Rhode Island textile manufacturer, Hazard maintained extensive business contacts in the South before his ambivalent anti-slavery alienated customers. He claimed that an 1841 trip to New Orleans in which he helped free a number of wrongfully imprisoned slaves was "the greatest effort of his life." In addition to entangling himself politically and economically with slavery, Hazard attempted to pass legislation curbing the corporate privileges of Rhode Island's railroads at the beginning of the 1850s.