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David Chanoff, "Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello. And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. David Chanoff, a visiting research professor at Brandeis University, about his latest book, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2025, titled Anthony Benezet, Quaker Abolitionist, Anti Racist. Now, obviously this book is a biography, but it's a biography about Someone who has a real impact in terms of intellectual history as well. So we are going to be talking about the actual person, Anthony Benezet, and who he is and why we maybe haven't heard of him. But we're also going to be talking about his ideas that were so influential on so many of the debates against the trade in enslaved people. Debates that happened, obviously, in the United States, also in the United Kingdom. There's all sorts of names that we do still know today, like Wilberforce. And yet it turns out that Benezet is maybe a name we should know as well as being a really big part of this. But we don't, and therefore we get to have this conversation. So, David, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. David Chanoff
Miranda, it's a pleasure. I'm so happy to be here with you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us what. Why you decided to write this book.
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Dr. David Chanoff
I have been affiliated with various universities over the years, but I would say primarily I'm a writer. So I've done quite a few biographies and also histories of one sort or another. I got engaged with Anthony Benezet, who is an absolutely remarkable character and an individual who has astonishingly been lost to the historic memory in the United States and also in England, where he was tremendously influential as well. I first came across him years ago when I was researching a book on the impact of American revolutionary ideas on other countries. And when I was looking at Great Britain, I came across Anthony Benezet's name. And this was an American who apparently had had a tremendous influence on the English abolitionist movement. And I had never heard of him. And so that piqued my curiosity, and I started looking into it and found that, in fact, not very much had been written about him. There was a biography that was in his lifetime. It was after his lifetime, actually, but near his lifetime. And there were two other biographies that had been written over several hundred years. So that was especially curious because I began to understand the impact that he had had on the end of the international slave trade, number one. And number two, even more importantly, at least in American terms, on the. On the question of the equality of black and white people. And this has been a discussion that's gone on in American life ever since the beginning of American life. So this is a person of really immense importance, global importance, and yet somebody that seems to have disappeared from our histories.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm always interested in history that gets forgotten and trying to revive it. So I'm so pleased you came onto the podcast to tell us about this. But obviously, before we get into his ideas and the impact that they had, we should probably cover some of these basics. So who was he? Where did he come from? What was his family and religious background?
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Dr. David Chanoff
Yeah, his family were Huguenot refugees. Louis Louis XIV in France made it an object, the primary object of his domestic policy, to completely extirpate Protestantism there. And the suppression of the religion was. Was so comprehensive and also so destructive that there was a very, very large exodus of Protestants from France. And they mainly went to Protestant countries where they could practice their religion. They went first of all to the Netherlands, which bordered France on the north, and they also went to the other Protestant countries that were available. England, Germany, Switzerland, and America. So Benezet's family were Huguenot refugees, and they left France very quickly under frightening circumstances when Benezet himself was 2 years old. And they went initially to Holland and then to England. And they were in England for 16 years before Benezet's father, Jean Benezette. Bene Z, they would have pronounced it. We pronounce it. Benezette decided to move to America. And so he did, and he went to Pennsylvania, which was an odd choice because the Huguenots who went to America at that time to North America went either to New York or to South Carolina. For various historical reasons. Almost nobody went to Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was a Quaker province founded by William Penn, who was a friend and companion of George Fox. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism and the. And the Calvinists. Huguenots were Calvinists, and they had nothing but disdain for Quakers. And so almost none of them went to Pennsylvania, but Benedict's family did. And that indicated that they had some contact with Quakers and maybe even with Quaker religious ceremonies and so on in England. So they ended up in. In Pennsylvania when Benezette was 18 years old. And both he and his father immediately joined the Philadelphia Meeting, the Quaker Meeting for Worship, which was the primary Quaker organization in. In America.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Wow. Okay. That's a whole bunch of transformations. We've got French Huguenots, we've got being in Britain, we've got ending up in Pennsylvania, we've got becoming Quaker. There's a lot of changes already happening there. But the focus of his life, in a lot of ways, kind of is something we haven't talked about yet, because it comes all throughout the book. That teaching was a really important thing to him, kind of maybe even the central thing to him. So when. How. Why did that develop as Being so.
