Carolyn Brown: Well, good afternoon. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you here for this wonderful program. I am Carolyn Brown. I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center here at the library. This is a celebratory event this afternoon to congratulate Dr. Maurice Jackson of Georgetown University upon the publication of his book, "Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism." It's a special pleasure for those of us here at the library, because Dr. Jackson was a Kluge Center Fellow in 2005, so we have a special pride and ownership that we take. It is my personal pleasure to talk with him while the book was developing, to get a glimpse of the long hours, the stacks of books, the stacks of Xeroxes, the sweat, dedication, and enthusiasm that goes into a book. And then when the book comes out, it looks so simple in its pristine form. And yet, we know what went into it. So it's really with deep respect and warm affection that we welcome Maurice today to talk about his work. I'll say just a few words about Dr. Jackson. He is a graduate of Antioch College, holds a M.A. and PH.D. from Georgetown University, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of History. His academic interests include of race and revolution in the Atlantic world, Atlantic American history and culture. He's extremely knowledgeable about jazz and the spiritual, African American intellectual history, social and labor movement. He's also working now on a history of the District of Columbia, and looking at the treatment of Black Americans right after the American Revolution. Dr. Jackson has traveled an unusual path into academia, and had an amazing career and set of experiences before he fell into the university's fold. I won't say much about these, but just to say, from early on, he's been a champion of social justice for all, and a social activist, someone who soared and acted on an international context, even while he has always had a strong focus on African American history and culture. Over time, his dedication to justice and equality propelled him into deeper reading into African American history. And eventually, trying to make that study more systematic, moved into academia, for which we are all grateful. Dr. Jackson's biography of Athony Benezet is the first biography of this seminal figure, who is wildly acknowledged among as his peers as well as contemporary historians as being the Founder of the 18th century anti-slavery movement. It's kind of amazing that there hasn't been a good biography before. Benezet was a Quaker, well acquainted with the intellectual community of his time, as well as an activist and a ferocious advocate for the abolition of slavery. Really a remarkable man. We always talk about people were men of their times; it seems he was a man not of his time, best I can tell. The biography is not just a biography, but also a kind of story of the figure and his time and his place, and the social intellectual history of the transatlantic fight against slavery that Benezet was so central to triggering. The book, which I hope you have taken a look at as you came in -- if not, you may want to pick up one at the end and Dr. Jackson will sign it for you -- it's really exquisitely researched and well-written, a work that can teach us much about African American history, much about Benezet. And the great pleasure this afternoon is that we have Dr. Jackson to start that education. So please give a warm welcome to our Kluge Center alumnus and intellectual colleague, Maurice Jackson. [applause] Maurice Jackson: Thank you, back to Carolyn Brown. It's always a great pleasure being here at the Library of Congress. I can honestly say that the book would not have been finished had it not been for the Kluge Center. My wife and I were in Paris -- that sounds good -- don't think that I go to Paris all the time. [laughter] I had an opportunity to go to Paris and we were researching, and we got this letter. You know when you apply for fellowships, you have one unopened letter; you want to open it but you don't because you don't know what's best. My son, who was in high school then, was in Washington. We left him with my good friend James Bennett. We never left our kids and gone away, but it was Paris. And so he had the letter and I told him, "Don't open this yet, let me think." And so finally, he opened it. And I felt last night that as I read about the Library of Congress ceremony at the White House, and everyone was dancing to "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours." And so the letter was signed, sealed, and delivered from the Librarian Of Congress, and he opened it, and I did get the Kluge, and it allowed me to finish this work. And it could not have done without the support of Dr. Carolyn Brown and many other people here at the Kluge Center. As I look around here -- Mary Lou Reker, who was a Chief Administrator here at the center. Many friends I've met here, Bruce Marden, who was in the reading room, Dr. Sybil Moses, many others, Tony Mullen, who works there in the research division. Over here I've not just had