A Teacher and a Friend

In his 2007 book, Head and Heart, Garry Wills called Anthony Benezet “the one unquestionably authentic American saint.” More than 200 years earlier, French revolutionary Jacques Pierre Brissot wrote, “Who is equal to Benezet? Who was more virtuous than Benezet? Who was more useful to society, to mankind?” Benezet, an 18th-century Philadelphia Quaker, was instrumental in ending the transatlantic slave trade. It was Benezet, too, who precipitated America’s long national discussion of Black and white equality, an unthinkable concept in his day. He was a person of not only national but global importance. Yet astonishingly, he has almost entirely slipped out of the American historical memory. Today, this man, who did so much to trigger America’s abolitionist movement and England’s as well, is known mainly to a small circle of scholars.

Philadelphia’s Quakers had started brooding about slavery in 1688, seven years after William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania. A group of Friends in nearby Germantown had issued a remonstrance that made its way to the Quakers’ highest colonial authority. “We are,” the Germantown Friends declared, “against the traffic of men-body … To bring men hither, or rob and sell them against their will, we stand against.”

The remonstrance went nowhere, with the matter deemed too “weighty” and complex. The fact was that too many Quakers, including a large percentage of their leaders in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, owned slaves. Some even dealt in the business of buying and selling enslaved people. Quakers believed that all people had the spirit of God within them, women as well as men, Black people and white, American Indians—the Inner Light didn’t differentiate. But though Black people might have been considered equal to whites spiritually, that didn’t mean they were equal otherwise. And here Quakers shared the common prejudices of their time.

The perception of Black inferiority was understandable enough. In the mid-18th century, the 13 colonies had a quarter of a million enslaved people, 20 percent of the overall population. Though conditions varied, almost all lived hard, distressed lives that were physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting. Kept illiterate, they had no access to the advantages white people enjoyed: education, rights, control over their persons and their labor, the common customs of individual, family, social, and civil life. Husbands and wives were often cruelly separated from each other, and children from their parents. Oppressed by these dehumanizing circumstances, they were perceived by the white world as incapable and contemptible. Imagine, said Benezet’s friend and fellow abolitionist John Woolman, if free people suffered the same circumstances: “[Would] we be less abject than they are?” But the idea of a humanity shared by Black and white people was to most an alien concept, absurd on its face.

This common street-level prejudice was part and parcel of a larger construct, one that provided an intellectual framework that oriented scientists, philosophers, theologians, and humanists, a presupposition that inhabited the minds of the era’s great thinkers and ordinary people alike. This principle, the so-called Great Chain of Being, provided a way of organizing the plenitude of nature—minerals, plants, and animals, including humankind—into a scale according to complexity, reasoning ability, and other criteria. The races of man fit into this continuum as well, best illustrated by Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, in which the great taxonomist placed white Europeans at the top of the hierarchy and Black people at the bottom.

The Great Chain of Being as an organizing principle had its origins in Plato and Aristotle, but it was in the 18th century, as the intellectual historian A. O. Lovejoy explained, that the concept attained its widest diffusion and acceptance, as influential during that period as the theory of evolution would be after Darwin. This most fundamental scientific theory of its time nurtured a jaundiced perception of Black people, both enslaved and free, and the power and extent of this distorted perception were deep and lasting. Although slavery itself was age-old, the New World association of Africans with the institution gave it a racial identification it didn’t previously have. With its steps of gradation, the Great Chain of Being provided a rationale for keeping Black people in perpetual servitude.

Given the universal perception of Black inferiority, it is perhaps not surprising that the idea of educating Black slaves was seen as both futile and dangerous. In the southern sections of the country, laws with significant penalties prohibited teaching the enslaved. In South Carolina, the fine for doing so was £100 “current money.” In other southern colonies anyone, white or Black, who dared teach enslaved individuals could be fined, imprisoned, or whipped. Educating Black people was considered a clear and present danger, especially in the aftermath of South Carolina’s Stono Rebellion of 1739, in which a literate enslaved man led a group that killed owners of a local store, seized weapons and powder, and marched toward Spanish Florida, killing more than 20 whites and setting fire to plantations along the way.

Into this world stepped Anthony Benezet. Born in 1713 into a Huguenot family that had escaped France when he was two years old, Benezet moved with his family to England and subsequently to Pennsylvania, where both he and his father joined the Philadelphia Society of Friends. Benezet was what we might today call a late bloomer, unable to settle on work until he was 26, when he found a job as a teacher and discovered his vocation. He had fallen into his career in the classroom by chance: An opening had presented itself, and in need of a job, he took it. “In the first instance,” one of his friends wrote, he “commenced teaching for a subsistence.” But he soon discovered a talent for teaching and then a passion for it. As a schoolmaster in Philadelphia’s Quaker school system, he was known for his innovations in curricula and for his gentle manner with students. “If I have any service at all in creation,” he wrote to a friend, “it is in the education of children.”

In 1750, at the age of 37—well into middle age by the standards of the time—Benezet created a small explosion in the world of education. He began teaching Black children in his home at night, fully understanding what a controversial thing he was doing but never imagining the consequences for both himself and society.