Thomas Hazard was born on September 15, 1720, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, United States, the son of Robert Hazard II (1689-1762). He was of the fifth generation of Thomas Hazard, progenitor of the Hazard family of Rhode Island and one of the nine founders of Newport in 1639. Physically they were strongly marked, being generally speaking of good stature and vigorous frame, and with a firmly set jaw.
Thomas studied at Yale College for several terms but did not graduate, it is said, because he could not reconcile his Quaker principles and collegiate honors.
In 1742 Thomas Hazard was admitted a freeman of the colony from South Kingstown. Perhaps also in 1742, he had his memorable conversation with the Connecticut church deacon who told him that Quakers were not Christians because they held their fellow men in slavery. The idea was a novel one to the young man. In the region about him there was one negro slave to every two or three white men; his father, their friends and neighbors were all slaveowners; and at least two of his connections imported negroes to be sold into slavery. Nevertheless, the words of the church deacon did their work; he took the view that slave-holding was an evil, and despite the arguments, even the threat of disinheritance by his father, he began cultivating his farm with free labor and to work against slavery - one of the first members of the Society of Friends to take the stand.
At first he had but a single convert, his friend Jeremiah Austin, who had liberated the one slave he possessed, his sole inheritance from his father. The movement in Rhode Island slowly grew, in 1774, College Tom found himself a member of a committee of the Yearly Meeting which went to the General Assembly with a bill, passed by it, affirming personal freedom as the greatest of the rights which the inhabitants of America were then engaged in preserving, and prohibiting the importation of negroes into the colony. During the Revolution he was a member of the Meeting for Sufferings. In 1783 he was a member of the committee of the Yearly Meeting which brought to the General Assembly a petition for the abolition of slavery which was answered by an act to that end, adopted by the Assembly in February 1784.
In 1742 Hazard married to his third cousin Elizabeth, daughter of Gov. William and Martha (Potter) Robinson.
