Christian Enlightenment and the Rush-Nisbet Slavery Debate in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia

Christian Enlightenment and the Rush-Nisbet Slavery Debate in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia


On May 1 1773, in a letter to Granville Sharp, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a prominent Presbyterian doctor in Philadelphia, told his friend that he had finished his own antislavery pamphlet. In the letter, he wrote: “From the amiable character which I have received of you from my worthy friend Mr. Anthony Benezet I have taken the liberty of introducing myself to your correspondence by sending you a pamphlet entitled An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America.” On the one hand, Rush told Sharp that he was going to publish his political tract on slavery; on the other hand, he pointed out his intellectual debt to Anthony Benezet, an American philanthropist and Quaker abolitionist in Revolutionary period. In the pamphlet, Rush not only advocated colonial Americans to “put a stop to slavery” in terms of “all mankind as equal,” but claimed that slaves should be entitled “all the privileges of free-born British subjects” and the children of the slaves should be embraced “in one great Family.” Rush’s antislavery views was so radical that he was involved into a slave debate.