- Title
- North Carolina historical review [1947 : July]
-
-
- Date
- July 1947
-
-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
-
North Carolina historical review [1947 : July]
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The North Carolina
Historical Review
Volume XXIV July, 1947 Number 3
ASBURY DICKINS (1780-1861) :
A CAREER IN GOVERNMENT SERVICE
By Ruth Ketring Nuermberger
Who was Asbury Dickins? Briefly, he was, between 1817
and 1861', successively clerk and chief clerk in the Treasury De¬
partment, chief clerk in the Department of State, and secretary
of the United States Senate. As a public servant for nearly half
a century, Asbury Dickins probably knew more of the great
and near great than any other man of his time. He was the
close friend of many who left a name and a record in American
history, yet they scarcely mentioned his name. And so Asbury
Dickins has been almost completely lost and forgotten, and since
his brief obituary in a Washington newspaper no printed biogra¬
phical notice of him has appeared. Yet such were his life and
services that he deserves some lasting memento.
His father was John Dickins, a famous Methodist divine of
the eighteenth century. John Dickins was born on August 24,
1747, in London, grew up there, and received a good education,
possibly at Eton College; in any case he was a good Latin and
Greek scholar..1
Some time before the Revolution John Dickins came to Amer¬
ica, where he professed religion in 1774 and joined the Methodist
Society in Virginia. He became an itinerant preacher in 1777,
traveling in the North Carolina circuit. The next year found
him in Brunswick circuit; thence he went to Roanoke circuit,
where he remained until the close of 1780 when he temporarily
1 Thomas William Herringshaw, comp., H erring shaiv' s Encyclopedia of American Biog¬
raphy of the Nineteenth Century. . . . (Chicago, 1905); Dictionary of American Biography,
V, 293 f. (cited hereinafter
ав
D. A. B.) ; Matthew H. Moore. Sketches of the Pioneers of
Methodism in North Carolina and Virginia (Nashville, 1884), p. 108; William Buell Sprague,
Annals of the American Methodist Pulpit .... (New York, 1861), p. 63; “John Dickins,''
Methodist Magazine , XXII (October, 1799), 521 £.; Eton College, The Eton College Register,
175S-1790, Alphabetically Arranged and Edited with Biographical Notes, by Richard Arthur
Austen-Leigh (Eton, 1921), does not list John Dickins as a Btudent.
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