Dicks, Zachariah, -approximately 1810
Variant namesBiographical notes:
Zachariah Dicks (sometimes also known as Zacharias) was a Quaker minister and abolitionist who spent much of his life in North Carolina. Dicks was born in southeastern Pennsylvania to Nathan and Deborah Dicks, likely in 1728. Dicks joined the Society of Friends in 1754 at Warrington Monthly Meeting in York County. The following year he moved to New Garden Monthly Meeting in Guilford County, North Carolina, and 1756 he married Ruth Hiatt. The couple had eight children: Deborah, Martha, Nathan, Esther, Lydia, Peter, Ruth, and Mary. In 1775, Dicks and his family moved to Cane Creek Monthly Meeting in Alamance County, and in 1793 they moved again, this time to Centre Monthly Meeting in Guilford County. In 1798 they returned to Alamance County, settling in Spring Monthly Meeting.
Dicks traveled widely in the ministry, visiting meetings as far flung as Georgia and New Hampshire. Some of this travel he undertook in the company of noted minister William Hunt. He also made a lengthy religious visit to the British Isles, which lasted from 1784 until 1787. Dicks was a well-known minister and outspoken abolitionist. He reportedly spent much of an 1803 tour of South Carolina and Georgia warning Quakers of the possibility of a slave revolution like that then ongoing in Haiti. Later accounts have ascribed to Dicks a prophetic power, saying that he predicted both Revolutionary War and the eventual Civil War. However, neither claim is well-substantiated by contemporaneous evidence.
In spring of 1808 the Dicks and his wife set out for Ohio, reaching West Branch Monthly Meeting in September 1809, where they settled on the Wabash River. Dicks reportedly died a few months later in 1810.
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Subjects:
- Abolitionists
- Antislavery movements
- Society of Friends
- Lay ministry
- Quakers
- Slavery and the church
Occupations:
- Abolitionists
- Clergy
- Quaker abolitionists
- Quakers
Places:
- Alamance County, NC, US
- Chester County, PA, US
- Guilford County, NC, US
- Miami County, OH, US
- York County, PA, US
