Note Type
Historical NoteNote
One night in a dream Rush came upon a beautiful country inhabited by a band of cheerful Negroes. We perceive you are a white man," someone said as he approached. "That color which is the emblem of innocence in every creature of God, is to us a sign of guilty in man." Suspicion melted and the people embraced Rush when they learned his name. But any self- satisfaction he felt died as the dream took a curious turn:
All at once, the eyes of the whole assembly were turned from me, and directed towards a little white man who advanced towards them, on the opposite side of the grove, in which we were seated. His face was grave, placid and full of benignity....
While I was employed in contemplating this venerable figure-suddenly I beheld the whole assembly running to meet him the air resounded with the clapping of hands-and I awoke from my dream, by the noise of a general acclamation of ANTHONY BENEZET.
The dream can be taken as a literary device used to praise Beneze. c as Rush's oblique way of confessing his own belated commitment to the antislavery movement. Benezet had prodded him about the evils of slavery, since the early 1770's. He got from Rush one essay, and, except fia rebuttal to a critic, nothing more. Rush continued to retain a slave.
He did not join the abolition society formed in 1774, and he had nothing to d with the abolition law passed by the assembly in 1780; while Rush had st by silently or worrying in print about inflation or the evils of Skippe Benezet had quietly interviewed every deputy and kept pressure a ala them until his pet bill passed. When the old abolition group was reorganized in 1784 under the name of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, Rush did not appear among the members. He did not coat himself to the society until March of 1787. A month later Franklin joined it and, with his election as president, Rush was chosen one of the secretaries, though most of the work was done by his fellow secretary Tench Coxe. He had a hand in the petition condemning slavery which was sent to the Constitutional Convention, and he was pleased by the clause in the Constitution calling for an end to the slave trade after twenty years. "The prospect of this glorious event more than repays me for all the persecution and slander to which my principles and publications exposed me about sixteen or seventeen years ago," he said at the time.
The assembly gave further reason to brag in March 1788, when it passed a law plugging loopholes in the earlier legislation against slavery.
"I am encouraged by the success that has finally attended the exertions of the friends of universal freedom and justice," he said soon afterward, "to go on in my romantic schemes (as they have often been called) of serving my countrymen."'
Two months later Rush took time off from his "romantic schemes" to make a statement which was witnessed by two colleagues, Samuel Powel Griffits and Benjamin Young, his former apprentice.
“I, Benjamin Rush of the city of Philadelphia, doctor of physic, having purchased a Negro slave named William of Captain David McCullough, and being fully satisfied that it trary to reason and religion to detain the said slave in t beyond such a time as will be a just compensation for my paid for him the full price of a slave for life, I do hereby that the said William shall be free from me and from all claiming under me, on the twenty-fifth day of February year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and nin In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and sea twenty-fourth day of May one thousand seven hundred eighty eight.
Benj. Rush
The statement makes it difficult to believe that Rush approached the anti slavery movement with the moral indignation evoked in his letters. Willi is to gain freedom only after Rush has received "just compensation for having paid for him the full price of a slave for life," which means six more years of bondage. But for that phrase "just compensation" it could be said Rush delayed manumission until he considered William adequately educated and trained to cope for himself in the world. Even without it no sign of fury, no real compassion, appears to underlie his commitment against slavery.
Worse still, the affidavit raises a question about Rush's veracity and subjects to doubt his apparently consistent distaste for slavery. He one said William was "liberated after he had served me ten years." Yet legally he could not have purchased him after 1780, which means he served minimum of fourteen years as a slave. And morally he could not have bought him after 1773, the year of his original anti-slavery pamphlet, unless he wished publicly to be classed as a hypocrite. Regardless of when William was purchased, Rush positively owned him in 1776 and mentioned him in a letter to his wife. Rush rarely if ever consciously lied, yet t would seem that a strong feeling of guilt over his ownership of a slave persuaded him to obscure the truth of the matter from his children and posterity."
It can be said for Rush that he did agree to free William, for the law did not manumit those in Pennsylvania already enslaved. He made this agreement at an inconvenient time, when his practice had slumped, he was in debt, and his large family had become expensive to maintain. He could only hope that by 1794 he could afford a paid servant to carry out tasks William had performed without wages. When the time came to give William his freedom, the bargain was kept. For a while he stayed on as a paid servant. A notebook of household expenses lists payments to him in 1794 for such chores as weeding the garden and gathering in the potatoes. Soon afterward he went to sea, but the warm relationship between former master and slave continued. "He was when I first bought his time a drunkard and swore frequently," Rush recalled upon William's death in 1799. "In a year or two he was reformed from both these vices, and became afterwards a sober, moral man and faithful and affectionate servant. His integrity ex tended to trifles, and was of the most delicate nature... He obtained some of my hair secretly, and had it put into a ring in London, which ring he gave to one of the maids to keep for him, with an injunction 'not to tell me. of it.' "
Rush's antagonism toward slavery as a moral evil an evil he had no bothered to include in the letter to clergymen detailing what was wrong with American society-deepened in the years after 1790, and he came deserve the reputation as a leader in the antislavery movement. But in 178 he appeared to attack the institution as a physician rather than as a moralis He worried about the diseases Negroes suffered as a direct result of enslavement and about the effect of slavery upon their well-being: the difficulty in childbearing because of a pelvis distorted by a master's kicks; lockjaw, which he thought arose "from the heat and smoke of their cabins in which the children are born and from their being exposed afterwards to the cool air; hypochondriasis or mal d'estomac, which "is occasioned wholly by grief and therefore stands justly chargeable upon slavery"; the usual chronic diseases due to an inadequate diet. The sense of degradation slavery imposed on its victims sapped their moral and intellectual energy, which in turn made them psychologically susceptible to disease. In 1788 he told Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, a visiting Frenchman, it was "much more difficult to treat and to cure Negro slaves than white people and that the Negroes have much less resistance to serious and prolonged illnesses. This is so because they do not have the will to live; they are virtually without vitality and life force."
"Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly. By David Freeman Hawke. (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1971. pp 360-363