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Chapter 3 An Antislavery Intellect Develops In 1727 Anthony Benezet’s mother sent her fourteen-year-old out to pick up a five-volume set of philosophical writings and correspondence.1 This errand perhaps led to Benezet’s lifelong pattern of reading the work of leading thinkers and authors of religious, scientific, and philosophical tracts. As an adult Benezet immersed himself in the works of the Scottish moral philosophers, who had started a learned reasoning against slavery and oppression. Because the Age of Enlightenment was also the golden age of the slave trade, people juxtaposed noble ideas and self-serving ideologies .2 Slavery’s opponents, Benezet among them, weeded through philosophical tracts and the Christian Bible to combat passages that condoned bondage and oppression and to cite those that opposed it. Benezet knew that to extend his reach beyond the Quakers he would have to extend his grasp of new theories of freedom. He subtly tied Quaker theology to the developing philosophical ideas.3 He found a way to use philosophy for two purposes: to combat oppression in general by helping formulate an intellectual basis for social freedom and equality without the use of violence; and to develop a philosophy of racial equality, or at least one that allowed for blacks and whites to struggle for that equality. Benezet and the Scottish Moral Philosophers Benezet looked to the works of Scottish philosophers James Foster, George Wallace, and Francis Hutcheson to counter the proslavery arguments of those who based their arguments on Locke, Hume, and later Lord Kames. The full titles of Benezet’s A Short Account of That Part of Africa and of Some Historical Account of Guinea included specific reference to these three philosophers .4 The Scottish thinkers had a special connection to the colonies, because such professors as William Smith and Francis Alison at the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) and those teaching at King’s College (later Columbia University) in New York focused heavily on Hutcheson’s writings.5 Foster’s major work, Discourses on All the Principal Branches of Natural Religion and Social Virtue, was published in 1749.6 He devoted a chapter, ‘‘Of the Distinct Obligations of Masters, and Servants,’’ to a discussion on slav- 58 Chapter 3 ery.7 Foster found slavery as a form of commerce repulsive, believing ‘‘the practice of modern times, in order to extend their commerce . . . is much more criminal, and a more outrageous violation of natural rights’’ than earlier forms of bondage.8 He made his boldest claim in a passage uniting religious and philosophical arguments: ‘‘We practice, what we should exclaim against, as the utmost excess of cruelty and tyranny, if nations of the world, differing in color, and forms of government, from ourselves, were so possessed of empire, as to be able to reduce us to a state of unmerited , and brutish, servitude.’’9 Such passages reveal a break with the past over religion and philosophy as a justification for oppression.10 Yet Foster also found reason to accept human inequality, if it allowed for a certain stability in society. ‘‘If all men acted, as one vicious man,’’ he wrote, and he ‘‘thinks himself at liberty to act; what would be the result upon the whole.’’11 Man needed ‘‘a more universal sense of morality’’ that would lead him to condemn slavery as an ‘‘outrageous violation of natural rights.’’12 Francis Hutcheson, the famed University of Glasgow professor, anticipated some of the philosophical arguments of Foster when he wrote An Inquiry into Beauty and Virtue in 1725.13 Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy , first published in 1755, strongly influenced Benezet.14 Benezet cited Hutcheson to show that ‘‘man is the original Proprietor of his own liberty. The Proof of his losing it must be incumbent on those who deprive him of it by force.’’15 Hutcheson reasoned that ‘‘all men have strong desires of liberty and property, have notions of right, and strong natural impulses to marriage, families, and offspring, and earnest desires of their safety.’’16 Benezet linked white liberty with black slavery when he accepted Hutcheson ’s logic that ‘‘he who detains another by force in slavery is always bound to prove his title. The slave sold into a distant country, must not be obliged to prove a negative, that he never forfeited his liberty.’’17 Hutcheson argued against the concept of the right to enslave the captured. He quotes some authors who make such claims and...

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