“An Unlikely Abolitionist”: Samuel Hopkins and His Complex Fight Against Slavery
by Fred Zilian, Ph.D, Michael J. Simpson, M.A., A.M
Living in Newport, Rhode Island, for 33 years, Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Transatlantic Human Trade. Though he had previously enslaved a single individual, Hopkins sold this woman before moving to the seaside city. In Newport, likely influenced by parishioner Sarah Osborn, who worked closely educating both free and enslaved Black individuals, Hopkins quickly turned to abolitionism. His sermons denounced slavery, and in 1776, he wrote A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, addressing it directly to the Continental Congress. Hopkins also sought to educate two African-born enslaved men in his community– John Quamino and Bristol Yamma– intending to send both men, who were fluent in both their native languages and English, back to West Africa as Christian missionaries for the Congregational Church.[1]
While Hopkins was central to these early efforts to “resettle” West Africa with formerly enslaved Africans, his later actions revealed the limits of his allyship. When free Black men in Providence organized their own emigration effort, Hopkins refused to provide the letters of reference they needed, effectively derailing the plan. This refusal underscores a recurring pattern in white allyship—supporting causes when decisions align with their own leadership but withdrawing when Black individuals assert control over their destinies.[2]
Portrait of Rev. Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803) – An 18th-century oil portrait of Samuel Hopkins, the Congregational minister from Newport whose sermons were among the first in America to openly condemn slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Hopkins became an influential abolitionist theologian, urging the manumission of enslaved people and the abolition of the trade in Rhode Island
Early Life
Hopkins was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on September 17th, 1721. From an early age he came to share the strong faith of his father, Timothy, a farmer.
At 16, Hopkins was admitted to Yale College in September 1737, a time when the religious Great Awakening was spreading throughout New England, led by men such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. By December 1741, Hopkins had placed himself under the direction of the Reverend Edwards, living with the Edwards family for eight months in Northampton, Massachusetts. Hopkins came to be one of Edward’s closest friends as well as one of his theological disciples. Under Edwards, Hopkins studied “divinity” and other theological principles. Though Reverend Edwards condemned the trade in people from Africa, he also defended the institution of slavery. His Puritanism included the belief that all humans had various divinely-appointed stations in life. That some people were enslaved merely reflected God’s ordained plan. Hopkins, and others, eventually broke with Edwards on this particular tenet and took the next step in condemning both the Transatlantic Human Trade and the institution of slavery itself, setting an uncharted course for the religious ethics of white abolitionists in the 18th century.[4]
About his youth, he wrote:
“I from my youth was not volatile and wild, but rather of a sober, steady make; and was not guilty of external irregularities, such as disobedience to parents, profanation of the Sabbath, lying, foolish jesting, quarreling, passion and anger, or rash and profane words. Indeed I do not recollect that I ever heard a profane word from any of my youthful companions, for the first fourteen years of my life.” [3]
By 1743, Hopkins was ordained in the church at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, serving as pastor there until 1769. His strong Whig views generated opposition in a parish full of Tories, and he was eventually dismissed. After a short period of farming, Hopkins was called to be a candidate for preacher at the First Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island.[5]
Photo of the United Congregational Church in Newport, RI.
