Scottish Enlightenment and the Antislavery Movement in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia: Benjamin Rush as a Case Study

Scottish Enlightenment and the Antislavery Movement in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia: Benjamin Rush as a Case Study

In the second half of the 18th century, slavery as a problem was greatly discussed in the Anglo-American world. In colonial Philadelphia, John Woolman exerted great influence in leading the Society of Friends to recognize the evil of slavery; Anthony Benezet, a Huguenot refugee who immigrated to Philadelphia and attacked the slavery system by writing many anti-slavery works; In domestic England, Granville Sharp published the first tract and attacked slavery──A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery ... (1769).


Moreover, he took part in several lawsuits on slavery, like the Jonathan Strong’s case, as well as the Somersett's Case, and struggled for the rights of the African slaves and highly supported the abolition of the slavery in the British Empire. Following him, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect became abolitionists and continued to abolish the slavery in England and its overseas colonies. As a result, with the help of these abolitionists, the Atlantic slave trade was finally ended in the British Empire in 1807.


Unlike these abolitionists in the 18th century Atlantic world, Benjamin Rush, a prominent Presbyterian doctor and professor of chemistry in Philadelphia, defended his anti-slavery views not only scientifically through the medical knowledge he had learnt at University of Edinburgh in the 1760s, but also faithfully through the religious education he had received when he was young.


In 1766, when Dr. Benjamin Rush set out for his studies in Edinburgh, he was outraged by the sight of 100 slave ships in Liverpool harbor. Then in 1773, he wrote a pamphlet entitled "An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping," in which he not only assailed the slave trade, but the entire institution of slavery in terms of the Christianity and the laws of nature. Dr. Rush argued scientifically that Negroes were not by nature intellectually or morally inferior. Any apparent evidence to the contrary was only the perverted expression of slavery, which "is so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it." Moreover, in 1792, Rush thought that skin color and hair difference of the African Americans meant they were diseased and could be cured with medical care. Then he presented a paper before the American Philosophical Society and argued that the “color” and “figure” of blacks were derived from a form of leprosy. He was convinced that with proper treatment, blacks could be cured (i.e. become white) and eventually... assimilated into the general population.


Comparing with other founding fathers in Revolutionary America who embraced the slavery at that time, Rush became a radical abolitionist. But why was Rush so radical an abolitionist? Why did he support the antislavery movement in pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia? Why did he defend his arguments through the medical knowledge he learnt in the University of Edinburgh? To what extend can we understand his inner mind as an abolitionist?