Codding, Ichabod

Born: 1810-09-23 Bristol, New York

Died: 1866-06-17 Wisconsin

Flourished: 1854-11-13 Chicago, Illinois

Ichabod Codding became a popular public speaker early in life, making a name for himself in the temperance movement at age seventeen. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont and took a leave of absence to join the anti-slavery movement. Codding served as an agent and lecturer of the American Anti-Slavery Society, commissioned in 1836 and assigned to Maine in 1838. He later moved west, joining the abolitionist cause in Illinois and Wisconsin. Codding also supported women's involvement the abolitionist cause and helped to establish Wisconsin's first anti-slavery newspaper. He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and supported the early Republican Party. Codding married Maria H. Gooding on November 15, 1856, in Peoria County. In 1860, the couple had three children and Codding owned $5,480 in real property. Codding died in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), 1:673; Pamela R. Peters, The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 34; Owen W. Muelder, Theodore Dwight Weld and the American Anti-Slavery Society (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 74; Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, Peoria County, 15 November 1856, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, IL; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Bureau County, IL, 41; Gravestone, Lockport Cemetery, Lockport, IL.