Anthony Benezet: Eighteenth Century Social Critic, Educator and Abolitionist
Anthony Benezet: Eighteenth Century Social Critic, Educator and Abolitionist
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Date
1974
Authors
Hornick, Nancy Slocum
Advisor
Bradbury, Miles L.
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Abstract
The career of Anthony Benezet (1713-1784), humanitarian leader,
social critic, and educator of the revolutionary period, had roots in
his French Huguenot background and English education. In 1731, Benezet
emigrated from London to Philadelphia, where he worked for several years
in an import-export business with his father and brothers. But he dropped
his commercial pursuits and began teaching school, a vocation he found
more satisfying. By 1743 he had taken the position of English School
Master at the Quaker sponsored "Publick School" of Philadelphia, later
known as the William Penn Charter School. For the next four decades,
Benezet led the school through its greatest period o:f development. He
was responsible for establishing the first permanent secondary level
school for girls in the colonies, as well a.s the first full time school
for black students , during his tenure. In addition he wrote school
books, introduced numerous innovative teaching methods, modernized curricula,
and ruled out harsh disciplinary measures in his classrooms, as
part of a long campaign to humanize education and make it serve more
effectively the needs of growing children and a changing society.
Benezet became the leading humanitarian reformer and social critic
of late eighteenth century America, as well. In response to real needs
created by the Seven Years' War and the Revolution, he tested his theories
and bourgeois ideals in the laboratory of daily life. His utopian vision
of community rested on values drawn eclectically from many sources in
Western civilization. These sources included his radical Protestant
heritage, his rising middle-class economic background, the Whig political
tradition, and contemporary Enlightenment thought. The result was a
social vision of essentially traditional patterns in which every person
contributed voluntary and happily to the good of the whole community.
On the basis of the Christian brotherhood ideal and his Quaker principle
of peace in the family of mankind, Benezet pressed for the transformation
of certain social institutions in order to preserve all that he saw as
valuable from the past.
His goal was never to overturn the established social structure,
but to change it drastically by gradual and peaceful methods. This called
for a revolution of sentiments, in which rational people would become
convinced of the need to correct various evils that threatened their
collective happiness. Benezet wrote prolifically on the subjects of
slavery, war, ignorance, and poverty, attacking what he believed to be
the causes of these social cancers. Invariably, as he analyzed the
problems, he concluded that they had roots in a spreading economic greed.
He condemned the selfish acquisitiveness that threatened to overwhelm
sociability and. lead to inexcusable oppression of less aggressive groups-the
children, black people, and poverty-ridden immigrants who comprised
a growing segment of the city's population. Failure to correct these
evils, he warned, meant ever worse chaos and social disorder.
Benezet's most significant campaign was that directed against
slavery and the slave trade. His sustained attack on the institution was
founded on an unequivocal assertion of the full intellectual and moral
equality of the races. It was a concept he first proved to his own
satisfaction in his teaching of black students, beginning about 1750,
and one that became the cornerstone of his antislavery campaign. From
1759 onward, Benezet's published research in African history, his exposes
of the inhumanity of slavery, his synthesis of Christian and Enlightenment arguments, and his sustained political campaign against the institution,
established his leadership in a growing libertarian movement in the
colonies.
In 1766, amid repercussions from the Stamp Act, Benezet published
his widely reprinted Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies.
The book attacked English hypocrisy for condoning the slave trade while
loudly proclaiming ''British ideas of liberty." The American antislavery
crusade, which peaked in 1774, became one important catalyst for inter-colonial
cooperation and. resistance to Great Britain, a powerful popular
movement which patriot leaders found useful in their drive for independence.
During and after the Revolution, however, antislavery sentiment
became politically embarrassing--a divisive force in a nation struggling
for survival. But in England and France, beginning in the mid-1780's,
Benezet's books in the hands of his antislavery converts and colleagues,
served as the basis for a sustained campaign to outlaw the slave trade
and the institution of slavery throughout the world.