Heroes and Rebels in the Family Tree—Jonathan “John” Doy

 

Jonathan “John” Doy was born on July 13, 1811 in Welborne, Norfolk, England to Thomas Doy 1787-1865 and Sarah Watts 1788-1868.  He was born the third of eleven children of Thomas and Sarah. He was baptised at age 16 at the parish church of Welborne on May 31, 1827.  (Presumed to be the same John Doy) Sometime before 1836, he moved to Yorkshire, England.  He married Jane S. Dunn 1820-1888, on February 3, 1836 in Sculcoates, Yorkshire, England and by 1841 John and Jane had four children born in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, England.

Between 1845 and 1846, the family moved to Canada while emigrating to America.  Their first stop in America was Rochester, New York.  In 1854, the family moved from New York to the newly settled territory of Kansas and located their home in Lawrence, Kansas.  The children of John and Jane were:

1.       Charles Felvus Doy 1837–1860

2.       Pamelia "Amelia" Doy 1838–1907

3.       John James Doy 1841–

4.       Lucretia Doy 1844–1903

5.       Alfred Egbert Doy 1845–1932

6.       George Edward Doy 1846–1923

7.       Wilberforce C. Doy 1851–

8.       Harriet B Doy Reimer 1854–1908

9.   William S Doy 1855–1944

10.   Leander J Doy 1857–1930

John Doy wrote of the journey from Rochester, New York to St. Louis, Missouri in his narrative.  Here is what he said.

“This first pioneer party was to ascertain if the soil was

such as had been represented-fertile, well wooded and well

watered, and thus calculated to prove a good agricultural

and manufacturing country. If they found this to be the

case, they were immediately to advise those who would be

waiting for their report, and to make such preparations as

might be necessary to receive and locate the body of emigrants

who would probably follow them, and who, coming

later in the season, would require all the time remaining to

secure themselves against suffering in the winter.

Mr. Daniel R. Anthony and I were the only persons who

joined the pioneer company at Rochester. The party then

numbered twenty-nine, and we went on our way, I making

it my business to call and see the presidents of all the railroads

on our route, by which we thought it best that the

succeeding parties should come, if we found the Territory

to be of such a character as we hoped and expected. I

met with the same encouragement from the managers of

the Western railroads as from those of the Eastern, and all

promised every facility.

 

On arriving at St. Louis, we made a bargain with the

captain of a steamboat-the Polar Star-to take us to

Kansas City, Missouri, for twelve dollars a head. Every

thing went on well. At Lexington, Missouri, some of us .

strolled about on shore while the boat wooded, and certain

persons, having learned who we were, from the captain or

otherwise, informed us that a large party was waiting for

us at Kansas City, and would give us a warm reception, of

such a character as might induce us to go back. On nearing

Kansas City, therefore, our little army of twenty-nine was

drawn up in a line on deck, with rifles and revolvers all

ready to give a fitting response to the promised warm

reception. But we found no one to molest us or make us

afraid ; consequently, when the boat reached the landing,

we quietly went on shore in a body, and attended to our

own business ; neither did we molest any one.”

 

The story of John Doy’s capture and escape from the pro-slavery militia men in Missouri is told very well by Tom Huntington in The American Heritage Magazine.

Civil War Chronicles

The Abolitionist John Doy

Written by Tom Huntington

As published in The American Heritage Magazine, Spring 2009, Volume 59, Issue 1. 

On January 25, 1859, a small wagon expedition of three whites and 13 blacks stole away from Lawrence, Kansas, on the first leg of a journey that would take the African Americans to the free state of Iowa, far from Kansas and the ever-present threat of kidnapping by slave traders. For the three white abolitionists it was a protest against those who would deny their deepest beliefs about freedom and human rights.

The wagons splashed across the Kansas River and left Lawrence behind. Twelve miles outside town, after the party had descended a small hill, about 20 armed and mounted men emerged from behind a bluff. Guns leveled, they forced the wagons to a stop and accused the white men of stealing slaves. The expedition’s white leader, John Doy, jumped from his horse and confronted a man he recognized. “Where’s your process?” Doy demanded. The man shoved his gun barrel into Doy’s head. “Here it is,” he growled.