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Dr. David Chanoff
Core for him, Benezet was what we would call late bloomer. He came to Philadelphia when he was 18. We don't know how he supported himself for quite a few years. He tried a career in business, but that was very short lived. And we assumed that he was primarily supported by his father, who. Who had a linen trading business. When he was 26 or so, he got a job as a teacher in a town outside of Philadelphia. It's now part of Philadelphia called Germantown. And he just fell into this kind of by accident. And he. He was very thankful to have a job at all, but he found that he had a tremendous talent for it, that he loved children, that he loved teaching. And in fact, he was. He became quite a unusual innovator. Innovator in terms of curriculum and the way teachers should treat students, which in those days was. Was extremely harsh, but not with Benezette. So he felt that, in fact, he said that teaching was obviously what he was made for. If he. If there was anything in creation that that was made specifically for him, it was teaching. So that was how he fell into that. And in fact, he was a lifetime teacher after that.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it really had quite a big impact on him. How then does he end up becoming an anti slavery activist? Is that sort of separate from his work as a teacher, or is that part of his goal as a teacher?
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Dr. David Chanoff
Well, it's intimately connected, Although that is not a connection that I think any of the previous biographers had actually identified. That process that you've just identified is probably the key to his life. When he was 37 years old, he had been teaching in the Quaker schools in Philadelphia for 11 or 12 years at that point. And he hadn't, as far as we know, spoken very much about slavery. Of course, there were slaves in Philadelphia. There was also a free black community there. But as far as we know, he had never expressed himself on it. We can kind of assume that he was appalled by the institution, but we don't really know. But in 1750, he opened a school in his house, a night school for black children. There was no education for blacks at that time. None. And as a matter of fact, in all of the southern provinces and colonies, There are very strict laws against educating black people. Because the feeling was that if they were educated, that might precipitate violence against their masters. And so anybody who attempted to educate black people was subject to fines, to whipping, to imprisonment. It just was not done. And of course, the slave population lived a, generally speaking, a tremendously harsh life, A physically hard Life, emotionally, mentally, they were kept ignorant. They lived an exhausting existence and they were considered uneducable. They were almost a different species, a species that wouldn't profit from any kind of education. And so anybody teaching them was, number one, endangering themselves, at least in the south. And number two, would have been embarking on a totally quixotic sort of adventure. So there, there was no education for black children, simply none in the entire North American colonies or in the Caribbean, England's Caribbean colonies. But Benezet opened a school for them, a night school, free night school. And at the same time he was teaching in the Quaker Day schools. So he was teaching during the day, he was teaching white children at night, he was teaching black children, and he was teaching them the same curriculum. And nobody else had any kind of experience of that sort of. And after he had been teaching black children for a while, he said, when he assessed their progress, he said, I can with truth and sincerity declare that I found amongst the Negroes as great a variety of talents as among the like number of whites. And I am bold to assert that the notion entertained by some that blacks are inferior in their capacities is a vulgar prejudice founded on pride or ignorance of their lordly masters who've kept their slaves at such a distance as to be unable to form a right judgment of them. So not only did he, did he revolutionize teaching in the sense of opening a school for black children, but he saw the veteran teacher that he was, that they were equal to his white students in every way, in terms of intelligence, in terms of creativity, in terms of discipline, that there was no space between them. So he discovered in a sense, the equality of black and white at a time when that was an irrationality, when that, that was a concept that couldn't even enter into the conversation. So it was only after that that he turned his attention to slavery. So, and, and if you look at his, his writing, which is what of course I've done in this book, you see that it unfolded in a way that progressively understood the humanity of black people. And, and so his, his school was the key to that development.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, when you put it that way, it's so clear how much they're linked. And I really appreciate as well how you've made it so obvious kind of what a big deal it was for him to be doing this and saying this. But as you mentioned, it does go beyond just saying black students can be educated too. Can you tell us more about his kind of more direct anti slavery work and public speaking?
