Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Post, Isaac

POST, Isaac, philanthropist, b. in Westbury, Queens co.. N. Y., 26 Feb., 1798; d. in Rochester, N. Y., 9 May, 1872. Being the son of Quaker parents, he was educated at the Westbury Friends' school. He engaged in the drug business, and removed to Scipio, N. Y., in 1823, and to Rochester, N. Y., in 1836, where he spent the remainder of his life. He was a warm adherent of William Lloyd Garrison, and one of the earliest laborers in the anti-slavery cause. His door was ever open to those who had escaped from bondage, and his hostility to the fugitive-slave law was bitter and uncompromising. He was a member of the Hicksite branch of the Quakers, but left that body because, in his opinion, it showed itself subservient to the slave power. Mr. Post resided in Rochester when public attention was first attracted to the manifestations by the Fox sisters, and became one of the earliest converts to Spiritualism. He was the author of “Voices from the Spirit World, being Communications from Many Spirits, by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium” (Rochester, 1852). — His brother, Joseph, b. in Westbury, L. I., 30 Nov., 1803; d. there, 17 Jan., 1888, resembled Isaac in his profession of abolition principles. He was at one time proscribed and persecuted within his own sect, but lived long enough to witness a complete revolution of sentiment, and to be the recipient of many expressions of confidence and esteem from his co-religionists. When Isaac T. Hopper, Charles Marriot, and James S. Gibbons were disowned by the Society of Friends, on account of their outspoken opposition to slavery, they received encouragement and support from Joseph Post. Mr. Post passed his life in the same house in which he was born and died.