Alfred Elijah Dickinson (3 December 1830–20 November 1906), Baptist minister and editor, was the son of Ralph Dickinson, a prosperous farmer, and Frances A. S. Quisenberry Dickinson. He was born in Orange County and grew up in Louisa County. Dickinson was baptized at age seventeen at Foster Creek (later Berea) Baptist Church, in Louisa County. Nearby Forest Hill Baptist Church licensed him to preach shortly thereafter and ordained him sometime between September 1853 and September 1854. Dickinson taught school until 1849, when he entered Richmond College (later part of the University of Richmond). He spent his summers as a colporteur, selling Bibles and other religious books in the Goshen Baptist Association, which served Louisa and Orange Counties. After graduating in 1852, Dickinson returned to Louisa County as a schoolteacher and pastor of the Upper and Lower Gold Mine Baptist Churches. His early ministerial experience combined pastoral ministries, itinerant evangelism, denominational representation, and tract distribution. An impressive figure, Dickinson, according to one account, appeared as a "massive form, towering, like Saul" above a gathering and possessed a great sense of humor and irrepressible spirit.

Dickinson studied at the University of Virginia during the 1852–1853 and 1854–1855 academic sessions. He assisted the college's chaplain, John Albert Broadus, at the Charlottesville Baptist Church and was for all practical purposes its pastor from 1855 to 1857. The two men shared a deep interest in the development of Sunday schools and maintained a close relationship for the rest of their lives. With his talents and Broadus's support, Dickinson advanced quickly. In 1855 he was elected to the Albemarle Baptist Association's Board of Colportage, and the following year he became a manager of the state Foreign Mission Board. By June 1858 the Baptist General Association of Virginia had appointed him the first general superintendent of colportage and Sunday school.

Dickinson moved to Richmond, most likely in 1857, and remained there the rest of his life. On 28 September 1857 he married Frances Ellen Taylor, daughter of James Barnett Taylor, a noted Baptist historian and corresponding secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions. Of their two sons and five daughters, one son and two daughters died young.

The Civil War increased the importance of Dickinson's colportage ministry. At the 1861 annual meeting of the Baptist General Association of Virginia he urged the state's Baptists to extend their work among soldiers. Dickinson suggested that Southern churches seize the increased opportunities for tract distribution afforded by the large numbers of troops in the state. He also foresaw the need for increasing the South's publishing capabilities. The Virginia colportage effort that Dickinson led fielded two-thirds of all colporteurs in the South at the beginning of the war. He reported to the state convention in 1862 that he and his colporteurs had raised $24,000, printed forty tracts, and distributed 6,187,000 printed pages, in addition to 6,095 New Testaments and 13,845 camp hymnals. During the following year, eighty colporteurs and evangelists worked in Virginia.

Dickinson left the colportage ministry at the end of the war. From 1865 to October 1868 he served as pastor of Richmond's Leigh Street Baptist Church, one of the largest Baptist congregations in the state. Several notable revivals occurred during Dickinson's tenure. He and Jeremiah Bell Jeter purchased the influential weekly Baptist journal Religious Herald in 1865. Dickinson worked as the junior editor until Jeter died in 1880 and as the senior editor until his own death. Dickinson spent little time in the office but traveled throughout Virginia soliciting subscribers. Finding money for southern institutions and destitute churches also occupied Dickinson's postwar energy. He raised more than $100,000 to rebuild and expand Richmond College, of which he served as a trustee for thirty-five years. Dickinson was one of the most influential men in the Southern Baptist Convention. His best-known lecture, What Baptist Principles Are Worth to the World (1889), appeared in tract form and sold millions of copies in several languages.

Dickinson's wife died on 22 September 1879. On 8 November 1880 he married Mary Lou Craddock, of Halifax County. Before her death on 23 August 1897, they had one daughter. Dickinson married Bessie Fleet Bagby, of King and Queen County, on 3 January 1899. Alfred Elijah Dickinson died in Richmond on 20 November 1906. Following a funeral in the Richmond College chapel, he was buried in the city's Hollywood Cemetery among the remains of Confederate soldiers he had served as a colporteur.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Men of Mark in Virginia (1908), 4:104–106, George Braxton Taylor, ed., Virginia Baptist Ministers, 5th ser. (1915), 166–176 (by son and with birth date), Woodford B. Hackley, Faces on the Wall: Brief Sketches of the Men and Women Whose Portraits and Busts Were on the Campus of the University of Richmond in 1955 (1972), 24–26 (portrait on unnumbered page tipped in between 62 and 63), and William Earl Brown, "Pastoral Evangelism: A Model for Effective Evangelism as Demonstrated by the Ministries of John Albert Broadus, Alfred Elijah Dickinson, and John William Jones in the Revival of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1863" (Ph.D. diss., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1999), 81–100; "Facts Desired Concerning Former Students of the University of Virginia Who Have Been Ministers of the Gospel (with variant birthplace of Spotsylvania Co.)," Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; biographical file in Religious Herald Archives, Virginia Baptist Historical Society, University of Richmond; letters in Correspondence of the Editors of the Religious Herald, Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, Ca.; Daily Richmond Enquirer, 30 Sept. 1857; Marriage Registers, Halifax Co. (1880), King and Queen Co. (1899), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries and editorial tributes in Richmond News Leader, 21 Nov. 1906, and Richmond Times-Dispatch (quotation), 21 Nov. 1906, Religious Herald, 29 Nov. 1906, 4–6, 12–13 (with cover portrait), and Baptist General Association of Virginia Minutes (1907), 87–89.

Photograph courtesy Library Company of Philadelphia, American Celebrities Album.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by William E. Brown.

How to cite this page:
William E. Brown, "Alfred Elijah Dickinson (1830–1906)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dickinson_Alfred_Elijah, accessed [today's date]).

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