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  • Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism
  • Emma Lapsansky-Werner
Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. By Maurice Jackson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. xvi + 374 pp. Maps, illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.

Anthony Benezet has been long overdue for a full-on biography. Since shortly after his death in 1784, observers of eighteenth-century reform have recognized his importance in helping to shape eighteenth-century thought. In what might be called "footnote biographies"—short pamphlets, introductions, footnotes, or post-scripts in larger works on reform or slavery Benezet's contributions have hung around the fringes of history. Just within the past decade, Irv Brendlinger, [End Page 51] William Kashatus, and others have given brief nods to Benezet as a central figure in the early abolitionist movement. And recently there has been a reissue of William Armistead's 1859 reprint of Roberts Vaux's 1817 biography/memoir.

But why no good, full biography? What has everyone been waiting for, one might ask? Why re-issue an old memoir rather than re-interpret the man for a modem audience? Surely Benezet's impact on western human-rights thought has been obvious. Yet, mostly, scholars concerned with the birth of abolitionism have contented themselves with a cursory mention of Benezet as they move on to focus on John Woolman, William Wilberforce, or—recently—Thomas Clarkson. Even scholars of early Quakerism have largely glanced off Benezet: enroute to chronicling Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's anti-slavery decree, Thomas Drake and Jean Soderlund breezed by Benezet, noting his Huguenot background, without stopping to explore his experiences or the development of his mind.

Well, now we have the answer: Benezet had been waiting for Maurice Jackson, and waiting for the right constellation of realities in the discourse about American thought. For far too long, Quaker history has been imprisoned by the myth that Quakers—the peculiar people—could only be studied and written about in the isolation of Quakerism. Today, an increasing number of promising scholars (e.g., Jane Calvert) have broken out of those confines, situating Quakers and Quaker history within the context of developments in the intersecting worlds around the Religious Society of Friends. In Let This Voice be Heard, Maurice Jackson has done for Benezet what Calvert did for John Dickinson: suggested how Quaker ideals, and the people who promoted them, have inter-penetrated the larger society.

Jackson's efforts are well-timed, for it would have been hard to write such a book thirty years ago. Using the emerging "Atlantic World" scholarship of recent decades, Jackson argues, convincingly, that Benezet should properly be seen as a seminal participant within the philosophical discourse of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, a man whose experience and loyalties comfortably embraced three continents, and several religions. Benezet's entry into, and appeals to, the embryonic human-rights discourse of his day are tidily organized into chapters Jackson titles "Visions of Africa," "Building an Anti-Slavery Consensus in North America," "Transatlantic Beginnings and the British Anti-Slavery Movement," "Benezet and the Antislavery Movement in France." These, and other chapter titles, tell us as much about the orderliness of Jackson's mind as about Benezet, for Jackson has carefully and systematically combed the primary and secondary literature of his topic, to paint a canvas both broad and detailed. In a final chapter, Jackson takes Benezet's biography yet one level deeper, exploring the minds of philosopher/philanthropist's subjects through the "African Voices" of Sancho, Cugoano, Equiano, and Gronniosaw as these black men sought to shape an identity in a white Atlantic World that viewed them with a noxious mixture of curiosity, dismissiveness, superiority, and disdain. [End Page 52]

Jackson's argument is "spot-on," and what it lacks in stylistic grace and lyricism, it more than makes up for in careful research and wide-sweeping thoroughness, placing Benezet's intellectual development in the context of contemporary French and British history and thought. Using admirable patience and meticulous note-taking, Jackson has read through manumission records, organizational minutes, Friends' archives, voluminous correspondence, the Bible, the musings of European and American philosophers, and countless travel narratives...

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