Benezet, Anthony

By: Maurice Jackson

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Benezet, Anthony

(b. 31 January 1713; d. 13 May 1784),
Quaker educator and abolitionist.

Anthony Benezet was born to Huguenot parents in Saint-Quentin, Picardy, France. His father, Jean-Etienne Benezet, and his mother, Judith, had at least thirteen children, but more than half died at birth. The Protestant Huguenots had experienced a period of relative religious freedom lasting from the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes under Henry IV in 1598 until the revocation of the edict by Louis XIV in 1685, which led to renewed persecution by Catholics. JeanEtienne Benezet belonged to a Protestant group known as the Inspirés de la Vaunage, which descended from the Camisards, who had violently resisted religious persecution in the Cévennes Mountains of southern France. The Benezet family fled France for the Netherlands in 1715, then went to England, and finally settled in Philadelphia in 1731.

In 1735 Anthony Benezet was naturalized as a British subject, and on 13 May 1736 he married Joyce Marriott, whose grandfather was the prominent physician Griffith Owen, a Quaker minister. The year of Benezet's admittance to the Society of Friends is not known, but he was well recommended by members of the society. Rejecting his father's desire that he join the family trading business, Benezet became a schoolteacher. In 1742 he took charge of the Friends' English School of Philadelphia (later renamed the William Penn Charter School); he also became one of the first educators to found a school for Quaker girls. In 1750 he began to teach young black children, primarily in his home, and soon founded the School for Black People, also known as the African School for Blacks or the Free African School. In The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the historian and civil rights pioneer W. E. B. Du Bois wrote “that on motion of one, probably Benezet, it was decided that the instruction ought to be provided for Negro children.”

Benezet's students included Absalom Jones, the first minister of African descent in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the sailmaker and entrepreneur James Forten. Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, also greatly appreciated Benezet's work as a teacher and abolitionist. Unlike many of his contemporaries who opposed the slave trade but went little further, Benezet actively fought to end slavery and proclaimed the complete equality of enslaved Africans. According to the historian Carter G. Woodson, Benezet “obtained many of his facts about the sufferings of slaves from the Negroes themselves, moving among them in their homes, at their places where they worked or on the wharves where they stopped when traveling.” In A Short Account of the People Called Quakers (1780), Benezet wrote, “Having observed the many disadvantages these afflicted people labor under in point of education and otherwise, a tender care has taken place to promote their instruction in school learning, and also their religious and temporal welfare, in order to qualify them for becoming reputable members of society.”

Religion and Writings

Benezet applied Quaker principles to his work with enslaved Africans, including the belief that all people are born equal in God's sight, the policy of nonviolence, and the disapproval of excessive material acquisitions and consumption. His observations led him to link Europeans, especially the British, with “the love of wealth” that he believed was brought on by the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade. Benezet argued that wealth drove men and nations to war, and he contrasted the constant desire for wealth in his own society with the image of African societies that he derived from travel narratives by and discussions with enslaved and free Africans. He believed that, prior to the slave trade, Africans lived in relative freedom, with an abundance of the necessities of life. He asserted that the trade morally corrupted Europeans as well as some Africans, who became accomplices in the buying and selling of their fellows. His most important works on Africa were A Short Account of That Part of Africa, Inhabited by the Negroes … and the Manner by Which the Slave-Trade Is Carried On (1762) and Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and General Disposition of Its Inhabitants, with an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, Its Nature and Lamentable Effects (1771). Seven of his pamphlets also dealt exclusively with slavery.

The gentle Quaker's work greatly influenced the famed African-born abolitionists Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano. Both men were kidnapped as children from Africa and relied on Benezet's writings to enhance their knowledge of their homelands. In his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), Cugoano referred his readers to “the worthy and judicious Benezet” as giving “some striking estimations of the exceeding evil occasioned by that wicked diabolical traffic of the African slave trade.” Equiano, in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), advised readers to “see Anthony Benezet throughout” to bolster their understanding of the Africa of Equiano's youth, before the “arrival of the Europeans.” In depicting his Ibo culture and homeland in what later became Nigeria, Equiano closely followed Benezet's geographical and physical accounts.

