Samuel Smith (201)

Samuel Smith (13 Dec 1720–13 July 1776) was a merchant, government official, and historian, and was a member of the American Philosophical Society by his election in 1768. Born into a wealthy merchant Quaker family in Burlington, New Jersey, he inherited a successful commercial business that freed him to focus largely on political and historical pursuits. Like his brother and fellow APS member John Smith of Burlington, Samuel has the distinction of serving in political office in two colonies simultaneously: he joined the Philadelphia Common Council in 1751; he was also nominated to the New Jersey Governor’s Council that year, but a spat with the Board of Trade resulted in a withdrawal; in 1754 he was elected a member of the Assembly; he served as treasurer of West Jersey (1762–75); Governor Franklin nominated him again to his Council in 1763 (approved). As much a Quaker racial progressive as his era admitted, he advocated for a tax on the importation of slaves and helped found the New Jersey Society for Helping the Indians, which purchased 2,000 acres as a home for the Lenni Lenape. Like many of his stature, he was a supporter and booster of the Pennsylvania Hospital and of the College of New Jersey. He was among the early provincials to sound the alarm about imperial overreach, inveighing against the Sugar and Stamp Acts (1764, 1765) on the basis of his historical interpretation of colonial history and of British constitutionalism. Indeed, his preparation of The History of the Colony of Nova-Caesaria, or New-Jersey (1765) alerted him to the changing relationship between colony and Crown. As he probed the province’s history from its founding to 1721 via official records but also Quaker meeting notes, he came to conclude that British colonials’ rights were under siege in the 1760s. But after a withering peer review of sorts by Quaker educator and historian Robert Proud, Smith abandoned revisions of the second volume and never began the projected third. Proud had it wrong, sadly: Smith’s attention to documentary evidence and his foresight concerning the impending constitutional crisis makes the loss of the other volumes especially painful. Smith’s fears proved prescient: he died shortly after the colonies declared independence. (PI, Sabin)