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Introduction Three men, three black men, who wrote in three different centuries, led me to the study of the French-born, Philadelphia-based Quaker antislavery leader Anthony Benezet. Olaudah Equiano first alerted me to Benezet in his The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), with his references to ‘‘see Anthony Benezet throughout’’ to bolster his own description of the Africa of his youth before the arrival of the Europeans. In 1899 W. E. B. Du Bois, the historian, sociologist, and driving force behind the Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the concept of pan-Africanism, wrote that ‘‘Anthony Benezet and the Friends of Philadelphia have the honor of first recognizing the fact that the welfare of the State demands the education of the Negro children.’’ DuBois went on to note that ‘‘on motion of one, probably Benezet, it was decided that instruction ought to be provided for Negro children.’’1 In 1917 Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Negro History Month, wrote of the nation’s debt to Benezet, who ‘‘obtained many of his facts about the suffering of slaves from the Negroes themselves, moving among them in their homes, at the places where they worked, or on the wharves where they stopped when traveling. To diffuse this knowledge where it would be most productive of the desired results, he talked with tourists and corresponded with every influential person whom he could reach.’’2 Woodson later published many of the early Quaker appeals against slavery in the journal. Blacks like Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho, Richard Allen, Lemuel Haynes, Absalom Jones, James Forten, and subsequent generations of black leaders were deeply influenced by Benezet’s contribution to the intellectual and social debates of the day. Benezet founded the African Free School in Philadelphia, and future black leaders as Jones and Forten, who founded (in April 1787) the Free African Society at the home of Richard Allen, studied at Quaker schools. The society’s articles of incorporation were written under the aura of Benezet. In January 1789 the society began to hold its meetings at what became known as the African School House, which had been founded by Benezet. The society began circulating petitions modeled in part on Benezet ’s earlier ones, and Forten’s opposition to colonialization schemes was x Introduction similar to that of Benezet, who was an early advocate of giving land to free blacks. Benezet closely collaborated with the Quaker leader John Woolman. In 1754 they wrote the Quaker document Epistles of Caution and Advice, Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves, which opposed slavery. The same year, Woolman published his Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, which Benezet probably edited. In 1775 Benezet became the first president of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. In 1784, a few months before Benezet’s death, Benjamin Franklin and others reformed this organization into the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage; and for Improving the Conditions of the African Race. In 1787 Franklin took the honorary helm of this organization. Benezet had a transformative influence on Franklin, turning a former slave owner into the president of the Abolition Society. Benezet similarly led Benjamin Rush into the struggle for black freedom. Under Benezet’s tutelage Rush wrote anonymous tracts condemning slavery and followed Franklin as the head of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1803. Benezet corresponded with a wide range of leading political figures, like Henry Laurens, Patrick Henry, John Jay, and other future leaders of the American Republic, on his concerns about slavery. Benezet applied Quaker principles to his work with the enslaved Africans . Unlike most of his contemporaries, even those in the antislavery movement itself, he believed that all people were born equal in God’s sight. He advocated a policy of nonviolence and disapproved 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; he contrasted that constant desire for wealth in his own society with an image of African societies that he derived from travel narratives and discussions with enslaved and free Africans . He believed that prior to the slave trade Africans lived in relative peace and freedom...

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