Ever since the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the Kansas territory had been thrust into the front lines of the increasingly rancorous national debate over slavery. The act nullified the Missouri Compromise, which had forbidden the expansion of slavery north of the 36°30 N line of latitude, and legislated that settlers could determine by popular vote whether or not to allow slavery in their territories. The stakes were high, and passions became inflamed. “The fate of the South is to be decided in Kansas,” declared South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks in March 1856. Four months later Brooks bludgeoned abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner senseless with a cane on the floor of the Senate after the latter had delivered a speech entitled, “The Crime against Kansas.”

Activists on both sides converged on Kansas, each intending to help tip the scales for or against slavery. “Border ruffians,” who crossed over from slave-owning Missouri, began battling with abolitionist “free soilers.” The violence gave the territory a new name: “Bleeding Kansas.”

John Doy, a physician from Rochester, New York, heeded the call from abolitionist societies and moved to Kansas in July 1854. A full-bearded and serious-looking man, Doy helped found the town of Lawrence and built a house on its outskirts, where his wife and nine children joined him. As a bastion of free-soil sympathies, Lawrence became a target of pro-slavers, who sacked it on May 21, 1856. In retaliation, the abolitionist firebrand John Brown and his men murdered five slave owners near Pottawatomie Creek. Three months later Doy fought alongside Brown in a pitched battle at Osawatomie, 60 miles southeast of Lawrence.

Kansas became increasingly dangerous for African Americans, so on January 18, 1859, a group of Lawrence’s citizens raised money to help blacks move to safety. Brown offered to take one group north to Canada and did so without incident. Doy also volunteered to help by taking another group about 60 miles northwest to the town of Holton, the first step on the road to Iowa. His passage proved less fortunate.

Among the African Americans on Doy’s expedition were Wilson Hayes and Charles Smith, cooks at a Lawrence hotel. Doy knew that both of them were free men, although they had no papers. All the others had their “free papers,” including William Riley, who had been kidnapped once before from Lawrence but had managed to escape.

Free or not, all 16 members of the party now found themselves in the hands of angry men bent on delivering them to slave-owning Missouri. The ambushers forced their captives on an overnight journey to Rialto Ferry, where they were put aboard a steamboat for passage across the Missouri River. On the opposite shore, an awaiting mob paraded Doy on horseback through town, beating and cursing him. One enraged man grabbed Doy by the beard and smashed his head repeatedly against a wall of the building where the prisoners were to spend the night.

The next morning John and his 25-year-old son Charles were pushed through the mob to the courthouse. The justice of the peace, who had “a face and eyes that looked as if all the milk of human kindness he ever possessed had long since soured,” Doy later remembered, sent the third white man back to Kansas but ordered the Doys locked up in Platte City and put on trial for abducting slaves.

After another rough welcome in Platte City, the two Doys were thrown into a windowless cell, “an iron box, exactly eight feet square . . . and about seven feet high, furnished with a mattress on an iron bedstead, and with a horse rug and an old piece of cotton carpeting for a coverlid.” The situation proved even worse for the African Americans. Hays, Smith, and Riley landed in the Platte City jail. Doy watched through the door grate as slave trader Jake Hurd brutally whipped Hays and Smith in a futile attempt to gain a confession that they were escaped slaves, then dragged them away. Riley managed to loosen the bars from his cell window and escaped back to Kansas—only to be later kidnapped once more as he was making his way to Nebraska.

Doy’s counsel successfully petitioned to have the trial moved to the slightly less hostile town of St. Joseph, and the Doys bid farewell to their miserable Platte City cell on March 24. “Pale from confinement and want of light, cadaverous, emaciated, covered with vermin—for notwithstanding the clean clothes we had had the advantage of since my wife’s arrival, we had not been able to free ourselves of them—with my joints swollen, my ankles, especially, so painful that I could hardly bear my weight upon them, I was weakened both in body and mind,” Doy wrote.

