Samuel Hanson Cox
Samuel Hanson Cox (August 25, 1793 – October 2, 1880) was an American Presbyterian minister and a leading abolitionist.
Cox was born in Rahway, New Jersey, of Quaker stock. After renouncing his religion and serving in the War of 1812, he studied law before entering the ministry[1] He was pastor of the Presbyterian church at Mendham, New Jersey from 1817 to 1821. He then moved to New York City where he was pastor of two churches from 1821 to 1834. Cox helped found the University of the City of New York, now New York University, in 1832, teaching classes in theology and contributing the college's motto. Due to his anti-slavery sentiments, he was mobbed, and his house and Laight Street church were sacked in the Anti-abolitionist riots (1834). He then move out of the city, and from 1834 to 1837 was professor of pastoral theology at Auburn.
Cox was a fine orator, and a speech made in Exeter Hall in 1833, in which he put the responsibility for slavery in America on the British government, made a great impression. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler described Cox as "one of the most famous celebrities in the Presbyterian Church... famous for his linguistic attainments, for his wit and occasional eccentricities, and very famous for his bursts of eloquence on great occasions."[2] It was he who described the appellation DD as a couple of "semi-lunar fardels".
The next seventeen years were passed as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, where he also served as Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Union Theological Seminary, and as a leader of the "New School" Presbyterians. In 1854, owing to a throat infection and loss of his voice, he removed to Owego, New York. He died at Bronxville, New York, on October 2, 1880.
His son, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, became bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, and another son, Samuel Hanson Coxe, was an Episcopal minister in Utica, who married Eliza Conkling, sister of Senator Roscoe Conkling (both, along with at least one other of his 15 children reverted to an "earlier" spelling of the family name). His grandson Alfred Conkling Coxe was a federal judge in New York.
Works
- Quakerism not Christianity (1833)
- Interviews, Memorable and Useful (1853)
Footnotes
Sources
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press
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| Preceded by The Rev. Ansel Doan Eddy |
Moderator of the 54th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (New School) 1849–1850 |
Succeeded by The Rev. Philip Courtlandt Hay |
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