intellectual ideas develop, but I made very good friends like Tony. I was in the movement for many years, and someone says, "Well Jack, leaving the movement? It's hard; you lose all your friends." And I said, "No, I'll be okay. I'll make better ones." And I did. And I have to give a great thanks to Dr. Dorothy Brown, who was the former Provost and Professor Emeritus at Georgetown. She is what I considered the great lady of Georgetown. She was the one who offered me the opportunity to go there and study. And it was in her seminar that I first explored this man, Benezet. And there are some of you who I see and I recognize, but I won't embarrass you because you know me. Except I will say there's my doctor, Dr. John Carroll. In working this field, it works on your stomach. So Dr. John is a gastro doctor, and he brought his mother and father from Illinois. [laughter] So he and my wife's good cooking and have kept me in survival mode. She says, "I have invested too much in you, man. You got to stick around." [laughter] And my son and my daughter is here, so I thank you all for coming. Three African American men actually got me involved in the study of this Quaker. The first was Olaudah Equiano. Olauda Equiano had written in the late 1780s; he was born in 1745. He wrote a book called, "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano," and later it became Gustavus Vassa. He was African, but then he took the name of a Swedish king, and then later on, he became African again. As he wrote about Africa, as he was trying to record his life, he realized that being kidnapped at the age of six, you would only know so much. For example, I can think of the things I remember from the time I was six or seven. I remember a good spanking. I remember working in somebody's field, but I don't remember much else. But you would not remember great details of a place, of the rivers, of the lakes, of the anatomy of a nation. And so to understand that he read the works of this man, Anthony Benezet. He said on page 25 of his work, "See Anthony Benezet throughout." Benezet had written on Africa in the 1760s to the 1780s. The second person who I saw wrote on this man, Benezet was W.E.B. Dubois. Of course, W.E.B. Dubois was born February 23. I like to tell the joke that my wife was in labor with our second child on February 22, the day before Dubois's birthday. I said, "Dear, see if you can hold on a couple of hours. George Washington is okay, but I'm a Dubois man." You could imagine the names she called me. [laughter] But she did hold on and we have a 21 year old Dubois baby. [laughter] But Dubois said in his suppression of the African slave trade in his doctoral dissertation which he wrote in 1896, he said that in reading Benezet, he also discovered a lot of Africa. But then in his book, "The Philadelphia Negro" which was written some years later, which became the first sociological study in America, not just of African Americans society, but the first country's sociological study that on motion of one, most likely Athony Benezet, the Quakers took the most definitive action against slavery heretofore in humankind. Then came the third person who had great influence on me, which was Carter G. Woodson. Carter G. Woodson, of course, had worked here at the Library of Congress. And as I started writing this other book about the blacks in Washington D.C., I found that Carter G. Woodson was working at this library, and he walks home one day and he caught in the D.C. riots and almost lost his life. There was a race riot in D.C; we speak of race riots, we think of black folks rioting. This was white folks rioting against the race of black people doing the great migration period. And Carter G. Woodson said -- and this is almost an exact quote -- that Benezet went around the docks and with this, by means of attaining knowledge and facts, he built a knowledge of the Negro to the world. And then in his second edition of his journal of Negro history in 1921, he published for the first time Quaker documents, and this was mainly the 1688 Germantown protest, which was one of the first written documents against slaves. So these three men, in their meager ways, three African American men brought me to the study of this gentle Quaker. Now, a bit about Anthony Benezet, and I'll speak about his life and then I will come back to the ideas and everything. He was born in Saint-Quentin, France in 1713. He was born to a Huguenot family. At the Edict of Nantes, a period of religious toleration is revoked in France. The Huguenots and many of families are forced out. His family had been involved in a linen business of great French linen industry. And they had some wealth, but they were forced to leave or convert, and the property was taken. So they left and went to Holland. As they are on the border on Holland, a guard stops them and says that you can't pass. The elder Benezet says, "Look, here's a pouch of money and here's a sword. Take your pick." He took the pouch of money; they left and went to Holland and stayed there for some while and then went to England. In England, the father put the children in