Stockton was born on June 4, 1808 at Mount Holly, New Jersey, United States. The son of William Smith Stockton and his first wife, Elizabeth Sophia (Hewlings), he was the eldest of a brilliant family of whom Frank R. Stockton, his half-brother, was one of the younger members.
At the age of nineteen he enrolled in Jefferson Medical College.
After studing at the Jefferson Medical College, Thomas disliked the profession of medicine, so he cut short his training, and after an unproductive essay in literary work for periodicals, he entered the ministry of the newly organized Methodist Protestant Church.
During the first years of his pastoral service, which were spent in northern Maryland, he discovered a capacity for pulpit oratory which was as unexpected as it was gratifying. His sermons were neither learned nor profound, but their style was graceful and literary, and they reflected the lovable spirit of the man himself. His reputation rapidly increased. When only twenty-five years of age, he was elected chaplain of the House of Representatives, an office which, except for one short interval, he filled until 1836. Once more in the regular ministry, at Baltimore, Stockton became involved in the rising antislavery controversy.
In 1838 he was again elected editor of the church paper, but when told that it should publish nothing on the subject of slavery, he resigned and removed to Philadelphia, where he preached to non-sectarian congregations for nine years, to the end that "professors of religion shall learn to live less for self and sect, and more for 'Christ and the Church' ", but at the end of this time he returned to the Methodist Protestant denomination. During the remainder of his career, he alternately withdrew from his denomination and returned to it, meanwhile organizing independent, non-sectarian congregations. This he did in Cincinnati, in Baltimore, and again in Philadelphia. During these years, however, he attained a national reputation. In the capacity of chaplain of the Senate, in 1863, he conducted the religious services at the dedication of the Gettysburg national cemetery, when Lincoln made his immortal address.
At the time of his death, in 1868, he was considered one of the greatest pulpit orators of his day. Nothing that Thomas Stockton said or wrote long survived his death in 1868.
Thomas Hewlings Stockton was the pastor of the First Methodist Church in Philadelphia and the editor of Christian World. His collected poems, Floating Flowers from a Hidden Brook (1844) and Poems (1862), are graceful and pleasing, but not inspired. His essays and controversial works, The Bible Alliance (1850), Ecclesiastical Opposition to the Bible (1853), and The Book Above All (1871), are without the charm and spirit that made his spoken words so memorable to his hearers.
His career was determined by the religious interest of his father. The latter, an influential layman in the Methodist Episcopal Church, took a leading part in protesting against the arbitrary policy then prevailing among the bishops; and in 1828 he withdrew from the Methodist denomination with those reformers who later organized the Methodist Protestant Church. This controversy, occurring during Thomas Stockton's formative years, not only turned him from the Methodist ministry, but provoked a hatred of sectarianism which influenced his entire career.
He was married to Anna Roe McCurdy, by whom he had eleven children.
