The Allen–King Affair
Phillipsville, New York · January 1853
Professor William G. Allen was a free Black scholar of Greek and German, born in Virginia of a free mother and an unacknowledged white father. He had taken a chair at New York Central College in 1850, and within two years had won the affection of a student named Mary King — the white daughter of the Rev. Lyndon King, himself an abolitionist minister of Fulton, New York.
Their engagement, made known in late 1852, did not survive the winter. Mary’s stepmother and her father’s congregation revolted against the match. Newspapers as far as Boston printed accounts under headlines such as “Amalgamation at Phillipsville.”
On the evening of January 30, 1853, a crowd estimated at between four and six hundred men gathered at the King farmhouse. They carried clubs, tar, feathers, and a rail upon which, by their own promise, the professor would be ridden out of town. Allen, warned by friends, was hidden in an attic; he escaped near midnight in a closed sleigh driven by a sympathetic neighbor.
Mary was placed under what amounted to house arrest. Within weeks, through the agency of friends in New York, she slipped from her father’s house, met Allen in the city, and was married there on March 30, 1853. Within days the couple sailed for Liverpool.
From exile in England, Allen published in 1853 a slim, blistering book — The American Prejudice Against Color: An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily the Nation Got into an Uproar. It indicted not only the mob, but the silence of Northern respectability that had emboldened it. The book remains in print and is freely available; a link is provided on the Sources page.
The Allens never returned to America. They taught in London for the rest of their lives, raised a family in straitened circumstances, and slipped, like the college itself, into the long quiet of historical neglect.
“We had committed no crime; we had only loved one another.”