Samuel Hanson Cox

Samuel Hanson Cox (August 25, 1793 – October 2, 1880) was an American Presbyterian minister and a leading abolitionist.

In the early 1830s, Cox helped African American John Sykes Fayette get to Ohio with fellow abolitionists, where he would become the first African American to attend (1832) and graduate (1836) college west of the Appalachian Mountains at what is now Case Western Reserve University.

In 1834, Cox invited abolitionist Photius Fisk to Auburn on a free scholarship.

"[5] When awarded the appellation of Doctor of Divinity by the College of New Jersey, which would later become Princeton University, he famously derided it as a couple of "semi-lunar fardels".

His son, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, became bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, and another son, Samuel Hanson Coxe, was an Episcopal minister in Utica, New York, who married Eliza Conkling, sister of Republican political boss and presidential candidate Senator Roscoe Conkling; both of them, along with some other of his 15 children, reverted to an earlier spelling of the family name.