William Sampson (26 January 1764 – 28 December 1836) was a lawyer and jurist who in his native Ireland, and in later American exile, identified with the cause of democratic reform. In the 1790s, in Belfast and Dublin he associated with United Irishmen, defending them in Crown prosecutions, contributing to their press and, according to government informants, participating on the eve of rebellion in their inner councils. In New York, from 1806 he won renown as a trial lawyer representing the abolitionist Manumission Society and disputing race as a legal disability; challenging the conspiracy charges against organised labor; and, in the name of religious liberty, establishing Catholic auricular confession as privileged. Maintaining that the tradition of common law denied citizens equal access to the law, and was a systematic source of injustice, Sampson pioneered the American codification movement.
Early life Sampson was born in Derry, in the Kingdom of Ireland, to Mary Spaight Sampson and Arthur Sampson, an Anglican clergyman. He attended Trinity College Dublin and after studying law at Lincoln's Inn, in London, he was admitted to the Irish bar in 1792. He settled in Belfast where he served as Junior Counsel to John Philpot Curran in the north-east circuit.
In 1790 he married Grace Clarke of Belfast, whose parents, the Rev. John Clarke and Catherine Anne Clarke (née Coates), were early members of the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge. With his wife's brother-in-law, the physician and polymath James MacDonnell, he had a mutual friend in the Society's librarian, the future republican martyr Thomas Russell.
Counsel for United Irishmen, agitator and exile
Counsel and radical pamphleteer In 1782, while at Trinity, Sampson was commissioned in the Irish Volunteers. That year, seizing on the occasion of the American War of Independence, the militia movement helped free the Irish Parliament from direct dictation from London. But it failed in what for many Volunteers, particularly in the Presbyterian north-east, was their chief object: to break the monopoly hold upon the parliament of the landed Anglican interest—"the Protestant Ascendancy".
In 1791, when rallying in celebration of the French revolution (Bastille Day), Volunteers in Belfast proposed a political "union" between Protestants of all persuasions and the kingdom's dispossessed and disenfranchised Catholic majority. While acknowledging himself, as a member of the established Anglican communion, to be "of the favoured cast[e]", Sampson embraced the cause. In a succession of cases, with John Philpot Curran, he was to represent the United Irishmen against charges of criminal libel, sedition and treason.
Sampson published anonymous reports of the trials, and contributed to the United Irish paper in Belfast, the Northern Star. Writing as "Fortesque", he urged judicial independence from the Crown. As a preface to demands for still greater change, with Thomas Russell he dispensed with the reformer's usual praise for the celebrated charters of English liberty: Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus. In their Review of the Lion of Old England; or Democracy Confounded (1794) (dedicated to the reputedly enlightened "Empress of all the Russias", Catherine II), they suggested that, honoured in the breach in Ireland, the invocation of these charters did little more than "amuse the masses".
In The Trial of Hurdy Gurdy (1794), serialised in the Northern Star, Sampson and Russell pilloried the Crown's suppression of dissent: a barrel organ is charged with playing a seditious tune, Ça Ira. "The King versus Hurdy Gurdy" parodied recent events: the playing of popular radical songs on a hurdy gurdy had been cited in Edinburgh as evidence supporting the transportation (to Botany Bay) of the Scots radical (and honorary United Irishman) Thomas Muir; and in Belfast Ça Ira had triggered a military riot.
Sampson claimed to have taken the United Irish Test (a pledge composed by his friend William Drennan) only in open court and then only to show that its purpose was reform—"the attainment of an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in parliament"—not treason. In Advice to the Rich (1796), he urged the Ascendancy to embrace reform, and prove "by fact and experiment" rather than "idle rhapsodies" that the constitution tended to promote public happiness". But with the Crown at war with the French Republic, all avenues of "experiment" were closed. Sampson's clients turned increasingly toward the prospect of a French-assisted insurrection. In 1795, with Curran, he represented the Rev. William Jackson, an emissary to the United Irishmen from the French Directory. Convicted of treason, the preacher and playwright collapsed and died in the dock.
Agitator and suspect When on New Years Day 1797, news reached Belfast of a French fleet appearing off Bantry Bay, Sampson addressed an open-air town meeting. Rather than profess loyalty to the Crown, he decried the disarming of the Volunteers and condemned the licentiousness of the "English mercenaries" garrisoning the town. Drennan expressed his astonishment—that Sampson should "leap upon a joint-stool and harangue the populace, at such a time and on such a topic, with such temper, and near such a body of military"—and proposed that he was the "most active" man in Ireland. Months before, after dining with the Duke of Leinster at a militia camp at Loughlinstown, he had given a further illustration of "the reckless character of his zeal" by privately scattering radical tracts and patriotic songs among the huts.
