Smith, Stephen

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Stephen Smith
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Estimated
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    Black
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    0
    Family
    Nancy Smith (mother), Harriet Lee (wife)
    Occupation
    Businessman
    Clergy
    Relation to Slavery
    Slave or Former Slave
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Methodist
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)

    Stephen Smith (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    Early on, Smith turned his talents to race rights and reform. He was a well-known participant in the Underground Railroad; Whipper told William Still that it was known "far down in the slave region, that Smith & Whipper, the negro lumber merchants, were engaged in secreting fugitive slaves" (Still, p. 739). Smith opposed the colonization movement and supported the early strivings of Whipper's American Moral Reform Society in 1834-1835. A frequent but not addicted convention goer and mass-meeting participant, he fought for the abolition of slavery, the removal of "white" from the state constitution, and the integration of Philadelphia's railway cars. Smith supported the temperance movement and was an officer in a number of black organizations, including the Odd Fellows, Social, Civil, and Statistical Association; the Grand Tabernacle of the Independent Order of Brothers and Sisters of Love and Charity; and the Union League Association. He hosted John Brown for a week in 1858 and, along with James Wormley and Henry Highland Garnet, had a leadership role in the movement to erect a Lincoln memorial monument.
    Leslie H. Fishel, "Smith, Stephen," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-01038.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Smith, Stephen," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/6601.