Isaac Tatem Hopper

• Isaac Tatem Hopper
• Born: December 3, 1771
• Died: May 7, 1852

Abolitionist and prison reformer, was born in Deptford, New Jersey, son of Levi and Rachel (Tatem) Hopper. His father came from a Quaker family, while his mother was a member of the Presbyterian church. He went to school only during the winter months, working on his father’s farm the remainder of the year. At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to his uncle, a tailor in Philadelphia; Hopper later opened his own tailor shop in that city. Strongly influenced by Quaker preacher William Savery, he joined the Society of Friends at age twenty-two. On September 18, 1795, he married Sarah Tatum, a distant cousin; the couple had ten children. Two years after the death of his first wife in 1822, Hopper married Hannah Attmore, by whom he had four more children.

Having developed an early sympathy for black slaves, Hopper became a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. By 1800 he was assisting runaway slaves to escape. Thoroughly familiar with the methods of the Underground Railroad, he became one of the foremost promoters of the secret transmission of slaves northward through his city until 1829, when, after moving to New York, he began sending escaped slaves by water to Providence and Boston. Hopper also became an expert in all the intricacies of law affecting slaves, and he handled many slave cases in the Philadelphia courts as a voluntary advocate. Nevertheless, scrupulous about entering upon a career of worldly ambition, Hopper refused officially to enter the legal profession, although offered various opportunities to study law.

In Philadelphia, Hopper was also inspector of the city prison and guardian of abused apprentices. In addition to defending slaves, he was often called upon by the poor to plead their cases with landlords and creditors, and he secretly expended hundreds of dollars to pay the debts of poor people or to redeem their attached property. The financial embarrassments he entailed were so great that his first wife for a time opened a tea store in Philadelphia to augment the family income.

In 1827, when the “Separation” occurred in the Society of Friends in Philadelphia, Hopper affiliated himself with the so-called “Hicksite” section, which advocated greater doctrinal latitude. This decision cost him the patronage of many wealthy customers, who remained orthodox Quakers, causing him to move to New York where he opened a Hicksite bookstore that doubled as a center for members of his sect. In 1841, the demand for Hicksite books having declined, Hopper closed his store, and became treasurer and book agent for the Anti-Slavery Society until 1845. In 1841 he also became associated with Lydia Maria Child in the editorship and management of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. His public work in connection with this extreme antislavery journal and with the Underground Railroad aroused substantial opposition. Once he was set upon by a mob, but escaped without serious injury. Hopper, his son-in-law James Sloan Gibbons, and Charles Marriott were “disowned from membership” by the New York Monthly Meeting of Friends because of their antislavery activities, the Quakers being then affected by the strong proslavery sentiment prevailing in New York. The three appealed the expulsion to the Quarterly Meeting and the Yearly Meeting, both of which narrowly sustained the action of the Monthly Meeting. Nevertheless, Hopper throughout his life wore Quaker clothing and use Quaker forms of speech; he continued to be popularly referred to as “Friend Hopper.”

In New York Hopper also retained his interest in prison reform. He was a founder and agent of the Prison Association of New York, an organization created to aid criminals on their release from prison. Hopper’s activities on behalf of prisoners fell into three categories: he continued his legal endeavors, protecting and defending persons arrested and held without suitable legal counsel; he advised and instructed convicts while still in prison; and he aided discharged prisoners in their return to normal life. Having gradually acquired a reputation as one of the foremost experts on penology in the United States, Hopper frequently addressed the state legislature on prisoner issues.

In this work, as in his abolitionist endeavors, Hopper was assisted by his daughter Abigail (Abby) Hopper Gibbons (1801-1893), later president of the Women’s Prison Association, and founder of an asylum named the Isaac T. Hopper home, in which Hopper took great interest, often spending Sunday evenings there talking with inmates. Abigail included relief of blind and crippled children and Civil War nursing among her other humanitarian endeavors. Hopper’s son John also became an abolitionist; set upon by a mob in Charleston, South Carolina, for his activities, John, like his father in New York, escaped serious injury. Hopper died in New York City at the age of eighty.

The only full-length biography of Hopper remains L. M. Child’s Isaac T. Hopper: A True Life (1853), reprinted in 1969. Additional information can be found in S. H. Emerson, Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons, 2 vols., (1897); and in sketches in The Dictionary of American Biography (1932) and the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 2 (1921). Hopper’s expulsion by the Quakers can be followed in Narrative of the Proceedings of the Monthly Meeting of New York, and Their Subsequent Confirmation by the Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, in the Case of Isaac T. Hopper (1843). For Hopper’s role with the Underground Railroad, see W. Still, The Underground Railroad (1872) and W. H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad (1898). Obituaries appeared in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 13, 1852, and The New-York Tribune, May 8, 1852.