Leonidas Dodson papers

Leonidas Dodson was among the prominent citizens of Easton, Maryland, in the nineteenth century. Dodson was born on October 12, 1822 in the town of St. Michael's in Talbot County to William Dodson and Amelia S. Brown. As a young man he taught for several years in the Female Department of the primary school in St. Michael's before moving to Easton in 1854. There he held a number of positions at Easton National Bank, eventually becoming a teller. A devoted Methodist, Dodson served the church as a trustee, Sunday school teacher, chorister, and lay preacher. He was also an active member of the Masons and the Odd Fellows. Family legend goes that Dodson taught Frederick Douglass to read while Douglass was enslaved by Dodson's mother's cousin Thomas Auld. This seems unlikely, as Douglass was enslaved by Auld for nine months in 1832 when Dodson was eleven and Douglass fifteen. It is, however, possible that Dodson met Douglass and observed the cruel treatment that Thomas Auld meted out to the people he enslaved. Dodson married Eleanor Jane Jefferson (1821-1867) in 1846, and together they had seven children, of which three survived. The youngest of these, William Patterson Dodson, was one of the first Methodist missionaries to Africa. After Eleanor's death, Dodson remarried and had four children with his second wife, Salina Virginia Barnett (called "Jennie" and "Ginnie" in the journals). Two of Dodson's children with Barnett survived. There are records of Dodson enslaving a woman named Emily for an unknown amount of time. It is not known if he enslaved other people, but there are records that Dodson hired people who were enslaved by other local families, an agreement where the enslavers received the payment not the enslaved people who were doing the labor for the hiring family. These agreements allowed Dodson to benefit from the enslavement of people without being their enslaver himself. At the time of his death on November 20, 1889, Dodson had five living children.