Samuel Joseph May

Born: Boston, Massachusetts; September 12, 1797
Died: Syracuse, New York; July 1, 1871

Entry by James P. Walsh

During the period from 1818 to 1876, Connecticut exported talented people. Of the thirty-nine Connecticut-born graduates of Yale College in 1814, for example, twenty-one left the state and never returned. Occasionally, of course, talented individuals came into the state and contributed significantly to Connecticut's history. The best example of such a newcomer in the period before the Civil War was Samuel May. He spent only fourteen years in Connecticut, but in that time he made the town of Brooklyn an important center of reform.

May was born to a wealthy, free-thinking family and went to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1817. At about the time he returned to Harvard for courses in theology, the Congregational Church in Brooklyn became Unitarian. This action evoked considerable controversy, and the Brooklyn church encountered great difficulty in finding a pastor. May agreed with the Unitarian views of the congregation and accepted Brooklyn's offer of a pulpit, becoming a pastor there in 1822.

May soon made Brooklyn a well-known center for every reform agitated in the nineteenth century. William Ladd, the great pacifist, came to visit as did Bronson Alcott, whose ideas were changing educational theory. Other prominent visitors were the Grimke sisters who claimed that marriage was a form of prostitution. Of all the reform movements, May himself was most interested in temperance, peace, and abolition. He recruited a "Cold-Water Army" that used to drill on the Brooklyn green; organized the Windham County Peace Society, one of the most active in the United States; and supported Prudence Crandall in her effort to educate blacks and joined with William Lloyd Garrison in advocating the immediate abolition of slavery.

May thought that he had "reconciled" himself to rural life, but Brooklyn proved too small a stage for him. In 1836 he accepted a pulpit closer to Boston, and his later life belongs to America rather than Connecticut history. For a dozen years, however, he led the people of Brooklyn and its environs in their quest for a better social order. For over a decade, he made Brooklyn a "city upon a hill."

For Further Reading

There is no recent full-length biography of May. He himself left an interesting autobiography: Memoir of Samuel Joseph May (Boston, 1873).

* Entry under revision.