David Christy

Ohio, United States

From 1824 to 1836 he was a newspaper man, and it was probably owing to this early training that he acquired his later skill in presenting his views on public questions in an interesting and striking manner. In 1848 he was appointed an agent of the American Colonization Society in Ohio and was instrumental in inducing Charles McMicken of Cincinnati and others to contribute toward the purchase of a tract of land in Africa for the colonization of the free colored laborer. This land lay between Sierra Leone and Liberia and was known as "Ohio in Africa. " In his capacity as agent he visited Columbus in January 1849 where he found the legislature in heated discussion over the repeal of the Black Laws which were designed to prevent the immigration of colored men into Ohio. A memorial was presented by the friends of colonization to send emigrants to Liberia, and Christy was asked to deliver lectures on African colonization before the House of Representatives in Ohio, which he did on February 19, 1849, and again on January 19, 1850. These were subsequently published at Columbus as well as a pamphlet, On the Present Relations of Free Labor to Slave in Tropical and Semi-Tropical Countries, which he had prepared for the Ohio Constitutional Convention. In 1852 he published The Republic of Liberia: Facts for Thinking Men, which was originally addressed to the citizens of Cleveland and printed in the columns of the Herald and the Plain Dealer. The agitation over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the attacks of the Abolitionists on slavery caused Christy in 1855 to publish his most important work. This was entitled Cotton Is King: or the Economical Relations of Slavery (1855). The author's name was withheld in the first edition although it was given in later editions. Christy's object in writing the essay was "to convince the abolitionists of the utter failure of their plans". The essay ran through three editions and De Bow's Review declared that it was "cogent, well-informed, and temperate". This work was followed in 1857 by a pamphlet on Ethiopia: Her Gloom and Glory (1857). In the meantime, due to the fact that his duties as agent compelled him to travel extensively in the eastern and middle sections of the country and because he had a natural aptitude for the sciences, Christy began to make geological observations. These he reported in a series of letters first published in the Cincinnati Gazette and later issued in pamphlet form and addressed to Dr. John Locke, assistant to the chief geologist of Ohio. According to Locke, no one else had "actually drawn approximate sections of the strata from the Atlantic to Iowa and from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico" (Letters on the Geology of the West and Southwest, Rossville, 1848). Christy's interest in geology led him to correspond with M. de Verneuil of Paris and to be employed as the geologist of the Nantahala & Tuckasege Land & Mineral Company of North Carolina. In 1867 he was engaged in writing a book on "Geology Attesting Christianity".