David Nelson was an American Presbyterian clergyman, educator, and abolitionist. He was a pulpit orator of great ability and became one of the notable preachers of his day in his denomination.
Background
David Nelson was born on September 24, 1793 in Jonesboro, Tennessee, United States. He was one of a family of Presbyterian ministers. His parents, Henry and Anna (Kelsey) Nelson, of English and Scotch extraction respectively, had migrated to East Tennessee from Rockbridge County, Virginia.
Education
David studied under the Reverend Samuel Doak at Washington College, two miles from his home. Upon his graduation at the age of sixteen he determined to become a physician, and after an apprenticeship to Dr. Ephraim McDowell at Danville, Kentucky, he went to Philadelphia for further study.
Career
He began his active practice as surgeon in the War of 1812 with an expeditionary force that invaded Canada, and later served with Andrew Jackson's army in Alabama and Florida. After peace was declared he returned to Jonesboro, and during the ensuing decade built up a lucrative practice in his profession. While studying medicine, Nelson had been captured by the naturalistic doctrines then rife among members of his profession, and had become "an honest, unreflecting deist. "
In April 1825 he was licensed to preach by the Abingdon Presbytery, and six months later he gave up his medical practice and was ordained as an evangelist.
From 1827 to 1829 he was one of the editors of the Calvinistic Magazine and in 1828 he succeeded his brother, Samuel Kelsey Nelson, as pastor of the Presbyterian church at Danville, Kentucky.
At Western Reserve College, Theodore D. Weld, abolition revivalist extraordinary, started among the faculty an anti-slavery discussion whose repercussions were heard throughout the Western Reserve. The next year among the students at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati he inspired a debate on slavery that converted the student body and disrupted the school. At St. Louis, Missouri, Elijah P. Lovejoy echoed the perilous agitation in the columns of the St. Louis Observer, the Presbyterian paper for the Far West. Nelson's convictions had led him, before he went to Missouri, to free his own slaves, and now, surrounded as he was by the agitation, he could not remain unmoved: at the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1835, in Pittsburgh, Theodore Weld found him ready for the abolition gospel. Together with more than one-fourth of his fellow delegates, he "pledged himself openly to the Cause".
A month after his return to Marion College he accepted a regular agency from the American Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1836, from the pulpit of his Presbyterian church in Palmyra, he called upon the slave-holders of his congregation to repent their sins and free their slaves. He was straightway expelled from Marion College and from Missouri, not escaping mob violence on the way, and the faculty of Marion College published a manifesto, nervously asseverating their loyalty to the institutions of the community. At Quincy, Illinois, he now founded a new college, a "manual labour institution, " where students were to support themselves by building their own dwellings and raising food for their sustenance on the college farm. The school did not survive its first year, and Nelson again took up agency work for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Intermittently he labored for the slave until 1840, when his health gave way completely.
He died at Oakland, Illinois, four years later.
Religion
After settling in Jonesboro, he eloped at the age of twenty-two with the charming young daughter of David Deaderick, a prominent merchant. She appears to have been sincerely religious, however, and her influence, together with several years of reflection upon his deistical principles, brought him back to the Presbyterian Church. His return from deism to Calvinism he later recorded in a powerful tract, The Cause and Cure of Infidelity, written in 1836, of which more than a hundred thousand copies were distributed by the American Tract Society, and many thousands more by tract societies in England.
Politics
Nelson was no faint-hearted reformer.
Personality
Nelson was big, fun-loving, and attractive; he drank and played cards to an extent distressing to his family. He was careless in dress and eccentric in manner. He was careless in dress and eccentric in manner.
As anti-slavery lecturer in western Illinois, he was only moderately successful, partly on account of increasing disability from epilepsy.