In preparing An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (1786), the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson wrote of Benezet's Some Historical Account of Guinea, “In this precious book, I found almost all I wanted. I obtained by means of it knowledge of and gained access to the great authorities of Adanson, Moore, Barbot, Smith, Bosman and others.” Some Historical Account became the first school textbook on Africa. Benezet analyzed the early travelers' accounts of Africa (such as those of Richard Jobson in 1623; André Brue, 1685; Jacques Barbot, 1678; and Wilhelm Bosman, 1709) to create his own description of Africa and to refute the proslavery descriptions of Africa and Africans.

Like many writers of the time—particularly Dissenters in the English-speaking world—Benezet relied heavily on biblical citations to buttress his arguments. He also drew upon Enlightenment philosophy and lessons learned from practical life. He followed the French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu's argument in The Spirit of Laws (1748) that slavery had a destructive effect on both the state and free men therein; Benezet noted that slavery destroyed both the white soul and the black body. He was also deeply influenced by the Scottish moral philosophers. He agreed with the legal theorist George Wallace, who wrote in his System of the Principles of the Law of Scotland (1760), “Men in their liberty are not in comercia, they are not either saleable or purchasable.” Benezet quoted from the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, who in his System of Moral Philosophy (1755) declared that “no endowments natural or acquired, can give a perfect right to assume power over others, without their consent.” Like Adam Smith he argued that slavery diminished the productive capacity and corrupted the morals of both races.

Benezet closely collaborated with the Quaker leader John Woolman. In 1754 they together wrote an antislavery Quaker tract, Epistle of Caution and Advice, Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves. In the same year Woolman followed with Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, which Benezet is believed to have edited. Benezet also had a tremendous influence on Benjamin Franklin, who credited his pamphlets and antislavery petition efforts with the decision of the Virginia House of Burgesses to petition the King for an end to the slave trade in 1772. Benezet also brought the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, who later wrote anonymous tracts condemning slavery, into the struggle for black freedom

Benezet wrote many hundreds of letters, corresponding with religious leaders such as George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Moses Brown and secular leaders such as Franklin and Rush about his views on slavery and the slave trade. Upon receiving one of his pamphlets, the future Patriot firebrand Patrick Henry wrote on 18 January 1773, “I take this Opportunity to acknowledge ye receipt of Anthony Benezet's book against the slave trade. I thank ye for it.” Henry added ruefully, “Would anyone believe that I am a Master of Slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by ye general Inconvenience of living without them; I will not, I cannot justify it.” John Wesley's Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) is based almost entirely on Benezet's Some Historical Account of Guinea; the Quaker Benezet thanked the founder of Methodism for using his work. In 1783 Benezet addressed a letter to Britain's Queen Charlotte, urging her to help end the British slave trade. He wrote to Queen Sophia of Spain with a similar request.

International Influence

The correspondence between Benezet and the pioneer British abolitionist Granville Sharp proved to be one of the first links in the transnational fight against slavery and the slave trade. The two men collaborated in the famous Somerset case, and copies of Benezet's pamphlets were delivered to Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and his fellow jurists in 1771 before their ruling. Mansfield decided that James Somerset, a black who had been brought to England, could not be forcibly removed from the country by his master; Somerset was declared free. On 14 May 1772 Benezet wrote Sharp that “six hundred Copies had been delivered” of his pamphlet A Caution and a Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies (1767) “to so many Members of both Houses of Parliament.” It was Benezet who, through his correspondence, introduced Sharp and Franklin, writing on 4 April 1773, “I am glad to understand from my friend Benjamin Franklin, that you have commenced an acquaintance, and that he expects in the future to act in concert with thee in the affair of slavery.” Together Sharp and Benezet developed new methods of collecting thousands of signatures on antislavery petitions and delivering them to their respective assemblies.

