Dan King

• Dan King
• Born: January 27, 1791
• Died: November 13, 1864

Physician, reformer, and pamphleteer, was born in Mansfield, Connecticut, the son of John King and Jane (Knight) King. Defying the wishes of his family, he began the study of medicine with a local doctor and at the age of twenty-three entered the Yale Medical School. In 1815 he was licensed to practice medicine and opened an office in Brewster’s Neck, Connecticut. The following year he married Cynthia Pride. The couple had eleven children. In the early 1820s the family moved to Charlestown, Rhode Island, where Dr. King supplemented his professional earnings—always meager—by manufacturing low-grade cotton cloth for the use of slaves on southern plantations. He served as representative from Charlestown in the General Assembly and in the mid-1830s became an adherent of the Constitutional party—the latest in a series of movements aimed at broadening suffrage and, more important, providing Rhode Island with a popularly ratified constitution to replace the old colonial charter. Although that governmental framework had in fact been abrogated at the time of the Revolution, Rhode Island was still operating under its provisions, the only state in the Union that still limited suffrage to “freemen,” who owned real property, and their oldest sons. Only the legislature had the power to amend, or to reapportion its representation, now grossly overbalanced against the growing industrial towns. All previous attempts to alter the status quo had failed, since the ruling oligarchy benefited from it.

In 1837 Dan King was humiliatingly defeated in his campaign for Congress on the Constitutional ticket, along with Thomas Wilson Dorr, who soon became the leader of the movement. The Constitutional party as such died with this election, but the movement, a loose confederation of Jacksonian elements, continued under the name of Suffragists. In 1842 a constitution drawn up by a People’s Convention was ratified, and under its provisions, which gave the vote to adult males over twenty-one with a year’s residence in the state, Thomas Dorr was elected governor. In the ensuing struggle with the incumbent government, many of Dorr’s allies were arrested, including Dr. King, then living in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where he had moved in 1841 after a fire in his factory had left him financially ruined. On being brought into prison, however, Dr. King, already highly esteemed in the community, was immediately released. Some years later he wrote a scholarly account that also contained his personal recollections of Thomas Dorr and his movement (The Life and Times of Thomas Wilson Dorr) in the belief “that national freedom can only be maintained by the proper diffusion of knowledge” and that “if popular sovereignty is in reality the fundamental principle of all free institutions it should never be lost sight of but . . . constantly watched as the pole star of liberty.” The book is still considered a valuable source on the Dorr War, a subject that has received renewed attention since the 1960s brought a revival of interest in political representation.

Dr. King had been a prolific and talented writer since the 1830s, when he presented a report on the Narragansett Indians to the state legislature. From the numerous articles he contributed to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal and other publications it is clear that his opinions on medical subjects were strongly influenced by ethical and social concerns, and by a Jeffersonian faith in the power of human reason that underlay his unshaken devotion to popular sovereignty. A common thread runs through Spiritualism: An Address to the Bristol County Medical Society (1852), Quackery Unmasked (1853), and Tobacco, What It Is and What It Does (1861): the belief that if the truth is cogently presented and widely disseminated the people will use their reason to remedy the evil. Nowhere in his tirades against tobacco, spiritualism, or homeopathy (the last being mainly a plea for higher standards of medical training and ethics) does he suggest that regulatory legislation is necessary to achieve these ends. The diffusion of knowledge, social pressure—the upper classes should take the lead in making homeopathy and tobacco unfashionable—and above all the power of women can help to revive “an enlightened and virtuous public” in a society where “the scale of intellect has fallen and all proud traits of honor, benevolence and self-sacrificing heroism have been lost.”

Dr. King maintained his dislike of coercive legislation as a regulator of conduct to the end of his life. Although a staunch Unionist and antislavery man, he opposed the draft act and was the probable author of The Draft, or Conscription Reviewed By The People (1863). He had left retirement in Pawtuxet, Rhode Island where he had moved in 1859 after practicing for eleven years in Taunton, Massachusetts, in order to carry on the medical practice of his son, who was serving in the army. Six months before the war’s end Dan King died. He had never earned much money from his profession, business ventures, or books, which were published at his own expense, and his strongly expressed opinions had often roused equally strong opposition. But he had always enjoyed the respect and affection of his neighbors, who prized the same quality of “moral fidelity” he had seen in Thomas Wilson Dorr.

Biographical information on Dan King is scanty, and no collection of his papers survives. Recent treatments of the Dorr War include works by A. M. Mowry, The Dorr War (1970) and P. T. Conley, Democracy in Decline (1977). See also E. P. and H. King, “Biographical Sketches of Dr. Dan King and His Sons,” Proceedings of the Rhode Island Medical Society (1891) and the article on King in The Dictionary of American Biography.