school and it so happened that one of the schoolmates was Voltaire. And Voltaire, as some of you may know, wrote four letters about Quakers. If you know a bit about Voltaire, you know he is nothing like Quaker. He likes -- and I used to work on ships -- so as they say on ships, he likes the world of wine, women, and song in his life. He was not a modest man nor was he one to not spend lavishly on those things that he wants. He had a great admiration for the Quakers, and he wrote about them. And they met such people as Voltaire there. But in England, he could not make the living he wanted, the elder Benezet. So he left and went to Philadelphia. Philadelphia, as you understand, had been the home of Quakers who had left England after the 1640 revolution had failed. Many came under William Penn's peaceful kingdom, his noble experiment. They came to look for a better life and they quickly established a propertor of power. They ran Pennsylvania for many years; the family went there. The father became involved in the business of merchant. He became friends with people like George Whitfield, the founder of the Great Awakening. We don't know exactly where this man, Benezet joined the Quakers. Quakers is something like Black Baptists. If you go in a church, you remember. You may get baptized later in the Baptist church, but when you walk in that door, people accept you as that. The Quakers -- pretty much the same, so whether he joined in Philadelphia or London, we don't exactly know, and I've chased the records. But we do know that around the late 1740s, he was as direct as go taken in by the Society of Friends. He married a woman named Joyce Marriott. When you think a Marriotts, you often think of Mormons with the hotel and things like that. But Joyce Marriott had been the daughter of a man named Samuel, in a prominent Quaker family. She was a prominent Quaker in her own right. And they married and he soon found that he did not want to be in the buying and selling of goods, and so he became a schoolmaster at the Quaker schools in Pennsylvania. First, a school for girls in late 1740s, and then he started teaching boys in his house, and then later on, he started teaching black boys in his house, which was something that was unique for the time as a Quaker educator. In that sense, he quickly became involved in agitation around making a better life for people. He became very involved in the work of the Arcadians. The Arcadians had been the French immigrants who had been forced in a battle between America and France in the Seven Years War. He had found the hospital of Philadelphia, which is now the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and became a member of the board in that sense. And then the Quaker movement, he started moving them towards more pronounced anti-slavery. Now in the Quaker religion, there are three or four doctrines that he quickly moved to except. One is that against the doctrine of original sin, which meant that we neither inherit the sins of our forefathers nor their wealth, which meant that a slave therefore did not inherit the condition of their father, according to Quakers. Second was against ostentation of wealth and the peace principle. And of course the peace principle went against Aristotlean notions of just wars. There was no such thing as a just war. That's why the Quakers had different positions on the American Revolution, which complicated topics. Lastly, that there was God in every man. I don't need the word of the preacher to get the Word of God; I can get it myself. Just show me the book; I can read. The Quakers took that movement, and they became very active in that sense. One of the first leaders was a man named Benjamin Lay. And Benjamin Lay was this hunchback man, about this tall. Benezet is about that tall. And he became famous because in 1738 he went into a Quaker meeting. They were not doing things about slaves; he went into the Quaker meeting with this great big coat on, with a pouch full of pokeberry juice. And the pouch was stuck inside a Bible. He stuck the Bible and says, "I do to this book, as you have done to the hearts of the blacks." And he walked out of the church. It created such a stir that the Quakers soon expelled him from their order. Next, he kidnapped a child and took it to his cave -- he lived in a cave outside Philadelphia -- the Quaker child. He gave the child back a day later, just to show how whites would feel if in fact, their children were taken away as slaves children had been taken away. And these were the first actions, but they didn't really move people over a period of time. The Quakers then moved towards what they called the epistles, which meant documentary statements. From 1730 to 1758, they moved very slowly. In 1758, they came almost to signing an epistle. An epistle would have to go from Philadelphia monthly meeting to the yearly meeting, and then go back to London and then come back. And the epistle was on the owning of slaves, and a resolution almost failed. And Benezet went to the front of the stage, weeping profusely and came out of the Book of Psalms, which said, "Ethiopia