A Tumultuous Arrival in Newport
Having spent decades refining his theological views and grappling with questions of morality, Hopkins arrived in Newport in 1769—a city whose wealth was built on the transatlantic hunan trade. It was here, amidst the stark realities of slavery, that his evolving theology met the brutal truths of the human trade, leading to a profound transformation in his ministry. When Hopkins first arrived he began quickly working with the female society of the church. Women not only made up a sizable majority in the congregation, but also outnumbered adult men by an average of 500 in the city population during this period of Newport’s history. Despite their significant presence, women were unable to vote both in the church and in Newport. Thus, it was the three men who voted to not accept Hopkins as their pastor that caused him to decline the original call. On March 18th, 1770, he gave what he originally thought was his final sermon. However, the sermon so inspired congregants Sarah Osborn and Susanna Anthony, that they decided to leverage their considerable influence to persuade the voting members of the congregation to reconsider Hopkins. They succeeded, and on April 11, 1770, Hopkins was installed as the fourth pastor of the First Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island.[6]
Contemporary portrait of Samuel Hopkins
During the preceding decades, Newport had become a prosperous port city, second in wealth and population only to Boston.[7] Much of this wealth was generated by Newport’s dominant role in the British North American slave-trading and sugar production system. Enslaved Africans in the colony of Rhode Island, especially in Newport and across the bay in southwest Rhode Island, called “Narragansett Country,” provided the labor to generate the produce and products traded in the British North American trading network. Historian Christy Clark-Pujara writes that in the 18th century, Newport became “the most important slave-trading port of departure in North America.” She continues: “The streets of Newport were paved and its bridges and country roads mended through the duties collected on slave imports. In many ways, the business of slavery literally built Rhode Island.”[8]
Hopkins himself wrote of Newport in 1787:
“The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those of Newport, have had by far the greater share in this traffic, of all these United States. This trade in the human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, oh which every other movement in business has chiefly depended. That town has been built up, and flourished in times past, at the expense of the blood, the liberty, and happiness of the poor Africans, and the inhabitants have lived on this and by it have gotten most of their wealth and riches.”[9]
Arguments and Actions Against the Human Trade and Slavery
Shortly after his arrival in Newport, Samuel Hopkins began to preach against the human trade and the institution of slavery, “so far as I then knew, almost alone in my opposition to the slave trade and the slavery of the Africans.” He was disgusted by the forced removal of Africans from their homeland and condemned the inhumane treatment enslaved people received both during the Middle Passage and after their arrival in the colonies. Hopkins asserted that “volumes might be written, and not give a detail of a thousandth part of the shockingly cruel things they have suffered, and are constantly suffering.” He argued that any person with a sense of morality “who are witnesses to any part of this horrid scene of barbarous oppression,” could not deny the inhumanity of chattel slavery. For Hopkins, slavery was not just an individual failing but a collective moral crisis, which he described as “a national sin, and a sin of the first magnitude—a sin which righteous Heaven has never suffered to pass unpunished in this world.” Historian Christy Clark Pujara further notes that “Hopkins came to believe British tyranny was a result of the colonists’ sins: slaveholding and slavetrading.”[10]
Map showing the primary movement of Enslaved Africans, raw materials, and manufactured goods
Hopkins was among the early abolitionists to highlight the glaring hypocrisy of the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality when juxtaposed with the oppression of the enslaved, calling it a “wicked contradiction.” He asked pointedly, “Is it possible that the Americans should, after all this … and after they had obtained liberty and independence for themselves, continue to hold hundreds of thousands of their fellow-men in the most abject slavery?” On the eve of the Revolution, Hopkins wrote a lengthy dialogue addressing specifically the members of the Continental Congress. Published in 1776, the work’s significance was reaffirmed when it was republished in 1785 by the Abolition Society of New York. In his introductory letter to the dialogue, Hopkins underscored the universality of liberty, writing: “May you judge the poor of the people …and be the happy instruments of procuring and establishing universal liberty to white and black, to be transmitted down to the latest posterity.”[11]
In 1793 addressing the Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade, Hopkins reiterated his arguments against the institution of slavery, noting the significant progress that had been made in shifting public opinion. He remarked: “there are none, or very few now, … who do not condemn it, as contrary to the true and best interest of society, and therefore, think all lawful endeavors ought to be exerted to suppress and abolish it forever.”[12]
Hopkins then elaborated on the devastating effects of slavery, both on the enslaved people and the slaveholders:
