New Books In Intellectual History

Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world were galvanized by the moral power of a modest Quaker teacher who never ventured more than a few miles from his home in Philadelphia: Anthony Benezet. While Benezet was buried in an unmarked grave, his fingerprints are all over the extinction of the Atlantic slave trade and the gathering strength of America’s own burgeoning abolitionist movement. He was a figure of global importance, “a saint,” Garry Wills called him, a great bearer to the rest of the world of the American ideals (no matter how compromised) of equality and liberty.Anthony Benezet lived, by chance, at the nexus of radical Christianity and revolutionary democracy, and he fused the power of those two streams of morality in a way that changed lives and challenged political institutions so compellingly that the world became a different place because of him. But for all the magnitude of B