Fisk, Clinton Bowen

Life Span
to
Dickinson Connection
Trustee, 1882-1890
    Full name
    Clinton Bowen Fisk
    Place of birth
    Clapp's Corner, NY
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    Family
    Benjamin Fisk (father), Lydia Fisk (mother), Geanette Crippins (wife, 1850)
    Occupation
    Military
    Educator
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Political Parties
    Other
    Other Political Party
    Prohibition Party
    Other Affiliations
    Temperance (Prohibition)
    Government
    Johnson Administration (1865-69)
    Military
    Union Army

    Clinton Bowen Fisk (Dickinson Chronicles)

    Scholarship
    Clinton Fisk was born on December 8, 1828 to Benjamin Bigford and Lydia Aldrich Fisk in Western New York, near the Erie Canal.  His parents moved to Michigan Territory while their son was an infant.  The death of Benjamin Fisk plunged the family into poverty.  Fisk eventually established himself as a small banker in Coldwater, Michigan.  In 1850, he married Jeannette Crippen.

    Fisk’s bank was ruined in the Panic of 1857; however, by the start of the Civil War, he had re-established himself in St. Louis, Missouri.  He initially served in the home guards, participating in the seizure of Camp Jackson in May 1861.  During the summer of 1862, Fisk recruited and organized the 33rd Missouri Volunteers, and was promoted that November to brigadier general.  He mustered out in 1865 as a major general.

    After the war, Fisk was appointed to the Freedman’s Bureau as assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Refuges, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands for Kentucky and Tennessee.  In 1866, he opened a school for freedmen in an abandoned army barracks in Nashville, Tennessee.  A year later the institution was chartered as Fisk University.

    Fisk returned to banking in New York until 1874 when he was appointed to the Board of Indian Commissioners.  He was president of the board from 1881 until 1890.  In 1882 Fisk was appointed as a trustee of Dickinson College.  He is credited with finding George Reed to replace James McCauley as president of the college.

    In 1888, Fisk ran for President of the United States on a Prohibition Party ticket, gaining 250,000 votes.  Clinton Bowen Fisk died on July 9, 1890.
    John Osborne and James W. Gerencser, eds., “Clinton Bowen Fisk,” Dickinson Chronicles, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/f/ed_fiskCB.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Fisk, Clinton Bowen," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5665.