Anthony Benezet: Linking Local And Global Abolitionism

Professor Maurice Jackson's study of Quaker Anthony Benezet's impact on the development of transatlantic abolitionism is well researched and insightful. The author clearly demonstrates his thesis that the Philadelphia schoolmaster made a unique contribution by building upon the increasingly robust Quaker opposition to slavery in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to help create an international network in North America, Great Britain, and France. Benezet was singular as well among eighteenth-century abolitionists by having first-hand sustained contact with free and enslaved African American adults and children through his Africans' School and, as a result, testifying that they were equal in intellectual ability with other people. He believed that empirical knowledge of the slave trade and African history, economy, and culture—taken to a large extent from the writings of slave traders—provided the best fuel for arguments against slavery and racial prejudice. Anthony Benezet thus served as a linchpin between the local and global antislavery movements, as well as between those who opposed slavery on humanitarian grounds versus those with more theoretical or religious motivations. While Benezet did not, as Jackson quotes Dr. Benjamin Rush in 1773, stand "alone a few years ago in opposing Negro slavery in Philadelphia" (p. 226), he set a standard for sustained energy and respect for people regardless of ethnicity and gender that few social activists emulated then or since.

Jackson's book begins as a biography, then evolves into a study of the men with whom Anthony Benezet interacted on both sides of the Atlantic and those he influenced through his written work. Benezet was born in France to Huguenot parents who escaped persecution in 1715, immigrating first to England and then to Philadelphia in 1731. Jackson suggests that the family's history probably inclined Benezet to sympathize with oppressed people, while the family's association with a French sect called the Prophets led him to join the Quakers in Philadelphia. Jackson briefly discusses Benezet's personal life, noting that he married Quaker minister Joyce Marriott of Burlington, New Jersey, in 1736. Together they lived in a simple house on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, where Benezet, as early as 1750, also taught African American children. Anthony and Joyce were vegetarians because they "did not believe that any life, including that of an animal, should be taken in order to feed another living being" (p. 19). They had two children who both died in infancy. In addition to abolitionism, Benezet was involved in other humanitarian work, including the Philadelphia hospital and aid for the exiled Acadians in 1755.

Jackson also briefly discusses the history of slavery in Philadelphia, summarizing the importation of Africans from 1684, legislation by the Pennsylvania Assembly to regulate the slave trade, Quaker involvement in the trade and antislavery activities, and the changing population of enslaved and free black people. He then considers in some detail the Quakers who predated Benezet in questioning the legitimacy of slavery, from founder of Quakerism George Fox and the Germantown protest of 1688 to the ardent abolitionists Ralph Sandiford, Benjamin Lay, and John Woolman. While the author briefly touches on Benezet's work to prohibit slaveholding within Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—which was considerable—Jackson's main focus is on Benezet's intellectual development and influence outside the Society of Friends. This emphasis places Let This Voice Be Heard firmly within the literature of intellectual histories of international abolitionism exemplified by the work of David Brion Davis and distinguishes it from another recent biography, Thomas P. Slaughter's The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition (2008). The contrast between these two biographies of Quaker abolitionists, contemporaries described as Quaker saints but very different in background and occupation, results in part from the historical sources. Woolman's major antislavery works included essays printed for mostly American audiences and his journal, published posthumously, which provides the biographer somewhat greater (though still limited) understanding of Woolman's religious and intellectual motivation. Benezet...