Rhoads, Samuel

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Samuel Rhoads
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Estimated
    Death Date Certainty
    Estimated
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Quakers (Society of Friends)
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)

    Samuel Rhoads (Still, 1872)

    Scholarship
    Was born in Philadelphia, in 1806, and was through life a consistent member of the Society of Friends. His parents were persons of great respectability and integrity. The son early showed an ardent desire for improvement, and was distinguished among his young companions for warm affections, amiable disposition, and genial manners, rare purity and refinement of feeling, and a taste for literary pursuits. Preferring as his associates those to whom he looked for instruction and example, and aiming at a high standard, he won a position, both mentally and socially, superior to his early surroundings. With a keen sense of justice and humanity, he could not fail to share in the traditional opposition of his religious society to slavery, and to be quickened to more intense feeling as the evils of the system were more fully revealed in the Anti-slavery agitation which in his early manhood began to stir the nation. A visit to England, in 1834, brought him into connection and friendship with many leading Friends in that country, who were actively engaged in the Anti-slavery movement, and probably had much to do with directing his attention specially to the subject. Once enlisted, he never wavered, but as long as slavery existed by law in our country his influence, both publicly and privately, was exerted against it.
    William Still, The Underground Rail Road (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 719.
    How to Cite This Page: "Rhoads, Samuel," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/25077.