In October 1797, Sampson helped establish a rallying cry for the movement (and for the coming rebellion): "Remember Orr!". Having failed to secure an acquittal for William Orr on the capital charge of administering the United test to soldiers,Stewart, A.T.Q. (1995), The Summer Soldiers: The 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and Down Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1995, pp. 46–47, . Sampson published sensational reports of the trial and execution (including Orr's declaration from the scaffold, in which his defence counsel may have had some hand). These appeared in The Press, a new paper he had established in Dublin with Arthur O'Connor, Drennan and others (the presses of the Northern Star in Belfast having been smashed by the military). From Drennan's pen, the paper also published a poem, then widely circulated, The Wake of William Orr, and a letter (signed "Marcus") which excoriated the Viceroy, Lord Camden, for having in Orr's execution disgraced the laws. Charges of seditious libel were brought against the nominal owner of the paper, the journalist Peter Finnerty, and the printer, John Stockdale. In court, Sampson and Curran struck reporters less as defence counsel than as prosecutors pressing the indictment of the government.
Dublin Castle was aware that Sampson was preparing further embarrassment. He was collecting affidavits detailing atrocities committed by the military as they sought to break up and disarm the United Irishmen and their Defender allies. While broadcasting their content in pamphlets and the Press, he was supplying these to the liberal Lord Moira who in turn sought to present them to the King. But, critically, a key informant was now placing Sampson, alongside O'Connor, at meetings of the Leinster (Dublin) Directory of the movement, and this at a time when the discussion was clearly of armed insurrection.
Sampson's response to the execution in May 1797 of four militia men who had refused to renounce their oath to the United Irishmen and betray their comrades—his widely circulated, ballad, Death before Dishonour—had concluded with a clarion call to arms:"Death Before Dishonour; Or The Four Irish Soldiers", by William Sampson (1797), from The Literary Remains of the United Irishmen, R. R. Madden ed., Dublin: James Duffy & Sons, 1887, pp. 177–179.
Irish heroes grasp your arms, Firmly clasp the pointed steel, Shake their souls with fierce alarms, Teach their harden'd hearts to feel.
Let the tyrants of the world See their hateful reign is o'er; From their seats let them be hurl'd, Nor wield their iron sceptre more. In March 1798, Sampson was charged with high treason.
Arrest and exile In April 1798, a month in advance of the United Irish uprisings, Sampson (rumoured by loyalists to hold a major-general's commission in the French army) escaped to England, but was returned to Dublin where, under the Banishment Act, he was permitted exile. Barred from the United States by President John Adams, whose Federalist administration was wary of importing "Jacobins", he travelled to Portugal. There, in March 1799, he was arrested by order of the English minister on the misapprehension that he was the author of a pamphlet circulating in Ireland protesting the country's incorporation in a united kingdom with Great Britain—following the failed rebellion, the government's settled policy.
In May 1799, he was sent to France, where, nursing a quiet disdain for Napoleon's new imperial regime, he lived under close police surveillance. Having been reunited in Paris, in May 1805 his family departed for Hamburg, and from there, in advance of Napoleon's troops, passed across to England. After again arresting Sampson, the government paid for his passage to the United States, now under the more welcoming presidency of Thomas Jefferson. On 4 July 1806, he arrived in New York City where he was met and assisted by fellow exiles Thomas Addis Emmet and William James MacNeven. He was admitted to the New York bar in October. His wife, son, and daughter joined him in 1810.
In 1807, he published Memoirs of William Sampson, including particulars of his adventures in various parts of Europe; his confinement in the dungeons of the inquisition in Lisbon, &c., &c. Several original letters; being his correspondence with the ministers of state in Great-Britain and Portugal; a short sketch of the history of Ireland, particularly as it respects the spirit of British domination in that country; and a few observations on the state of manners &c., in America.
Lawyer and advocate in New York
Disputing race as a legal disability In New York City, Sampson set up a business publishing accounts of the court proceedings in cases with popular appeal and which advanced arguments for reform. Sometimes he filled the role of both counsel and reporter. This was the case in two proceedings in which Sampson, representing the New York Manumission Society, upended precedents anchored in racism and in slavery: The Commissioners of the Almshouse v Alexander Whistelo (1808), involving a black man in a case of paternity; and Amos and Demis Broad (1809) in which Sampson succeeded in having sadistically abused slaves, a mother and her 3-year-old daughter, manumitted.
In the Broad case, Sampson lamented that the law kept the woman from testifying on her own behalf: "the silence which fate, for I will not call it law, imposes on the slave who cannot tell us of his own complaint; gagged, and reduced to a state of a dumb brute ... [is a] weighty obstacle to justice".
In 1808, in a case in which he had occasion to defend "interracial" marriage, he noted that, "every man must follow his own pleasure ... neither philosophy nor religion have forbade such mixtures."
Labor's right of association