Sylvanus Lowry

Sylvanus B. Lowry (July 24, 1824 – 1865) was an American Democratic political boss, newspaper publisher and pioneer in St.

Repeatedly attacked in writing by the abolitionist newspaper publisher Jane Swisshelm, he found his political influence reduced.

His father was David Lowry, a Scottish-American Cumberland Presbyterian minister and missionary to the Winnebago people in northeast Iowa.

[3] His father, a Presbyterian minister who established a Cumberland mission; and his sister Elizabeth and her husband also migrated to St.

[2] More slave-owning Southerners entered the state after 1857, when the US Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case that, as slaves were not citizens, they had no standing to file freedom suits.

Its decision also that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional meant that Minnesota was unable to enforce its laws against slavery.

He is well known in Minnesota folklore for his conflict with the abolitionist newspaper publisher Jane Grey Swisshelm, who repeatedly attacked him for his slaveholding as well as for allegedly defrauding the Winnebago people, damaging his political influence.