William Sampson

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. With Russell, Sampson was to co-author popular political commentary and satire. Counsel for United Irishmen, agitator and exile Counsel and radical pamphleteer In 1782, 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".