The jail in St. Joseph was “a paradise after the cell at Platte City,” and the jailer, named Brown, “proved to be a very humane man.” The jury at the first trial in St. Joseph deadlocked, so the judge set Charles free and scheduled a second trial for the elder Doy on June 20. The second jury found him guilty and sentenced him to five years’ hard labor. While Doy’s counsel filed an appeal to the state supreme court, prosecutors planned a dozen more indictments against him on charges of stealing other slaves in the ill-fated expedition. He faced up to 65 years in prison.

But help was on its way. On the evening of July 23, a young man visited him in the jailhouse and slipped him a note reading “Be ready at midnight.”

That night a storm hit St. Joseph. Amid its fury, a man knocked on the jailhouse door and shouted to Brown the jailer that he had a horse thief he wanted locked up. Somewhat reluctantly, Brown went downstairs and opened the door. Two men held the alleged criminal, his hands bound. The jailer led them upstairs and opened the door to the cell. Suddenly the horse thief whipped off his bindings and one of his “captors” jammed a revolver against Brown’s chest. “If you resist or try to give an alarm, you’re a dead man,” he warned. “We’ve come to take Dr. Doy home to Kansas, and we mean to do it; so you’d best be quiet.”

Doy emerged from the cell, shook the jailer’s hand, and left with his rescuers. He was so weak that two men needed to support him through the storm and down to the river, where boats were waiting. “By dint of hard pulling, for the current of the Missouri is very strong there, we soon landed on the Kansas bank, which I had often gazed at longingly from the window of my cell,” Doy wrote. His rescuers bundled their charge into a covered wagon for the 90-mile journey back to Lawrence, where Doy was “restored to my home, to my family and friends, and to the soil I love so well.”

His ordeal was over, but the country’s was just beginning. In October 1859, Doy’s friend and fellow abolitionist John Brown led a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Civil War erupted a year and a half later.

FOOTNOTE:  There are many family trees which show John Doy as the son of Thomas Doy, Chimney Sweeper and Sarah Watts.  There is a record of baptism in the Norfolk church showing Jonathan's baptism, both in Hoe (at birth) and in Welborne (at age 15).  After his baptism, the next record to be found is his marriage and then the 1841 census record.  It is difficult to draw the conclusion that John Doy, born in Welborne is the same John Doy who moved to Hull in Yorkshire, married and then emigrated to America.  Once, in America, there are plenty of records to record his time until his death in Battle Creek, Michigan.  It is a somewhat dangerous leap of faith to state definitively that the John Doy born in Welborne is the same man married in Hull, Yorkshire, England.  But neither is there proof to the contrary.  I tried to discover if there might be another John Doy born in Yorkshire, but could find no records to substantiate the possibility of another man with the same name.  In 1841, John Doy is found in the census record as a "warehouseman", but the John Doe arriving in America claimed to be a homeopathic physician.  The marriage record in Yorkshire only records the marriage but doesn't show his father or the trade of either.  So, a presumption that the son of a chimney sweep became educated enough to learn about homeopathic medicine and then in late 1859 write a fairly fluent narrative of his adventures as an anti-slavery supporter is a stretch.  

However, without proper proof, it may be unwise to add him to the family tree, but I found the story to be worthwhile and perhaps, by retelling the story, I might leave a little hope that it is possible that John Doy in America is related to our family tree.

Genealogy:  (This portion of his genealogy is accurate.  However, the loss of confidence is in the ability to prove with certainty that this is the same John Doy who moved to America.)  Jonathan "John" Doy 1811-1869  (1st cousin 2x removed of husband of 2nd great-grandaunt) was the son of Thomas Doy 1787-1865 and he was the brother of Charles Doy 1767-1847 and his son was Charles Doy 1799-1872 and his son was Samuel Doy 1828-1896 and his son was Charles Henry Doy 1853-1928 and his wife was Harriet Elizabeth Adams 1855-1913 and her brother was William Frederick Adams 1848-1907 and his son was George "Pikey" William Welch-Adams 1867-1940.