“Suffice it now, in a few words, to say, that, by this trade in the bodies and souls of men, millions have been violently torn from their native country and from every thing dear to them; in the accomplishment of which, fire and sword, war and desolation and slaughter of numbers exceeding our reckoning have taken place through a vast extent of country, and multitudes have been induced to betray, steal, and sell their countrymen and neighbors. Many thousands of these, thus taken from their country and all the enjoyments of life and liberty, and all their dearest connections, have died on board the ships, in their passage to the West Indies or to other countries, and the rest have been sold, like brute beasts, into perpetual slavery, with their posterity after them where most of them are treated in a manner beyond description inhuman and cruel, by owners, masters, and overseers, many, if not the most, of whom are hardened against all the feelings of humanity towards their slaves, and are themselves a nuisance and burden to the earth.”[13]
Ever the optimist, Hopkins expressed his unwavering faith in God’s will, believe that even the immense suffering caused by the human trade could lead to a greater good:
“Thus all this past and present evil which the Africans have suffered by the slave trade, and the slavery to which so many of them have been reduced, may be the occasion of an over-balancing good; and it may hereafter appear … that though the slave traders have really meant and done that which is evil, yet God has designed it all for good, the good of which all this evil shall be the occasion.”[14]
Hopkins envisioned this “over-balancing good” as the eventual triumph of abolition and the spread of the gospel:
“But … we may be assured that we are engaged in a cause which will finally prosper. The slave trade, and all slavery, shall be totally abolished, and the gospel shall be preached to all nations; good shall be brought out of all the evil which takes place, and all men shall be united into one family and kingdom under Christ the Savior.”[15]
The Religious Influence of Sarah Osborn
In addition to delivering his Sunday sermons, Samuel Hopkins conducted Thursday evening lectures and followed in the footsteps of Sarah Osborn by establishing regular Bible study meetings for white, Black, and Native children. Throughout his ministry in Newport, Osborn played a pivotal role in shaping Hopkins’s theological views, particularly his opposition to slavery and the human trade. It is likely that Hopkins discussed his sermons with Osborn before presenting them each week, drawing on her insights and experiences. Notably, prior to his arrival in Newport, Hopkins had never publicly spoken out against slavery– his theology was ultimately based in his deep religious faith, devotion to the gospel, and the concept of “advantageous sin,” which held that the institution of slavery was “nevertheless capable of having a positive impact [on] a person’s life.”[16]
Osborn’s guidance not only shaped Hopkins’s theology but also influenced the forward-thinking ideas of his fellow Newport pastor, Ezra Stiles. Indeed, Osborn’s contributions to their theological development cannot be overstated. Before he arrived in Newport, he owned at least one slave, a black female servant, whom he freed before he left Great Barrington. Following regular interactions with Osborn, Hopkins began to develop a new aspect of his doctrine, which he called “disinterested benevolence.” Michael Monescalchi defines this as “a kind of passivity: it is passive in the sense that it requires persons to vacate their individual will but active in the sense that in denying their own interested they will be able to alleviate others’ suffering and exhibit Christlike benevolence to all persons.”[17]
Page from the Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn, Who Died at Newport, Rhode island, on the Second Day of August, 1796.
Hopkins was likely also influenced by his experiences with Africans throughout Newport. These men and women must have helped to change his understanding of their inherent humanity and equality with whites in the eyes of God. After all, he came to know them as members of his congregation, as well as through the meetings that he and Osborn held weekly. In 1774, fourteen percent of Newport’s population (1,246 individuals) was African, nine percent of whom were free Africans. Thus, Hopkins would also have likely been in daily contact with African-born men and women on the streets of Newport.[18]
Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations 1774
The Religious Influence of John Quamine and Bristol Yamma
While Sarah Osborn’s mentorship helped Hopkins refine his views on slavery and morality, his interactions with African-born members of his congregation, such as John Quamine and Bristol Yamma, further deepened his commitment to abolition. Their shared discussions of faith and freedom would soon evolve into a bold plan to send African missionaries back to their homeland. Quamine was a Fante man who had “been born into a wealthy family in Annamaboe on the African Gold Coast” in what is now coastal Ghana. Quamine, sometimes spelled as Kwame, is a traditional African day name for boys born on a Saturday, and when he became, Quamine took his first name as his last, and adopted the name John. In about 1755, when he was ten years old, Quamine’s father intended to send him to Rhode Island in the care of a ship captain to gain an American education. Though the captain taught him briefly himself, he was eventually enslaved and sold to Benjamin Church, a distiller and landowner in Newport. Hopkins was able to confirm much of this story with Reverend Philip Quaque, an African-born missionary educated in England who was at the time working at Cape Coast Castle.[19]
A February 1775 letter from Rev. John Witherspoon (President of Princeton College) to Rev. Samuel Hopkins, reporting on the progress of Hopkins’s proteges Bristol Yamma and John Quamino at Princeton
First Effort to Send African Missionaries to Africa
An important feature of both John Quamine and Bristol Yamma, is that they were both fluent in their native language, presumably Akan, and English. Samuel Hopkins thus saw this as an opportunity to turn these men into missionaries for the church in their home country.
