ABSTRACT
Morgan John Rhys, or, as he spelled it after arriving in Philadelphia, Rhees, was an abolitionist, Welsh republican radical, publisher, dissenting Baptist minister and pioneer. Rhees found the American republic strangely familiar, declaring, 'What are improperly called French Principles pervade the universe and universal emancipation must be the result. For him America was less exceptional than it was a New World location for dangerous ideas of equality that he had first encountered in France. He travelled throughout the United States and its western territories, preaching emancipation and republican ideals while searching for a suitable settlement for Welsh immigrants. Rhees's analogy of native-born Philadelphians' assistance to immigrants to Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan reflects his sense of the pluralistic possibilities of early American society. Rhees particularly had in mind Britain in his hyperbolic criticism, given his persecution there, his earlier enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and his sense of the similarities, at the time, between American and French liberalism.
