The Slavery Debate between Benjamin Rush and Richard Nisbet

Since Rush’s slavery pamphlet appea¬red in Pennsylvania Packet in 1773, Richard Nisbet, a proslavery writer and a transplanted West Indian who arrived in Philadelphia in the early 1770s, immediately published his proslavery tract and debated with him. In Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture, Nisbet harshly criticized Rush’s arguments on slavery in terms of the Scripture. Meanwhile, an anonymous writer wrote Personal Slavery Established, by the Suffrages of Custom and Right Reason and participated in the Rush-Nisbet slavery debate. In reply to the anonymous writer, Rush finally finished a vindication tract to defend his own points of view. Later, to further support his arguments on slavery, Nisbet published The Capacity of Negroes for Religious and Moral Improvement Considered, in which he claimed that the African slaves were not capable for moral and religious improvement.

As to the tract written by the anonymous writer, till now historians still don’t know how to interpret it. Some think it is a virulently anti-black defense of slavery; some presume that it is actually an antislavery satire on Nisbet’s Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture; other historian, especially Lester B. Scherer, argues that it is an antislavery proslavery document, because “while seemingly defending slavery, the anonymous author chose a method which suggests that he may well have intended to ridicule the institution and its defenders.” Though historians could not figure out the authorship of the anonymous pamphlet, they doubtlessly agreed with each other that the author was intentionally to respond to the slavery debate between Rush and Nisbet. In this paper, regarding to the salve debate between Rush, Nisbet and the anonymous writer, I would like to call it Rush-Nisbet slavery debate.