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220 7 oBservATions on slAvery (1778) EDIToR’S INTRoDUCTIoN In the period immediately following Benezet’s publication of Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery, the friction between the British colonies in North America and England began to flare into armed conflict. The skirmishes at Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, in April 1775 began a war that would not end until the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781 and would occasion British occupations of the colonies’ major cities, including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. As usual in wartime, the Quaker community was squeezed between the patriots who demanded that they support the war for independence and their faith’s traditional stance of neutrality and nonparticipation. The peace testimony of the Quakers was very important to Benezet: he had delivered a sermon in 1759 to mark a celebration of British victories in the French and Indian War, in which he argued that war always arose from the evil in men’s hearts and was never efficacious through men’s efforts and ended only when God’s spirit caused men to renounce their ambitions and seek his pure love. He had the sermon printed and distributed in 1766 when the Stamp Act crisis erupted, and a revised version appeared in 1776 in the midst of hostilities between the colonies and England. As early as 1762, Benezet had been arguing for the freedom of African slaves based on their natural rights as men, rights that could not be abrogated by the actions of any government. He watched closely as rebellious colonists began using the same arguments in their resistance to the English king and Parliament. If Parliament had the power to tax them without their consent, then it might have the power to reduce them to the level of African slaves; if the king could veto their assemblies’ acts banishing or restricting the importation of African slaves, then he was Observations on Slavery | 221 able to force slavery on them.1 As the resistance intensified and colonists used the natural rights arguments to declare their independence of England , Benezet became more and more acutely aware of the gap between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of continuing slavery. By 1778 he was moved to republish his sermon against war, and this time he coupled it with a new and powerful essay against slavery. Benezet began his new essay, “observations on Slavery,” with an explicit recognition that slavery “is another mighty evil which proceeds from the same corrupt root as war,” and that root is the lust for wealth and power. He quoted the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Declaration of the Rights of Men to demonstrate that patriots publicly assert the principle that all men have inherent rights to freedom, yet they continue to deny the blessings of liberty to their laborers. The guilt and suffering deriving from Negro slavery and massacres of Indians, he declared, are “the principal causes of those heavy judgments which are now so sensibly displayed over the colonies.” Before independence Benezet had sought to place most of the guilt for the slave trade at the door of avaricious British merchants and an accommodating English government ; he now accused the colonists in America of ignoring evidence of the cruelty and inhumanity occasioned by slavery so that they might, using slave labor, increase their substance and amass great wealth. Just as he had interpreted the French and Indian War as punishment for Pennsylvania ’s participation in the slave trade, he now saw the Revolutionary War as a direct consequence of the colonists winking at slavery while professing equality. “Perhaps,” he mused, “nothing will so sensibly teach us to feel for the affliction of the oppressed Africans, as that ourselves partake of the same cup of distress we have so long been instrumental in causing them to drink.” Benezet saw a parallel between the colonists and the Israelites who, under the threat of captivity in Babylon, agreed to free their servants who had been kept in bondage beyond the term allowed in the Mosaic Law. When the danger appeared to be over, the Israelites “brought them again into subjection,” and God’s curse took an unusually ironic cast: “Ye have not harkened unto me in proclaiming liberty every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbor. Behold I proclaim a liberty for you . . . to the sword, the pestilence, and the famine.” Benezet closed his essay with a long quotation from Wesley’s address to the ship captains, merchants, and planters, as...

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