Samuel Hopkins was, along with Joseph Bellamy and Jonathan Edwards, Jr., a major figure in the New Divinity group in American religious history, a theological and social movement which sought, after the death of Jonathan Edwards in 1758, to defend the orthodox tenets of Edwardean Calvinism against the emerging, liberal ethos of eighteenth-century rationalism in metaphysics and philosophy. Hopkins is perhaps best recalled as the first editor and biographer of Jonathan Edwards and as an early Abolitionist who, from his Newport pastorate in the 1770s, decried the evils of slavery to a nation on the threshold of independence.

Hopkins was born in 1721 in the backwater town of Waterbury in western Connecticut, to a family newly risen to some prominence after two generations of farming. His father, Timothy, wanted his firstborn son to become a minister, and from an early age Samuel prepared for a pastoral career. In 1731 he entered...