Antislavery Movement in the 18th Century Atlantic World

Before the Atlantic slave trade was finally abolished, Anglo-American abolitionists supported the antislavery movements with each other. In the early of the eighteenth century, over the issue of slave importation, the Philadelphia Friends who believed it was “not a commendable, nor allowed practice.” After consulting the Philadelphia Friends, the London Quakers distributed their attitudes to other English Friends in 1727. In 1761, Philadelphia Quakers proposed a provincial tax on the importation of slaves and asked the British Quakers to support their actions. Hearing the good news in the other side of the Atlantic world, London Quakers sent a message to North Carolina and Virginia Quakers to support their antislavery movements. Moreover, in April, 1773, in a letter to Granville Sharp, Benezet wrote, “I herewith send thee some pamphlets, and in a confidence of thy goodness of heart, which by looking to the intention, will construe the freedom I have taken in the best light.” In order to let “the rising youth might acquire knowledge, and at the same time a detestation of this cruel traffic,” Thomas Clarkson claimed the London Yearly Meeting to circulate his pamphlets particularly among the students in English schools. As a result of this correspondence, Philadelphia and London Quakers separately petitioned to Parliament and to the Continental Congress in 1783, which made the London Meeting for Sufferings to appoint a special committee on the slave trade to consider steps “for the Relief & Liberation of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, & for the Discouragement of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa.” Obviously, in order to struggle for the African slaves, abolitionists in the Atlantic world cooperated with each other.


As a Quaker in Philadelphia, Benezet was very sympathetic to the sufferings of African slaves. When he was young, he experienced religious persecutions of French government on his family members. In a letter to a friend, Benezet wrote, “one of my uncles was hung by these intolerants, my aunt was put in a convent, two of my cousins died at the galleys, and my fugitive father was hung in effigy for explaining the gospel differently from the priests and the family was ruined by the confiscation of his property.” In an increasingly intolerant French society, he witnessed the subjugation of the Huguenots, which made him natural to help the enslaved Africans who were suffering inhuman tortures in North America. In Benezet’s life, his father had a great impact on his antislavery view. Elder Benezet was an associate of George Whitefield, a leader of the Great Awakening of the 1730s, who protested the slave system and called for more humane treatment of human property. He assisted Whitefield’s project of establishing Christian school for Negroes in Pennsylvania and started the Nazareth training school for Blacks on 5,000 acres near the Delaware River. Whitefield didn’t object to the institution of slavery, nor did he suggest emancipation, because he believed that Christian training could create a more efficient slave labor force without the use of brutal coercion. Although the project was failed, elder Benezet passed on his view on the African slaves to his son. Benezet believed in the rights of the Blacks, probably because of his father’s participation of Whitefield’s project.