Rankin, John

Life Span
to
    Full name
    John Rankin
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    13
    Family
    Jean Lowry (wife)
    Education
    Other
    Other Education
    Washington College, TN
    Occupation
    Clergy
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Presbyterian
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)

    John Rankin (Appleton's)

    Reference
    RANKIN, John, clergyman, b. near Dandridge, Jefferson со., Tenn., 4 Feb., 1793; d. in Ironton, Ohio, 18 March, 1880. From 1817 till 1821 he was pastor of two Presbyterian churches in Carlisle, Ky., and about 1818 founded an anti-slavery society. Removing to Ripley, Ohio, he was pastor of the 1st and 2d Presbyterian churches for forty-four years. He joined the Garrison anti-slavery movement, and was mobbed for his views more than twenty times. About 1824 he addressed letters to his brother in Middlebrook, Va., dissuading him from slave-holding, which were published in Ripley, in the "Liberator," in 1832, and afterward in book-form in Boston and Newburyport, and ran through many editions. He assisted Eliza and her child, the originals of those characters in "Uncle Tom's Cabin, to escape. He founded the American reform book and tract society of Cincinnati, and was the author of several books, including "The Covenant of Grace" (Pittsburg, 1869). See his life entitled "The Soldier, the Battle, and the Victory," by Rev. Andrew Ritchie (Cincinnati, 1876).
    James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., “Rankin, John,” Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900), 5: 180.
    How to Cite This Page: "Rankin, John," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/6452.