Richard Dillingham

Infobox Person
name = Richard Dillingham


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birth_date = June 18, 1823
birth_place = Peru Township, Morrow County, Ohio
death_date = June 30, 1850
death_place = Nashville, Tennessee
occupation = school teacher, abolitionist
spouse = unmarried

Richard Dillingham (June 18, 1823 – June 30, 1850) was a Quaker school teacher from Peru Township in what is now Morrow County, Ohio, U.S.A., who was arrested in Tennessee on December 5, 1848, while aiding the attempted escape of three slaves. Tried April 12, 1849, he was sentenced to three years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville, where he died of cholera. He was celebrated as a martyr to the abolitionist cause by novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, fellow Quaker Levi Coffin and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who wrote the poem "The Cross" in Dillingham's honor.

The exact location of Dillingham's grave is not known. He was buried in a cemetery on the prison grounds the day he died, but the site was built over in the course of Nashville's later urban development.

External links

*Find A Grave|id=10867012
* [http://www.qhpress.org/quakerpages/qwhp/jgwh237.htm "The Cross" by John Greenleaf Whittier]
* [http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/coffin/coffin.html#p713 Levi Coffin's Memoir of Richard Dillingham]
* [http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/uncletom/key/keyIt.html "The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe] ("See" pp. 101-108.)