David Chanoff, "Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Nov 22, 2025

David Chanoff, a visiting research professor and biographer, sheds light on Anthony Benezet, a largely overlooked Quaker teacher whose moral teachings significantly influenced the abolitionist movement. Chanoff discusses Benezet's unique background and how his revolutionary ideas reached prominent figures like Benjamin Franklin and Granville Sharp. He highlights Benezet's groundbreaking night school for Black children and his innovative arguments against slavery, illustrating the enduring impact of this remarkable yet forgotten figure on both American and British history.

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INSIGHT

From Huguenot Refugee To Quaker Teacher

Anthony Benezet's family fled France as Huguenot refugees and settled in Pennsylvania where he became a Quaker.
He transitioned from business to teaching and declared teaching was what he was "made for."

ANECDOTE

Late Bloomer Turned Innovative Teacher

Benezet fell into teaching in Germantown at age 26 and quickly innovated classroom methods.
He rejected harsh discipline and became an influential educator in Quaker schools.

INSIGHT

Classroom Proof Of Racial Equality

Benezet opened a free night school for Black children in 1750 while teaching white children by day.
His classroom experience convinced him that blacks had equal talents and capacities to whites.

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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 Benezet’s impact, he is largely unknown outside scholars of the period. He does not exist in any meaningful way in the widely read histories and biographies that define and amplify America’s historical consciousness.
In Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist (U Georgia Press, 2025), preeminent biographer Dr. David Chanoff tells Benezet’s story—who he was, what he did, how he did it, and why it was that William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” of Pennsylvania provided the matrix for the historic transformation the abolitionist educator brought about. Indeed, Dr. Chanoff carves out a place for this forgotten American hero as a pioneering figure among those who launched American ideals onto the world stage.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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