Benezet's descriptions of Africa proved to be so central that the British abolitionist leader William Wilberforce quoted him at length in the great 1792 parliamentary debates on ending the slave trade. At that time a motion was forwarded in favor of abolishing that trade—the first such action taken in any parliamentary body in the world. Although it did not win passage, it is credited with having brought about the beginning of the end of the international slave trade. Thousands of Benezet's pamphlets were distributed to abolition societies and members of the British parliament. He corresponded with the founders of the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of Friends of the Blacks) in Paris, who initially authorized the translation of his works on Africa. Among these men were Jean-Pierre Brissot, a member of the Girondist movement during the French Revolution; Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, a politician and defender of human rights, especially for women and blacks; Etienne Claviere, a peer of Brissot's in the Girondist movement; Honoré Gabriel Victor Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, who was imprisoned because of his revolutionary activities; Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, a Jesuit priest who left the order to devote his life to politics; and Bishop Henri Grégoire, the leading antislavery figure during the French Revolution.

American Activism

When kidnapped blacks were transported through Philadelphia on their way south, Benezet intervened to obtain their freedom; in 1775 he became the first president of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. In 1784, a few months before his death, this organization was refounded as the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, for the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Conditions of the African Race. In 1787 Benezet's old friend Benjamin Franklin took the helm of this society.

In early 1787 a number of free blacks, including Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, met to discuss the formation of a religious society for blacks. Feeling that their numbers were too small and their religious sensibilities too varied, they instead formed the Free African Society in April 1787. Its articles of incorporation were written under the aura of Benezet and indeed specified that a Quaker was always “to be chosen to act as Clerk and Treasurer of this useful institution.” In January 1789 the society began to hold its meetings at the Quakers' African School House, which had been founded by Benezet. The society circulated petitions that were modeled in part on Benezet's earlier ones, and James Forten's opposition to African colonization schemes was similar to Benezet's. In voicing his own opposition to colonization, Benezet was an early advocate of giving land to free blacks.

There were many facets to the life of Anthony Benezet. As an educator he developed new ways to teach students to read, publishing An Essay on Grammar (1778) and The Pennsylvania Spelling Book (1778). Near the end of his life he began a study of the plight of the Native Americans and in 1784 published Observations on the Situation, Disposition, and Character of the Indian Natives of This Continent. He wrote several pamphlets on the Quaker religion and others such as Thoughts on the Nature of War (1759). He wrote Remarks on the Nature and Bad Effects of Spirituous Liquors (1788) and several other pamphlets on what he considered the harm done to society through liquor consumption.

On his deathbed Benezet uttered the words, “I am dying and feel shamed to meet the face of my maker, I have done so little in his cause.” The blacks who followed his funeral processions felt different. Summing up the general feeling about the passing of Friend Anthony Benezet, the French writer and revolutionary Jean-Pierre Brissot wrote:

"What author, what great man, will ever be followed to his grave by four hundred Negroes, snatched by his own assiduity, his own generosity, from ignorance, wretchedness, and slavery? Who then has a right to speak haughtily of this benefactor of men? … Where is the man of all of Europe, of whatever rank or birth, who is equal to Benezet? Who is not obliged to respect him? How long will authors suffer themselves to be shackled by the prejudice of society? Will they never perceive that nature has created all men equal, that wisdom and virtue are the only criteria of superiority? Who was more virtuous than Benezet? Who was more useful to mankind?"

(Brookes, p. 460)

See also Abolitionism; Africa, Idea of; African Methodist Episcopal Church; Allen, Richard; American Colonization Society; Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah; Education; Equiano, Olaudah; Forten, James; Franklin, Benjamin, and African Americans; Free African Society; Grégoire, Bishop Henri; Jones, Absalom; Petitions; Religion; Slave Narratives; Society of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans; Temperance; and Woolman, John.

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