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Dr. David Chanoff
Yes, but I'd like to go back to your previous question for a moment because this business of black and white equality and his demonstration of it wasn't just a phenomenon in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, in the British colonies. This was really something of a, a transformation in the history of slavery and of the racial element in slavery. Because if you look at slavery, you find out that it goes back, that the institution goes back to the, the really the very beginnings of human history. And it was evident in almost every culture that developed over the millennia. And so this was something that was such a normal part of life. It was a normal part of life in Greece. It was normal part of not life in Rome and China, in India, in the Middle east, in the Americas. And it was ingrained so that it wasn't considered something extraneous or unusual. And so there was a preconception of the difference between, between slaves and free people. And Benezet struck at the heart of that with this tiny experiment in Philadelphia, in the upper room of his house at night over a period of many years. So we're not talking about some kind of very narrow, revolutionary venture in the, in, in the world of education. We're talking about something that has huge impact in terms of the universal preconception of slavery.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow, 135 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com this is really clearly, as you said, an impactful way of thinking and definitely new for the context at the time. How did other people hear about this? Like, how did these ideas get out just beyond his own thoughts?
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Dr. David Chanoff
Well, he started his school in 1750 and it was noticed that at that point he began talking about slavery and he began talking in a public way. Philadelphia, of course, was. Pennsylvania was founded on Quaker principles, and Philadelphia was the capital of that. And Benezet, as a Quaker, had his Quaker community as his audience. And in 1754, he began writing about slavery, and he began writing about the injustice of it, the cruelty of it, the, the fact that it was so unchristian, the fact that it was so murderous, because we're talking about the slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade. And the Atlantic slave trade was dominated by England, by the, the British shipping industry. And so, so he, he had an audience, but his audience was his own community. And, and he tried in his writing to convince them that the horrors that accompanied that slave trade were something that were simply intolerable. And so he appealed to people, to his community, to the Quakers, to their sense of their sense of justice, their sense of fairness, and to their religious principles, to the essential ideas of Christianity. And so that was how he began. And he began writing in 1754. But the Quakers, his audience, even though he was what was called a weighty Quaker, that is an important individual in the Quaker, in the Quaker community, and the Meeting accepted his writings, and yet it didn't have that much effect. In fact, the effect was almost inaudible because Quakers owned slaves the same as everybody else, and some Quakers actually dealt in slaves. And so there was this very, very powerful investment in not freeing the slaves. And so when you look at his writing, you see that it evolved in terms of his arguments for abolition. And at first it was just aimed at the, at the Quaker community itself. And the, and, and the arguments that Benezet put forth were primarily religious arguments. He brought out the, the Golden Rule. He, he appealed to their sense of piety, to the. To their sense of Christian justice. And at first it had very little effect, but he continued to write and every few years he would produce a different essay. And each one of these essays, and there were four or five major ones, had a progressive impact on the Quaker community. So he talked about, he, he talked about the. Not just the equality in terms of the talents and intelligence of, of blacks and whites. He, he talked about the moral equivalent of blacks and whites. If you look at the. If you look at the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you others and you, black and white. And so there was a moral equivalent there. So it wasn't just that there was an equivalent between black people and white people in terms of intelligence and talents. It was also because there was an equivalent in terms of their moral nature. And even that had only a kind of incremental effect on the Quaker community. And he was addressing the Quaker community. And so he saw eventually that what was necessary here was to expand the idea of black humanity. And in order to do that, he had to be able to present black people in their normal environment. But that was something that you couldn't access in America, in the colonies, because there was no normal environment for black people. Black people were either enslaved, as most were, but there was also a free black community. But even the free black community