The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet, 1754-1783: An Annotated Critical Edition

3. A Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes (1762)

25 3 A shorT ACCounT of ThAT pArT of AfriCA inhABiTed By The negroes (1762) EDIToR’S INTRoDUCTIoN The new approach to antislavery argumentation that Benezet pioneered in Observations galvanized him over the next two years through the most productive period of his writing. Having discovered Bosman, Barbot, and Brüe, he began to mine Astley’s Collection for other descriptions of Africa and Africans that he could use to counter the arguments of those who defended the slave trade. He also began to look systematically for depictions of slave life that would arouse a new concern and pity among those who had been taking the system for granted. By the time bookseller James Rivington announced the publication of Benezet’s next work, A Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes, in February 1762,1 the material that had taken up barely nine pages in Observations had blossomed into a fifty-six-page booklet. Benezet increased the number of quotations from authors found in Astley’s Collection from three to twenty-four and added as witnesses such authors as Michel Adanson, Francis Moore, Thomas Phillips, William Smith, John Snoek, and an anonymous enslaved man in the colonies. He also added twentyeight abstracts from an anonymous tract published in London in 1760, Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade. Unlike Benezet, the author of Two Dialogues was a classically educated scholar, fond of quoting Cicero and Seneca in the original Latin, who cast his argument as a literary dialogue between Allcraft, a man with ships involved in the slave trade, and Philmore, a conscientious opponent of slavery. The fictional Philmore, like the real Benezet, used 26 | The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet, 1754–1783 a volume of travel narratives to prove the points he makes to Allcraft.2 Benezet, in preparing his extract from the work, removed the dialogue with Allcraft and presented only the narratives and arguments provided by Philmore.3 He appropriated the anonymous author’s language but edited and rearranged portions of the text to make it conform to his own hortatory style. In addition to these testimonies about the manner in which the slave trade was carried on, Benezet added yet another new element: a long extract from the Scots legal scholar George Wallace, who argued from a natural law basis that no one, not even a prince, has the right to “dispose of [men’s] liberty and to sell them for slaves.” Judges everywhere, then, have “a duty to remember that [a slave] is a man, and to declare him to be free.” Within seven months Rivington and Brown announced the publication of the second edition of A Short Account, “with large additions and amendments.”4 The booklet increased from fifty-six to eighty pages, with new quotations from Brüe, Bosman, Barbot, Smith, Phillips, Moore, Nicholas Villault, Reynaud Des Marchais, Jacques-Joseph le Maire, Peter kolb, and many others. one by-product of this expansion was the addition of footnotes to incorporate some of the new material and to document sources more fully, a practice Benezet was to follow also in later publications. He also added long quotations from the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson and the English preacher and scholar James Foster. And he proposed the first comprehensive plan to emancipate enslaved Africans in the colonies, reimburse them for their labor, and offer them a path to full citizenship. As a book, A Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes is like a large, rambling house, with each room decorated in a different style: religious, philosophical, factual; earnest, heartrending, bombastic, gentle; accommodating and defiant. His footnotes sometimes seem like a lean-to kitchen or bathroom, tacked on after the original construction. Nancy Slocum Hornick called it “hurriedly written” and “poorly organized,” lacking classical polish and formal systematic analysis .5 Roger Bruns lamented Benezet’s “characteristic writing style of endlessly listing quotation after quotation.”6 But read the book carefully and you will discover there is a through-line of argumentation that is actually straightforward and compelling: Africans are persons like us, with the same intelligence, feelings, affections, and wills; their countries provide them with everything necessary to lead a rewarding civil life; for the A Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes | 27 sake of gain we have violated their liberty, subjecting them to abduction, murder, torture, and a life of...