will receive the support of all consistent Radicals. We owe every privelege we have to that party, and we are Radicals. Is it proper to repudiate the just measure of the party that just gave us freedom, citizenship, and the ballot? It is the mission of the Radical party to give equal rights and justice to all men, without regard to race, color, or previous condition….We are the very last who should try to block the wheels of progress.”¹⁵

Moses Dickson, June 28, 1870, Warrenton Banner

Although this post-war period of Dickson’s life is far better documented that his early years, the Finding Moses Initiative has discovered a number of new details about the influential leader’s life. One of these smaller discoveries was that Dickson was named consul of the Port of Victoria in Seychelles in 1873, similar to posts colleagues of Dickson’s like Turner were serving in Liberia and elsewhere.¹⁶ No further details are available about this appointment, and no documentation exists in historical databases about any travel Dickson may have taken related to this work. Only the initial newspaper announcement remains. 

Moses Dickson’s Fight for Educational and Religious Opportunities

In addition to his work in the political sphere, Dickson also became ordained as an African Methodist Episcopal preacher in 1866. The below Freedmen’s Bureau records show him raising money for a church and school in Carondelet, Missouri, that year. Once funding was secured, the church and school were built on land donated by Henry Taylor Blow (of the Blow family associated with the Dred Scott case, and connected on some family trees to Dickson). The Freedman’s Church and School were destroyed by a fire shortly after completion. Coincidentally, Dickson’s home was also burned down a few years later in 1871. Although there is no way of knowing definitively what happened to the church and school, hundreds of Black churches and schools were destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era.¹⁷

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Dickson’s advocacy work around African American education spread beyond his immediate community. Following the Civil War, he fought to open more schools for African American children throughout the South, as well as more training opportunities for Black teachers, and more Sunday schools for children. He was also one of the founders of the HBCU Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, which is still in existence today. A large number of the founding members served in the USCT together and pooled money to open the school, originally known as the Lincoln Institute.

Dickson’s advocacy and aid work spread beyond just churches and schools. By 1879-1880, thousands of African Americans were fleeing the South in search of work and new lives in the North and West. Many of these “Exodusters” convened in St. Louis, where Dickson served as president of the Refugee Relief Board that provided aid to tens of thousands of destitute refugees, largely formerly enslaved individuals, making their way to places like Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, and other destinations. Dickson spent these years traveling, writing, and fundraising for the cause. In 1879, Dickson wrote to William Lloyd Garrison about the refugees’ need for financial and institutional support.¹⁸

Despite his good deeds, Dickson was already on thin ice with the Missouri chapter of the AME church since 1873 after failing to pay out money due to a widow who had purchased burial benefits from Dickson. In 1880 he was expelled from the AME church after a similar claim of misappropriating funds meant to go to Exodusters, although his accuser was also having different legal troubles, and some questioned retaliation.¹⁹ Dickson continued to preach in his later years but for the closely related African Wesleyan Methodist Church and other congregations that fell outside of official AME jurisdiction. In later years the church seems to have forgave Dickson.

Moses Dickson’s Lasting Legacy: The Prince Hall Mason and Order of Twelve

In addition to his other hats, Moses was also active with the Prince Hall Masons, a branch of freemasonry started for African Americans in the late 1700s in Pennsylvania in response to being excluded from joining existing Masonic organizations due to their race. While it did serve some similar purposes as other Masonic groups, the Prince Hall Masons put racial and social justice at the center of their initial efforts. Notable civil rights leaders Medgar Evars, Julian Bond, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Booker T. Washington, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, and W.E.B. DuBois are just some of the Prince Hall Masons’ most notable past members. Dickson served as the Grand Master for the state of Missouri, which held jurisdiction over multiple other states in the still-growing region. He opened Black lodges throughout the Midwest and Plains states. In 1866 he returned to Minnesota to open the Pioneer Lodge in St. Paul with local leaders and fellow Masons Israel Crosley, Joseph Farr, J.K. Hilyard, and Jacob Pritchard (who will be featured in later, shorter biographies).²⁰

Although the Knights of Liberty and Order of Twelve had disbanded before the war, Dickson used inspiration from both to create a new fraternal organization in 1872 known as the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor. With “temples” and “tabernacles” (similar to Masonic lodges) around the country, the organization promoted advancement through moral action, education, wealth attainment, temperance, and religious commitment. 

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