was subject to restrictions and prohibitions. And in terms of their civil lives, their personal lives, their professional lives, all of that was closely constricted. And so there was no access to a so called normal black community that he could refer to. And so he managed to break that roadblock. And the way he did was by taking the kinds of travelogues, so called travelogues that had become very popular at that time by individuals who had spent a great deal of time in Africa. And these were primarily the people who wrote these. These travelogues, which were the great bestsellers of the day, were often officials of slaving companies who had retired or who had begun reflecting on what they were doing. But the essential point was that they were living with black people who were. Who. Whose lives were carried on under normal, ordinary circumstances. And so Benezette began quoting the. Those travelogues and showing that Africans, that blacks were decent, they were sociable, they. They had all of the qualities, all of the social qualities that white people had. And so that was a further expansion of this idea of black humanity and what black humanity was. And all this was an immense revelation to people who had never seen blacks as normal human beings. They had seen blacks as slaves, as menials, as. As people who are abject, who were ignorant, who were uneducable. And. And all this was buttressed by, I would say, the great scientific theory of the time, that that created a pathway, a ladder, if you will, and a hierarchy of all of the. All of the munificence of the world in terms of minerals, plants, human beings. This is an idea called the great giant chain of being that really started with Aristotle and Plato, but that became especially prominent in the 18th century and. Is maybe best represented by the great taxonomist Linnaeus, who put white people at the top of this ladder and black people at the bottom of this ladder. And so that was a theory that created an ambiance that affected philosophers and scientists and theologists as well as. As People downstream from there. And so there was this whole confluence of ideas that identified blacks as inferior. And this is what Benezet was arguing against and was breaking through. And so you see him, in doing that as this extraordinarily creative and revolutionary character. And yet, you know, as we said before, a character who's been lost to us. So that's what I've tried to convey in this book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's definitely really helpful to understand the context in which he's operating in. Could you maybe give us some more examples of specific. Specific people who were influenced by these ideas? I mean, they're really clearly quite radical. Who were some of the people reading these essays and kind of taking them on themselves?
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Dr. David Chanoff
That's a wonderful question, because it's possible to name the people or some of the people who were powerfully influenced by Benezet, many of whom became his collaborators and. And his companions in this campaign. And they include, for example, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, John Wesley in England, the great abolitionist Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, who brought Wilbur Wilberforce into. Into this campaign and was his partner for the entirety of it. And so when. When you. You look at that and. And other major figures of the 18th century world. So when you. When you look at just the kind of. As you survey the individuals who were so profoundly influenced by Benezet, you. You're kind of amazed. I was amazed when I first began to understand these things. But what is even more interesting is that many of those people were British. So how did that happen? Because Benezette's initial audience was the Quaker community in Pennsylvania and throughout the colonies there. But of course, the London Quaker meeting was the mother church of the. Of the Quaker world. And of course, this is. This is prior to the American Revolution. So Americans, if you could even call them that, then Americans were British subjects. The difference, there were huge differences, but the differences were. Were only separated by the North Atlantic and the amount of time it would take to go back and forth. And there was a tremendous amount of traffic back and forth, and especially among the Quakers because they were so closely connected the American community and the British community. And so Benezet's writings began to circulate in England. And what happened in England and how they influenced the British abolitionist movement, that didn't even exist when Benezet's writings began to penetrate there. That is a tremendously interesting story by itself.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. Thank you for helping us see those connections there. And in some ways, that makes it even more interesting, the fact that we don't have Benezet as kind of part of the history that we generally learn of this area. So perhaps as a final question on the book, is there anything further we need to understand about why we don't. Like, why did this all get forgotten?
