The Slavery Correspondence Debate Benjamin Rush and Granville Sharp

On 1 May 1773, Rush wrote a letter to Granville Sharp, in which he was going to send him an antislavery pamphlet. It was in this pamphlet Rush firstly asserted his views on slavery. Although slavery was very popular in colonial America, Rush argued that the slave-keeping was evil and “the evil still continues” in North America. As Rush pointed out, “slavery and vice are connected together, and the latter is always a source of misery.” Europeans who assumed the African slaves caused these vices, but Rush claimed that it was the evil of the slavery rather than the evil of the African slaves caused them:

Slavery is so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it. All the vices which are charged upon the Negroes in the southern colonies and the West-Indies, such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft, and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery, and serve as an argument to prove that they were not intended for it.

In his opinion, the idleness, treachery, theft and so on were all caused by slavery. Slavery, then he further explained, “While it includes all the former Vices, necessarily excludes the practice of all the latter Virtues, both from the Master and the Slave.” Europeans thought Africans were inferior to them. However, Rush did not think so. In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu argued that the African Negroes were suitable for slaves and they should not be admitted as men:

The Europeans having extirpated the Americans, were obliged to make slaves of the Africans for clearing such vast tracts of land. Sugar would be too dear, if the plants which produce it were cultivated by any other than slaves. These creatures are all over black, and with such a flat nose that they can scarcely be pitied. It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise being, should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black ugly body…… It is impossible to us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow, that we ourselves are not Christians.

Under Montesquieu’s influence, Europeans thought the Africans should be slaves due to their black color. Assuming that the African slaves had the same capacities and moral faculty as the white Christians, Rush thought the intellects of the Negroes were not inferior to them. Rush explained that the blackness was endowed by the providence. Disagreeing with Montesquieu, Rush refuted the statement that the Africans were subjected to slavery due to their black skin. He pointed out, “I need hardly say anything in favour of the Intellects of the Negroes, or of their capacities for virtue and happiness, although these have been supposed, by some, to be inferior to those of the inhabitants of Europe.” Instead, Rush proclaimed that God gave them the black color, with which “the ravages of heat, diseases and time, appear less in their faces than in a white one.” While for those Europeans, they suffered heat, diseases and other sufferings.