The Schoolmaster — Anthony Benezet

The candles are thin from frugality. Around a long pine table in a Philadelphia schoolhouse, Black children of laborers and freedmen are reading aloud from a borrowed primer. A small man with a French accent corrects pronunciation without impatience. He has no children of his own. He has been teaching these children every evening since 1750.

The city outside is not watching.

It is 1770.

He does not just believe in equality. He teaches it. He opens his own home to the children the colony has told it does not need to educate, and when the home grows too small he opens a school, and when the school needs a charter he finds the money for it. He teaches as if it is a plain obligation one man owes another. Because to him it is.

He does not just teach. He writes. Pamphlets and tracts and careful documented accounts of the trade in human beings — circulated among reformers in Philadelphia and London, read by John Wesley and Benjamin Rush, copied and passed from hand to hand through dissenting chapels and abolitionist societies across two continents. He does not argue from sentiment. He argues from evidence.

He does not just write. He reaches. His 1771 pamphlet travels to a young English student named Thomas Clarkson, who will use it as a primary source in the research that drives the British campaign to end the slave trade. A schoolroom in Philadelphia. An ocean away. A parliament that changes the law.

His Spark of Liberty was the obligation to teach.

The conviction that freedom is not a principle until someone sits down in a room and actually passes it to another person, that the work of liberty happens at a table with a candle and a primer and a child who was not supposed to be allowed to read, and that the man who does that work has done more for the republic than any man who only wrote about it.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life”

In Philadelphia, from 1750 until his death in 1784, a French-born Quaker schoolteacher taught the children the colony would not educate, wrote the pamphlets the reformers needed, and died with one of the largest funeral processions the city had seen — Black and white mourners walking together behind the man who had spent his life making that walk possible.

His name was Anthony Benezet.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

The Speedwell’s Confession, Book One of the Sparks of Liberty series, is live on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ5QH7L8

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