The Scholarship on the Slavery Debate between Benjamin Rush and Richard Nisbet

Regarding to the Rush-Nisbet slavery debate, several historians have touched it. Larry E. Tise argues Nisbet was one of the three proslavery writers who answered the antislavery opinions of Woolman, Benezet and Rush, and thinks that Nisbet, as well as the other two proslavery rejoinders “merit some scrutiny because they constitute the most acute formulations of traditional proslavery thought prior to the nineteenth century.” Moreover, he points out, “Nisbet’s perspective was not only an early critique of free society or of capitalism. Rather it was an integral part of traditional proslavery thought called forth by natural rights theory.” Patricia Bradley believes that “the Rush-Nisbet exchange was important in the dialogue on slavery,” because “it illustrated that the discussion could be framed in new approaches, including one of racial difference that so seldom appeared in the colonial discussion.” Both Tise and Bradley have mentioned the Rush-Nisbet debate, but they haven’t discussed it in detail. Therefore, the Rush-Nisbet slavery debate is still in need of further exploration.


In the eighteenth century, antislavery movement in the Atlantic world greatly attracted the attention of historians, but it is still debatable how to approach to it. David Brion Davis thinks both religion and enlightenment offered sources for abolitionists in the eighteenth century British Atlantic world. To understand the problem of slavery in Western culture, he examines how religious sources of Quakerism, British Protestantism, latitudinarian theology in New England and evangelicalism contributed to the antislavery movement. Meanwhile, in the Age of Enlightenment, although rationalism was ambivalent, he believes that the Enlightenment disseminated ideas could serve the defender of slavery as well as the abolitionist. Davies explores the religious sources and the Enlightenment as a source of antislavery thought in the eighteenth century, but he doesn’t combine them together and consider how they could help us to understand the antislavery thought.