Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (review)

Resurrecting the true impact that Anthony Benezet had on abolition both in Pennsylvania and throughout the Atlantic world, Maurice Jackson’s biography of this important Quaker abolitionist focuses on an intellectual history of his subject’s writings and influence. Jackson argues that not only did Benezet help nurture the American abolition movement but he also provides a “direct personal link between the great struggles in America, Britain, and France” (xiv). Jackson claims that Benezet’s prolific writings circled the Atlantic and provided inspiration for European abolition leaders to attack both slavery and the slave trade.

Focusing first on Benezet’s role in the United States, Jackson maintains that his subject’s support for abolition came from his personal desire to educate the oppressed and defend against similar types of persecution, which his own family had been subjected to in its past. Jackson continually reminds his readers that, unlike most eighteenth-century abolitionists, Benezet believed not only in abolition but also in the fundamental equality of blacks and whites. Indeed, Jackson, in chapter 4, expertly details how Benezet studied Africa and “proposed that blacks were human beings, no different in soul and spirit from whites” (79).

Though his ideas placed Benezet apart from other colonists, even among Quakers, the Pennsylvanian hoped to free Philadelphia’s blacks, as well as educate and provide for them financially. To fulfill his goal, he founded the African Free School within the framework of Philadelphia’s Quaker Meeting. Designed to offer both basic reading and writing as well as vocational education, Benezet’s school sought to ensure that “black students could exhibit capability in learning” equal to their “white contemporaries” (23). Hoping to build upon what he felt was his greatest accomplishment in life, Benezet sought out friendships and alliances with leading non-Quakers, including Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin, in an effort to advance both the abolition of slavery and the education of African Americans.

Throughout his work, Jackson carefully argues that Benezet drew his ideas on slavery and freedom from the larger Atlantic world. As opposed to harnessing ideas only from his Quaker faith, Benezet appears in Jackson’s study as a vociferous reader and intellectual, a true “man of the broad Atlantic” (70). Benezet’s abolitionist designs came from his own empirical study of African customs and cultures as well as from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and humanist scholars in Europe. Internalizing and reproducing their thoughts, Benezet used them to engage other Quakers in the colonies and, in effect, created a transnational exchange in the debate over slavery in North America.

The real contribution of Jackson’s work comes in the book’s second half (chapters 6–8) when he explains how Benezet helped create, as his subtitle states, an Atlantic abolition movement. In these chapters, Jackson persuasively argues that Benezet’s writings influenced both contemporary and future British, French, and African abolition activists including William Wilberforce, Olaudah Equiano, and Ignatius Sancho. As he was always willing to share his work with others, Benezet wrote extensively to his contemporaries in Europe, especially Britain’s Granville Sharp. The pair’s dialogue helped create a network of exchange for abolitionist ideas between the United States and Great Britain that Sharp carried on with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society even after Benezet’s death. Jackson makes clear that even those whom he did not have personal contact with, such as Olaudah Equiano, felt the Pennsylvanian’s influence. Equiano, for instance, frequently paraphrased Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea in his own Interesting Narrative, relying heavily on Benezet’s research and ideas on West Africa. By examining this textual transmission, Jackson proves both the importance and pervasiveness of Benezet’s ideas both in the United States and abroad.

Although this work is an excellent look at the intellectual history of Atlantic abolition, Jackson misses out on an opportunity to fully examine how Benezet’s ideas impacted the...