Samuel Stillman (176)

Elected to the American Society.

Samuel Stillman (27 February 1738–1807) was a minister and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election into the American Society. Born in Philadelphia, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina where he was reborn under the guidance of a Baptist minister. An educated young man who had found his calling, Stillman gave his first sermon at the age of twenty—in the following year, 1759, he was ordained. Soon after he returned to Philadelphia and preached regularly while also receiving two MA degrees from the College of Philadelphia and Harvard in 1761. By 1763 he had moved to Boston to assume the assistant minister position at the Second Baptist Church where the congregation esteemed the charm and eloquence he brought to the pulpit. Such charisma drew many in the congregation to follow him when he was installed as the first minister of Boston’s First Baptist Church in 1765. He served Boston during the 1760s and 1770s, preaching famously and forcefully on the repeal of the Stamp Act. Though he left Boston in 1775 when the British army took over the Baptist meeting house, he had returned by the summer of 1776 to reconstitute the congregation and repair the damage done to the building. He supported American independence throughout the conflict and, after it ended, advocated for the Federal Constitution. Throughout his life in Boston he advocated for education and humanitarian causes including activities such as founding the College of Rhode, serving as a trustee to the Massachusetts Humane Society, and belonging both to the Providence and Pennsylvania Abolition Societies. He passed care of his congregation to APS member Joseph Clay who, doubtlessly, shared in community’s sadness when a stroke cut short Stillman’s planned retirement. (PI)