The Great Plan of Benjamin Rush to End Slavery

In order to terminate the slavery in North America, Rush proposed his great plan and designed the blueprint for the African slaves. He presumed that magistrates should “exert the authority they are invested with, in suppressing this evil.” Meanwhile, legislators should “reflect upon the trust reposed in them.”


In addition, their laws should be made in terms of the Spirit of Religion, Liberty and the English Constitution. Rush hoped the magistrates to exert their authority to suppress the evil of the slavery, the legislators should make righteous laws. If legislators and magistrates could cooperate with each other, the slavery would be over sooner or later. Then “population, and the accession of strangers, in which the Riches of all countries consist, can only flourish.” As for the future of the Africans, Rush claimed that they should be embraced into “one great family.” Colonial Americans, “as an asylum for freedom,” highly valued Humanity, virtue and general Liberty, rather than various vices, with which human beings would be degraded. In such a land for freedom, it should not be constructed on the slavery. Rather, it should be based on benevolence, with which “all the children of men together in one great Family.” Therefore, there should be no difference between white colonial Americans and the African slaves and the slavery in North America should be ended.

Responding to Rush’s pamphlet, Nisbet wrote a tract entitled Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture and asserted his disagreements with Rush on slavery in it. In the preface, Nisbet pointed out that Rush’s antislavery arguments were “exaggerated beyond the most distant bounds of probability.” Assuming Rush’s arguments were biased, he thought it was very necessary for him to debate with Rush. He wrote, “I never should have attempted to contradict the author of the address, merely from being a native of the West-Indies, for I hate national partiality; but as I have many valuable friends in that part of the world, I could not, patiently, hear them so unworthily traduced, without endeavouring to undeceive his readers.” Although he admitted that he was “infinitely inferior to the author of the address, in the qualifications of a writer,” he still believed that he had “many advantages over him.” In order to defend his points of view on the slavery, he finally published his political tract.