Thomas Gregory Smith Dabney was born on January 4, 1798 at “Bellevue, ” King and Queen County, Virginia, United States; of well-to-do Fluguenot stock, son of Benjamin and Sarah (Smith) Dabney.
His father dying early, the boy grew up in New York at the home of his uncle, Dr. John Augustine Smith.
After several sessions of boarding-school in New Jersey he entered the College of William and Mary, but soon withdrew to manage the family estate, “Elmington, ” in Gloucester County, where for fifteen years he raised wheat and tobacco and followed the agreeable existence of the antebellum Virginia gentleman.
A diligent and skilled executive, he was successful from the first.
Much of his prosperity proceeded from the sense of responsibility which, out of compassion rather than self-interest, he felt toward his negroes: his consideration and affection, and even firmness, they repaid with unvarying devotion.
At the same time he managed—more carefully than his own, it was said— four other plantations; was an eager, although personally disinterested, student of public affairs; fished, hunted, and played whist; entertained so open-handedly as to win reputation as an “incomparable host”; and devoted himself to his large family.
Peace found him in straitened circumstances.
To cap his losses of over a half-million dollars in slaves, livestock, and household goods, the defalcation of a friend caused the sacrifice of his remaining property and saddled him with a debt which took fourteen years of bitterest self-denial to pay. He could have avoided this by declaring himself bankrupt: instead, the hands that had never performed manual labor learned to garden, saw wood, and even—to save his daughters—do the washing.
Adversity chastened him, made him tender, more patient, but did not bend him: to his death he remained the patrician, guileless, generous, high-hearted, courageous, tolerant of all save dishonesty or littleness. His actual achievement was slight; his significance was that he symbolized a class, a section, an era.
His Whig principles helped to make him a strong Unionist, and when secession threatened he would have moved to England save for his inability to provide comfortably for his slaves; yet, when war came, he gave unreservedly to the South his crops, his money, and his sons, and fretted because he himself was not in the field.
Quotations: “I never could forget that I was born a gentleman, and incapable, consequently, of a mean action. ”
Without aspiring to drive “the horses of the sun, ” nevertheless he lived greatly, so naturally and unostentatiously filling a long life with honorable deeds that Gladstone, upon reading his biography, was moved to pronounce him “one of the very noblest of human characters. ”
On June 6, 1820 Dabney married Mary Adelaide, daughter of Samuel Tyler of Williamsburg, who died three years later, and on June 26, 1826, he married Sophia Hill of King and Queen County. His son Virginius was a teacher and author.
