Samuel Smith was born in Perquimans Precinct, North Carolina in about 1726. In 1766 he signed in support of his brother-in-law Charles Jordan's petition to receive compensation for an enslaved man who had run away from the Jordan plantation and subsequently been killed. A Quaker, in 1782 he signed a petition asking that Peter, a local man of mixed African American and American Indian ancestry, be allowed to remain unenslaved. He died in Perquimans in about 1789.