shall soon stretch her hands to Thee." The motion passed, and therefore, the first true motion of the western world against slavery. But Benezet understood that it was not enough just to work with Quakers. He had to expand beyond them. To do that, he started a deep study of philosophical notions of justice in right and wrong, studying the French philosopher Boudin, but also studying in the main ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. He studied Montesquieu, who wrote Spirit of Laws in 1754, but whom had only said that slavery is a vile institution. It does great harm to the white; it does great harm to the black, but never a movement of action. He started studying three Scottish philosophers. One was named James Foster; one was named Frances Hutchinson; and another -- the most famous was named George Wallace. And as I note, not our George Wallace, but their George Wallace. George Wallace, as I joke often, he never moved forward. I can remember when he died, Reverend Jesse Jackson goes to speak at his funeral, and also speaks at [unintelligible] funeral. But George Wallace never adjusted. George Wallace had a contemporary by the way, his name was Bear Bryant. If you know a little bit about football, Bear Bryant never integrated the University of Alabama. And then one day, they played USC and USC put a thump in on them. And he saw this black guy running and he looked and he says, "I got to get me one of them." And thereon, he integrated football, and the Library of Congress can also tell you this story. But the George Wallace of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophy cast certain notions. Basically, they center on whether the question of a human being could be used in commercial, or for the buying and selling. Understand that John Locke in the 17th Century had perfected the idea of chattel slave property, prior to the rule of the South Carolina company. South Carolina first did not have slaves. They didn't want them because they figured it would only corrupt the minds of whites. But also if there were so many black slaves, they would in fact erupt, as they did in the Stono Rebellion in 1739. But he started taking these ideas and the ideas of Hutchinson. Hutchinson's ideas also concerned the notion of slavery, but one thing Benezet did not like about Hutchinson was Hutchinson believed that the subject had the right to resist. And if you had the right to resist, then this would go against the Quaker principle. Thus, Benezet cut and pasted some of these particular ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. He had gotten these ideas because the library of Philadelphia, the first public library in America, the books of Hutchinson and Wallace and Foster had ended up there by two men. One was named Frances Allison and one was William Smith, who founded Kings College, which became Columbia. And the college of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania. And they brought these Scottish Enlightenment ideas and later Jefferson spread these ideas at the University of William and Mary. So the philosophical ideas -- the rights of people to freedom. Then he did what was unique in the western world at that time is start the study of the African travel narratives, of narratives of people who had gone to study the flora and the fauna, the rich life of Africa. And some of those had been slave traders. The ones of course you would know more about is John Newton. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see. But of course, Newton made one action against slavery. And in 1764, he left and moved on. But others continued in the struggle. But in these narratives -- the beauty of the Library of Congress is that I had read them, but I can put them on the desk there and study them. And in these journals, there may be a thousand pages in each one. And in the thousand pages you may find two lines that had a wonderful thing to say about the Africans. One of the most beautiful examples and one of the most widely quoted by a man named Michele Addinson [spelled phonetically]. And he said, " Wherever I turn, I thought I saw a Garden of Eden." Of course, it sounds very much like Sir Thomas Moore's utopia, that idea of a perfect world. And as he read these, he read other people -- John Wesley and many others. My grandmother had a saying, "In every lie, there is a grain of truth." And Benezet somewhat took out of that. And in reading a thousand pages, he found some pages that helped him for his cause. One example was the study of a man, Snelgrave, who was seeing Islamic society. And Snelgrave wrote about the beauty of the habits of what he called the Mohatmen Negros. They prayed three times a day and of course he meant, if he studied more, he would realize what they prayed for. But he studied that and some learned the languages, and in reading these, Benezet saw that within certain African societies there was something similar that he wanted in Quaker society. That is, that men and women only produce what they needed. Primitive mode of production, not common capitalistic production, where we produce for buying and selling, and