Thompson, William

Life Span
to
    Full name
    William Thompson
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Estimated
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    Family
    Roswell Thompson (father)
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)

    William Thompson (Villard, 1910)

    Scholarship
    William Thompson, son of Roswell Thompson, was born in August, 1833, and was killed October 17, 1859. He married Mary Ann brown, a neighbor, but no relation of the Brown family. He had no hesitation as to where his duty lay when the call came to help free the slaves. He started for Kansas in 1856, but turned back on meeting the Brown sons, who returned to North Elba in the fall of that year. He was full of fun and good nature, and bore himself unflinchingly when face to face with death. Both William Thompson and his brother Dauphin went to Harper’s Ferry without being urged and purely from a sense of right and duty to a great cause.
    Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 683.
    How to Cite This Page: "Thompson, William," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/18232.