Benezet, Anthony

Anthony Benezet, (born January 31, 1713, Saint-Quentin, France—died May 3, 1784, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.), eminent teacher, abolitionist, and social reformer in 18th-century America.

Escaping Huguenot persecution in France, the Benezet family fled first to Holland and then to London. Anthony was there apprenticed in a mercantile house, and he joined the Quaker sect. In 1731 he and his family immigrated to Philadelphia. Disliking the merchant’s life, Benezet tried several other vocations before finally deciding to become a teacher. He taught at the Germantown Academy and then at the Friends’ English Public School in Philadelphia. In 1755, distressed at the unequal educational opportunities afforded women, he established a school for girls. He devoted the remainder of his life to teaching. Convinced that personal kindness was the key to harmonious social relationships, Benezet made that principle the basis of his teaching methodology.

By the 1760s Benezet was an ardent abolitionist, writing and distributing pamphlets at his own expense to encourage opposition to slavery and the slave trade. Late in his life he established and taught a school for blacks, and in his will he left his modest estate to endow the school. At various times during his long philanthropic career, Benezet came to the assistance of refugee French Acadians, American Indians, and other persecuted minorities. Pacifism, vegetarianism, and temperance were other causes he championed.

Among Benezet’s many publications were A Caution to Great Britain and Her Colonies, in a Short Representation of the Calamitous State of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominion (1767) and Some Historical Account of Guinea, with an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave-Trade (1772).