Background
Hopper was born in Deptford, Gloucester County, New Jersey, in 1771, the son of Levi and Rachel (Tatem) Hopper. His father came of a Quaker family, his mother was a member of the Presbyterian Church. Isaac settled in Philadelphia in 1787.
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Hopper was born in Deptford, Gloucester County, New Jersey, in 1771, the son of Levi and Rachel (Tatem) Hopper. His father came of a Quaker family, his mother was a member of the Presbyterian Church. Isaac settled in Philadelphia in 1787.
At the age of six-teen, served a period of apprenticeship as a tailor.
He opened a tailor-shop on his own account.
Before 1800 he had begun the work of assisting runaway slaves to escape. He became thoroughly familiar with the "underground" methods of procedure in Philadelphia and from 1800 until 1829, when he moved to New York, he was one of the foremost promoters of the secret transmission of slaves through the city on their way northward. He became an expert in all the intricacies of the laws affecting slaves and he handled many slave cases in the Philadelphia courts as voluntary advocate. He was tactful, quick in the discovery of expedients, devoid of fear, and he soon acquired unusual prestige as the defender of the friendless and oppressed.
When in 1827 the "Separation" occurred in the Society of Friends in Philadelphia, Hopper affiliated himself with the so-called "Hicksite" section and became one of the leaders of that branch. Moving to New York City in 1829, he became manager of a bookshop and transferred his anti-slavery activities to the New York center of operations. He often sent escaping slaves by water from New York to Providence and Boston. Both he and his son John were set upon by mobs, the father in New York, the son in Charleston, South Carolina, but they both escaped without serious injury.
In 1841, Hopper 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 anti-slavery journal and his reputation in connection with the "Under-ground Railroad" aroused an opposition to him. A section in the Quaker Meeting (the "Hicksite Branch") led by a conservative minister of the Society disapproved of public reform work carried on by Friends. Furthermore, the press of the city and its churches generally, reflected the feeling of its merchants, who had a large and profitable Southern trade and did not wish that trade disturbed. The Society of Friends, which had, eighty years previous, disowned the last few of its members who would not manumit their slaves, was at this time, and for the next decade much influenced by the pervading pro-slavery sentiment. Hopper, his son-in-law Gibbons, and Charles Marriott were "disowned from membership" in 1841 by the New York Monthly Meeting. An appeal was made by these three Friends to the Quarterly Meeting and the Yearly Meeting, both of which narrowly sustained the action of the Monthly Meeting.
Hopper continued throughout his life to wear the Quaker garb and to use the Quaker form of speech and he was always popularly known as "Friend Hopper. " Work for prison reform paralleled his anti-slavery work and equally absorbed his attention. During his period of life in Philadelphia he had been an inspector of prisons and in the New York period he gave much time to the work of the prison association of the state. As he grew older and his anti-slavery work slackened, he became agent of the Prison Association of New York and gradually acquired the reputation of being one of the foremost experts in penology in the United States. His work fell into three parts: first, protecting and defending persons who were arrested and held without suitable legal counsel; second, advising and instructing convicts while in prison; and third, aiding discharged prisoners in their return to normal social and business relations. His work in this field was of a high order and entitles him to a place among the notable reformers of prison systems and prison methods.
He had become everywhere recognized as the prisoner's friend and helper as he had been throughout his life the friend and helper of persons of color when he died in New York City.
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He was profoundly influenced in his religious life by William Savery, a prominent Philadelphia Quaker preacher of that period, and he joined the Society of Friends by his own request, at the age of twenty-two.
He had imbibed in his early youth a strong sympathy for negro slaves, as a young man became a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
On September 18, 1795, he married Sarah Tatum, a distant relative. In 1822 his wife, the mother of ten children, died. Two years later, in 1824, he married Hannah Attmore. His daughter, Abigail Hopper Gibbons and his son-in-law, James Sloan Gibbons were also active in anti-slavery activities.
