Concklin, Seth

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Seth Concklin
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Estimated
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Other
    Other Religion
    Shaker
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
    Military
    US military (Pre-Civil War)
    Foreign military

    Seth Concklin (Bordewich, 2006)

    Scholarship
    A small, homely man, often scruffily dressed and taciturn to the point of eccentricity, [Seth] Concklin was born in upstate New York, in 1802, and endured an appallingly grim childhood that left him with the cocky combativeness of a perpetual survivor, coupled to an indelible affinity for every underdog he ever met. His father died when Concklin was still a boy, leaving him responsible for a large, virtually indigent family. One of his sisters was given away to strangers when she could no longer be fed. To support his remaining siblings, he tramped the roads of rural New York peddling trifles. After living for a time in a pacifist Shaker community near Albany, he enlisted in the small, ill-starred republican force that sought to overthrow the British colonial regime in Canada during the so-called Patriot War of 1838-39. Later he served in Florida as a soldier in the First Seminole War, returning home contemptuous of the government’s expansionist propaganda, and with a deep sympathy for the beleaguered Indians. He hated slavery with such a passion that it was said of him that “he was a whole Abolition Society in himself,” and he served for a time as an underground conductor in Springfield, Illinois, where he may have known, or at least met, the up-and-coming young lawyer Abraham Lincoln.
    Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York: Amistad, 2006), 357.
    How to Cite This Page: "Concklin, Seth," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5446.