Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs

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Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs, Florida Secretary of State and Superintendent of Public Instruction

Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs (1821 - 1874) was a Presbyterian minister and a prominent officeholder during Reconstruction.

Gibbs was born in Philadelphia as a free black, on September 28, 1821. He apprenticed as a carpenter and then attended Kimball Union Academy at Meriden, New Hampshire, graduating in 1848. He was the third African-American to graduate from Dartmouth College. Following his graduation in 1852, Gibbs studied at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1853 to 1854 but did not graduate. He was ordained in 1856, and became pastor of Liberty Street Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, inviting the pro-slavery president of Dartmouth College, Nathan Lord, to give the ordination sermon. Gibbs then returned to his native Philadelphia as pastor of the First African Presbyterian Church from 1859 to 1865.

He was an active member of the abolitionist movement. During and after the American Civil War, he traveled to North Carolina and South Carolina establishing schools for newly freed slaves. Gibbs moved to Florida in 1867. He was elected to the State Constitutional Convention of 1868. He ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was appointed as Secretary of State from 1869 to 1872 and was appointed Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1873. Gibbs was also commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Florida State Militia. Gibbs was also elected as a Tallahassee City Councilman in 1872.

Gibbs died on August 14, 1874 in Tallahassee, Florida, reportedly of apoplexy. Immediately after his death it was rumored that he was poisoned by the Ku Klux Klan.

He was the brother of prominent Arkansas Reconstruction judge Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, and the father of Thomas Van Renssalaer Gibbs who was a delegate to the 1886 Florida Constitutional Convention, and a member of the state legislature for Florida.

[edit] References

Canter Brown, Jr. Florida's Black Public Officials, 1867-1924. Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1998.
Eric Foner ed. Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.
Mifflin Wistar Gibbs Shadow and Light: An Autobiography Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
William Peirce Randel, The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy. Philadelphia and New York: Chilton Books, 1965.
Joe M. Richardson, "Jonathan C. Gibbs: Florida's Only Negro Cabinet Member." Florida Historical Quarterly, XLII (April, 1964).
C. Peter Ripley, et al., eds. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Five Volumes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992-1995.