Andrew Flinn Dickson was an American minister and author. Dickson, the son of Rev. John Dickson, was born in Charleston, S. C., November 8, 1825. His mother was a daughter of Rev. Andrew Flinn, D.D., the first pastor of the 2d Presbyterian Church in Charleston. He graduated from Yale College in 1845. After graduation he began to teach in his native city, but was soon obliged to move to a more northern climate for the sake of his father's health. He taught in Cincinnati for about a year, and after his father's death, in 1847, entered Lane Theological Seminary in that city. The next year he returned to New Haven, and was connected with the Yale Divinity School until January, 1850. In the meantime he had been licensed to preach by the Middlesex Association of Congregational Ministers, and having been married, Jan. 7, 1850, to Miss A. H. Woocthull, of Long Island, he took charge of the Presbyterian Churches of John's Island and Wadmalaw, near Charleston, in which out of a membership of 360, 330 were African-American. After serving in this position for some years and acting for a short time as an agent of the American Tract Society, he took charge in 1856 of the Presbyterian Church in Orangeburg, S. C, and left this position to become a chaplain in the Confederate service during the late war. His next pastoral charge was over the Canal Street Presbyterian Church in New Orleans from 1868 to 1871. He subsequently served the church in Wilmington, N. C, for about 18 months, and then the church inChester, S. C, for three years. The General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church, having established an Institute for the Training of Colored Ministers at Tuscaloosa, Ala., he was appointed its first professor and entered on his duties in October, 1876. While filling this position he died, in Tuscaloosa, after two days' illness, of pleurisy, January 8, 1879, aged 53 years. His wife with nine children survived him. Dickson had published, in 1856 and 1860, two series of Plantation Sermons, and in 1872 a volume on the Temptation in the Desert. He was also, in 1878, the successful competitor for the prize established by the late Hon. Richard Fletcher, by an essay entitled, "The Light—is it Waning?"
