Samuel Eells (1810–1842) was a 19th-century American lawyer, philosopher, essayist, and orator who founded the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity in 1832 at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

He could trace his family back to early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his father was a Congregationalist missionary who worked amongst the Native Americans in Western New York.

Besides his praiseworthy writing and oration, he often undertook seemingly impossible projects; for example, before going to Hamilton, in order to improve his health, he traveled on foot from Maryland to Massachusetts, then sailed to Newfoundland and back, paying for his passage by fishing.

The college was nearly bankrupt due to mismanagement, and the student body was torn apart by rivalries between underground debating and literary societies, primarily the Phoenix and the Philopeuthian.

Eells saw the virtue of the debating societies as a haven for free thought, association and intellectual cultivation, yet he deplored their vicious competition for members and social dominance.

He asserts that only spiritual and philosophical change—not material advancement or political reform—can lead to real progress; he cites the mistreatment of the Native Americans as proof that democratic government and law are not enough in themselves to preclude tyranny.

Although his idea of unstoppable progress may seem very familiar or cliché today, at that time it was connected to a radical counterculture that was overthrowing conservative beliefs in the continuous decline of humanity.

Eells tried several tactics to try to recover his health, such as spending the winter of 1840 in Cuba, but nevertheless, he died in 1842 in Cincinnati at the home of his friend S. W. Pomeroy, wracked with arthritis and tuberculosis.

The middle joint of his rheumatic ring finger remains in the possession of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity as a testament to his courage and willpower.