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Dr. David Chanoff
That's. That is a. That's a mystery that I'm sure has complex answers and I don't think I can. I can address all of them at all. He wasn't. He. His work was important for a while and was recognized as that. And in fact, the. The initials, imprints of the encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica incorporated his work. But. But then people began to forget and I think partially because the abolitionist movement in. In the United States was. Became so volatile and of course led to the Civil War and really subsumed the emotional life of the American people for a long time. And I think the events were so dramatic and the evolution in that period was so dramatic that. That some of the initial people who triggered abolition simply were overshadowed by all of this, including Benezet in England. And I wish we had time to go into this because actually, I think this is as much a book for. For a British audience as an American audience. So in England, people know the name of Wilberforce. What people don't know is that Wilberforce used Benezet's arguments and even to a certain extent, Benezet's vocabulary in his campaign, which eventually came to fruition in prohibiting the Atlantic slave trade. But Wilberforce was brought into that campaign by Thomas Clarkson. Thomas Clarkson was hugely influenced by Benezet Clarkson and the. And the other great figure in British abolition abolitionist history, Granville Sharp. Granville Sharp was equally influenced by Benezet, as was John Wesley with his vast influence. So this is really, in a way, a British book as well as an American book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for explaining some of the reasons. Obviously, I can't ask you to summarise all the things in the book about why this history has been forgotten, but you did mention relevance to Great Britain there. And we've got a few moments. Do you want to tell us more about why you think this history matters across the pond?
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Dr. David Chanoff
Well, very briefly, number one, the British abolitionist movement was in a sense started by Granville Sharp. And in a law case that he brought in order to protect a slave who had. Who had been badly beaten. And in that lawsuit, Sharp came across one of Benezette's essays. And that provided a really huge advantage for him in that lawsuit. There was a lawsuit a number of years later that expanded on Granville Sharp's campaign towards abolition. And in. In that lawsuit. He again came across another essay of Benette's which. Which provided the material for. For the defense that he mounted. So, so Granville Sharp himself and Benezette became very close collaborators. That was, that was number one. Excuse me. Number two is that Thomas Clarkson, who was really the key to the anti slave trade campaign that brought in Wilberforce, was also influenced in essentially by Benezet and by one of Benezette's books. So Clarkson, even though his activities took place after Benezet died, it was as if Benezette had spoken to him from the grave. And Clarkson was the one who brought Wilberforce into the. Into the campaign against the slavery and functioned as his researcher, his publicist, his consultant, and so on through the entirety of it. John Wesley also who wrote who. Who was motivated by Ben. His head and wrote his own book against slavery. And his book actually included long excerpts from Benezet's own work. So when you look at this and you look at the, at the magnitude of Benezet's influence on the leading British abolitionists, that you see that his, his effect in England was equal to his effect in the Americas.
- [45:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. Impactful and definitely in both places, which makes it even more amazing that we don't necessarily know this history particularly well. So thank you for telling us about it. And I have to wonder if you're excavating another bit of unknown history next. Now that this book is out in the world, do you have any current or next projects, whether or not they're book related? I don't know. Maybe you've got a great garden that you like. Anything you're currently working on that you want to give us a brief peak preview of?
- [45:35]
Dr. David Chanoff
Well, sure. You know, the production process in the publishing industry now means that it takes about a year from the, from the time you've completed a manuscript until it actually becomes a book and is available for sale. So the Benezette book. I finished writing the Benezet book more than a year ago, so I've had a year to work on something else. And I've. I've completed another manuscript on the Holocaust and specifically on. On Jewish resistance in the Holocaust, and that's being published by the University of Toronto Press. But again, because of the long lead times here, that won't be available until the fall of 2026.
- [46:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, sounds like you're definitely keeping busy. So any listeners who want to learn more about the project that we've been discussing can of course go read the book published by the University of Georgia Press in 2025 titled Anthony Benezet, Quaker Abolitionist, Anti Racist David, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [46:52]
Dr. David Chanoff
Miranda it was a great pleasure to be with you and thank you for the opportunity. Sam.