Historian Cherry Fletcher Bamberg writes that the idea of African-born Christian missionaries may not have originated with Samuel Hopkins or other white Newport residents. In fact, John Quamine had told Ezra Stiles that “ever since he tasted the Grace of the Lord Jesus he conceived a Thought and Earnest Desire or Wish that his Relations and Countrymen in Africa might also come to a knowledge of and taste the same blessed things.” Hopkins himself admits that Quamine and Bristol Yamma had already discussed this idea between themselves before Hopkin’s arrival in Newport. This suggests that the true origin of the plan to send African-born Christian missionaries may have come from the Africans themselves. Perhaps Quamine and Yamma saw this as their fastest way to return home, with no intention of serving as emissaries of the church, or perhaps their faith and missionary zeal were genuine. Regardless of their motivations, their vision was a significant impetus for the plans to establish African-born missionaries in West Africa.[22]
Hopkins wrote in 1784:
“I first got acquainted with Bristol and finding him more than common engaged in the things of religion; and remarkably steady, discerning and judicious, with respect to the nature of true religion, and the most important doctrines of the gospel; and that hey yet retained his native language; and the Quamine spoke the same language with him, I conceived a strong desire that they [be sent] to their native country, and preach the gospel to the people from which they sprang.”[21]
In November 1774, Quamine and Yamma set out from Newport to begin their formal education at the College of the Colony of New Jersey, now Princeton, where they were privately tutored by the Reverend Doctor John Witherspoon, of Scotland. Hopkins used his own funds to help the campaign, donating one hundred dollars– the same amount he had received for selling an enslaved woman before leaving Great Barrington. Quamine and Yamma were back in Newport by 1775, their education interrupted by the American Revolution. In an effort to raise money to free his wife, who was known as Duchess Quamino, Quamine enlisted on a privateer. Tragically, he died at sea in the fall of 1779, and with his death, the initial plan to send African-born missionaries to settle in West Africa came to an end. Hopkins’s actions brought him, he said, “not only insights and acquaintances, but also the hostility of some whites.” On ministering to Africans he wrote to his fellow New Divinity minister Stephen West: “This, I expect, will make me many enemies, and be the occasion of my falling under much reproach.”[23]
Gold Coast, 1729. [Thomas Astley, ed., A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745–47), vol. 2, plate 60, between pp. 564 and 565]
Second Effort to Send Missionaries to Africa
Although the initial missionary effort with Quamine and Yamma faltered due to unforeseen circumstances, it planted the seeds for a broader movement. Nearly a decade later, the Providence Free African Union Society—a younger generation of free Black men inspired by similar ideals—revived the cause, seeking to establish a foothold in Sierra Leone. This society was an offshoot of an earlier organization of the same name, founded in Newport in 1780–the first known African benevolent society in the United States. By 1794, the Providence society was ready to enact a preliminary reconnaissance voyage to Sierra Leone to negotiate with the local British-run government and petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly for financial assistance. In November of that year, James Mackenzie, the organization’s Secretary and their appointed “Black ambassador”, sailed to Sierra Leone aboard the ship Charlotte. Hopkins had originally suggested Bristol Yamma for this role, but his death in June 1794 in North Carolina made that impossible. Mackenzie’s voyage to Sierra Leone may represent Rhode Island’s first such legitimate trading endeavor in the region.[24]
"Plan of Sierra Leone and the Parts Adjacent" Published in 1794
Mackenzie was able to meet with Zachary Macaulay, a Scottish man who was the Governor of the Sierra Leone Company, the corporation founded to organize the resettlement of free Black people from British North America. Mackenzie negotiated an offer of space in the colony for “twelve families of blacks, [and] provide each family with ten acres of land and a town lot.” However, before the emigration effort could proceed, Macaulay wanted to secure “satisfactory testimonials of moral character, particularly with respect to honesty, sobriety, and industry” for the head of each family, with each report signed personally by Samuel Hopkins. Hopkins, however, refused to provide the necessary endorsements, effectively derailing the entire effort.
