Anthony Benezet as an Abolitionist

Benezet determined to be an abolitionist and finally he became an important representative of Philadelphia’s antislavery movement. In his first work, Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes (1760), Benezet argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of man. Two years later, shifting from the economic to the social and philosophical, in his Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes (1762), he wrote that “Negroes are generally sensible, humane, and sociable, and that their capacity is as good, and as capable of improvement as that of White People.” Nevertheless, in Short Observations on Slavery (1785) Benezet made a strong-person assertion of full racial equality. According to him, A. Benezet,

Had the opportunity of knowing the temper and genius of the Africans; particularly those under his tuition, who have been many, of different ages; and he can with truth and sincerity declare, that he has found among them as great variety of talents, equally capable of improvement, as among a like number of whites.

Apparently, in the eighteenth century Atlantic world, Benezet was a pioneer who changed the nature of antislavery movement. Before him, activists of the early years relied almost exclusively on religious arguments. However, with the help of Benezet’s effort, early Quaker antislavery sentiment was transformed into a broad-based transatlantic movement. Moreover, he “translated ideas from diverse sources ─ Enlightenment philosophy, talks with enslaved and free Africans, Quakerism, practical life, African travel narratives, and the Bible ─ into concrete action, and in doing so became universally recognized by the leaders of the eighteenth-century antislavery movement as its founder.” In the history of antislavery movement of the eighteenth century Atlantic world, Benezet brought the collective spirit across the Atlantic to Britain and France and “laid the foundations for a truly pan-Atlantic antislavery movement.”