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

4. A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies (1766–1767)

84 4 A CAuTion And WArning To greAT BriTAin And her Colonies (1766–1767) EDIToR’S INTRoDUCTIoN A Short Account could be called a user’s manual for antislavery activists, supplying them with facts and arguments to buttress their campaigns. Benezet’s next work, A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies, is a refined and polished argument in its own right, wielded like a laser scalpel to excise the practice of slavery from the British dominions. As others have noted, the more Benezet studied Africa and the slave trade, the more he became convinced that entrenched transatlantic business and mercantile interests would resist all private efforts to curtail their profitable trade. He sought some countervailing force to use against them.1 He set his sights on convincing the king of England, his ministers, and Parliament that they had become unwitting dupes in their empire’s perpetuation of “this evil of so deep a dye” and that it was time for them to act by decree or legislation to put an end to it. His strategy involved trying to separate the most active perpetrators —Guinea merchants, the shipping industry, and planters—from the general populace and its government. The latter were depicted as embodying the grand constitutional tradition of Britain, which valued individual freedom and liberty above all tyrannies: religious, secular, and economic. If only, Benezet suggested, the bearers of these freedom-loving traditions knew what was being practiced in their name by the greedy speculators who profited from slavery and who trampled on human rights for the sake of gain, they would act to reestablish Britain’s preeminent position among the Christian nations of Europe by ending the slave A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies | 85 trade and eventually abolishing all slavery. Doing so might allow them to escape the harm to their own society that the perpetuation of slavery naturally wreaked on its character. Benezet began his new argument by describing Britain as the home of “those who distinguish themselves as the advocates of liberty,” the guardians of the “valuable privileges transmitted to us from our ancestors .” As evidence, he alluded to the current outcry against the stamp act and the “universal consideration” of men’s individual liberties it had occasioned. He then wondered aloud how such a people could “remain insensible and inattentive” to the great multitude of “our fellow-men” who remain “in the most deplorable state of slavery.” The answer must be that the people’s leaders in government, “both clergy and laity,” who had power to put a stop to the trade, did not know either its extent or the horrible cruelties that accompanied it. If they had, they would have joined their fellow countrymen who had already spoken out in print against such injustice, men such as the English preacher and theologian James Foster, who had alleged that slavery “spurns at all the principles both of natural and revealed religion.” Benezet glanced at the evils that slavery nourished among those who practiced it: it promoted idleness and discouraged marriage, corrupted the young and debauched morals, introduced fear of insurrection and took employment from the working classes. He then chose to focus on what was more hidden from common view, the horrific treatment that “our fellow-creatures,” the enslaved Africans, received in British colonies such as Barbados and Jamaica. These accounts were written by Britons and recently published in London: they were not antislavery tracts per se but were compiled as part of larger histories such as An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757) by William and Edmund Burke and The Natural and Civil History of the French Dominions in North and South America (1760) by Thomas Jefferys. Then Benezet turned to descriptions of conditions in the southern colonies of Georgia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Virginia by George Whitefield, a famous itinerant preacher of the Great Awakening, respected throughout England and North America for his oratory and his concern for the treatment of slaves. Then Benezet returned to his usual sources about conditions in Africa. He used Brüe and Bosman, Adanson and Smith, to demonstrate that Africans displayed a “very good natured, social, and obliging” character and that their diligent cultivation of their land offered them an 86 | The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet, 1754–1783 abundance of food and clothing—essentials they were later denied at the hands of...