Historian George Brooks writes that Hopkins’s actions seem “inexplicable after his devoting more than two decades to bringing about such an opportunity.” Clark Pujara offers a more pointed critique, arguing that “white abolitionists [like Hopkins] held paternalistic attitudes toward Blacks and resented Black Americans who took charge of their own affairs.” Brooks further observes that Hopkins’s refusal reflects “little credit on men of supposed enlightened views and high moral principles.” Mackenzie’s journey to Sierra Leone had offered a renewed hope for Black-led emigration efforts, but the success of the mission rested on the support of influential white abolitionists like Samuel Hopkins nonetheless. Despite his decades of advocacy, Hopkins’s refusal to provide the necessary character references marked a pivotal setback—one that revealed the complex dynamics of paternalism within abolitionist movements.[25]
Sierra Leone Company. Dollar, 1791.
While both of these efforts to send African-born men back to West Africa failed, they laid the groundwork for later attempts, most notably that of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816. In January 1826, the brig Vine departed Boston for Liberia. Aboard this vessel were two former students of Samuel Hopkins, Salmar Nubia and Occramar Marycoo, otherwise known as Newport Gardner. Marycoo has studied under both Hopkins and Sarah Osborn beginning in the 1760s, and was “an accomplished poet known for his intellect, piety, and musical ability” who used his skills as a musician to eventually purchase his own freedom. A devout member of Hopkins’s church, he was known to regularly assist the elder Hopkins to ascend to the pulpit each Sunday. Much like John Quamine’s story, Marycoo “was the son of a prosperous African who had been sold into slavery by an unscrupulous Rhode Island slave trader whom his father had entrusted to educate him.” Upon arriving in Liberia, Marycoo was eighty years old, and Nubia seventy-seven– both men died within a year of settling on the home continent.[26]
In the year before his death, Marycoo spoke of the reasoning behind his voyage to West Africa;
“I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years– it is in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied.”[27]
His Final Sermon
As Hopkins neared the end of his life and ministry, he looked back on decades of service shaped by profound moral convictions and difficult contradictions. In his final sermon, delivered at over 80 years old, he reflected on his life’s work and the principles that had guided him, offering a poignant summation of his faith and legacy:
“I have opposed evil practices, by which I have incurred the displeasure and resentment of many; and have taught and inculcated duties, and an experimental, practical religion, which consists most essentially in self-denial, as the only way to heaven, which are disagreeable to many, and not believed to be true. … To you … my dear people … as a dying man, … I recommend the religion which I have endeavoured to preach and inculcate among you for a number of years. … I recommend Christ to you with my dying breath as the only refuge for sinners.”[28]
In the year before his death, Marycoo spoke of the reasoning behind his voyage to West Africa;
“I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years– it is in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied.”[27]
Samuel Hopkins’s life and work exemplifies the complexities of moral leadership in an era rife with contradiction. While he passionately championed the abolition of slavery, sought to expand liberty, and condemned the hypocrisy of his contemporaries, his own actions revealed the limitations of white allyship and the paternalistic attitudes that often permeated abolitionist movements. Hopkins’s refusal to support Black-led efforts like the Providence African Society serves as a reminder of how even well-intentioned reformers could perpetuate the very power imbalances they sought to dismantle.
Hopkins’s legacy, however, also highlights the transformative potential of moral conviction and theological activism. Hopkins’s willingness to confront the entrenched economic and social systems of Newport, even at personal cost, helped spark conversations that resonated well beyond his time. Yet, the voices of individuals like John Quamine, Bristol Yamma, and James Mackenzie remind us that the fight for freedom was not a story of white saviors but instead one of Black agency and resilience. As we reflect on Hopkins’s contributions, we are invited to consider the need to critically evaluate the motives and methods of reformers, and the enduring struggle for justice and equality. Hopkins’s story is not only a testament to progress but also a call to ensure that future movements for change fully embrace the autonomy and leadership of those most impacted.