people who produce, he believed what they needed. Well, maybe not a bad idea. In a society where we have 2,000 cars and different brands of cars, and now we find that we don't need them in that sense. This goes back to his idea against greed and avarice, and then he studied other aspects of the treatment of African children and of the judicial societies, and put those ideas together in a great study and wrote something in 1762 called "A Short Account of Africa." And then it expanded in 1761, [unintelligible] and these works are published throughout the world. Now, Some authors have criticized him because he was selective. And, as I say, every propaganda that I know has been selective. Pick one: it could be the head of the Senate; it could be Aristotle; it could be anyone. They would pick what they need for their purposes; it's the way it works. One criticism of him was that when he spoke about the Africans, he did not talk about their sexual practices. Now I often say, he's a Quaker, man. Quakers don't write about anybody's sexual practices. They don't write about their own. [laughter] Certainly, they're not going to write about an African's. It was a simple notion of trying to find criticism, when, in fact, there may not have been any. But in the main -- what he tried to prove -- that before the coming of the European, and he quoted a slave trader. "Before we came with the powder and a ball, they lived wonderful lives." The notion has always been, as we have studied African histories, somehow the whites brought Africans in because they could work better or work harder. There is not a notion that no one could prove to me yet that a person with black skin can work any harder than a Polish person, than a Russian working at a rye field. I've traveled the world; I've seen people working in every kind of field possible. There's nothing about a black person that can make them work any harder, except with a whip and a gun on their hands. And Benezet looked at that. As he found this, he came to a unique conclusion. He asked this question, "When the weight of the world is before us, and we put all things on balance, we will ask ourselves a fundamental question: Who are the greater savages?" He believed it was the complicity of the whites in bringing about the slave trade. And so he added the unique element of Africa. And his book became the first book to be used as a textbook in American History on Africa. Then came the movement towards convincing people and brining all these things together within three or four countries on different continents -- England, France, and America. In America, he developed a very close relationship to Benjamin Franklin. Going upstairs in the rare bookroom, I found the key to the rare bookroom. My students always ask me what is the key. The key is to wear a suit and tie and you're treated better. So you wear a suit and tie and they bring things to you and you read the materials. And I started reading something that Franklin wrote in 1741 called Observations on the Increase on Mankind. And there, Franklin wrote about the positive and negative aspects of society in this country, and the negative aspects of immigration of bringing German immigrants and others. But frankly he wrote something unique in 1751, "Almost every slave is by nature a thief." But by 1755, he changed this. "Almost every slave is made by the nature of slavery a thief." You get it? It is not what's innate in that person; it is that society that has put this on this person that has made them and everyone we know, before one can be involved in the awesome things, one must eat. And if one cannot feed their children, they would do what is necessary; the slaves were made to do such. And frankly, he developed this after a long period of time in speaking and working with this man, Benezet. Franklin is back and forth in England and France a lot. And he also became a close associate with Benjamin Rush, and I'll talk about that in a moment. He wrote letters to people like Patrick Henry. "Give me liberty or give me death." Patrick Henry had this wonderful letter; he thanked Smalls, who was a Virginia Quaker for giving him one of Benezet's pamphlet. He said, "I thank you for this pamphlet. I agree with everything your friend, Benezet has said. But how can I survive without slavery? How would my children make ends meet?" We know the answer; that has always been one of the questions before us. But Henry had a great love for the ideas. He corresponded with John Jay, who became the head of the Congress. He corresponded with Henry Lawrence, who was the biggest slave trader in South Carolina. And Henry Lawrence's son, John actually became a colonel in the American Revolution Army and died fighting there and had been one of the first to want to muster blacks within a regiment in South Carolina. He disagreed greatly with his father on that. And he had tremendous influence and then started with the use of petitions throughout the college and then the development of abolition societies throughout America. The first he founded in 1776 in Philadelphia. It went dormant in the American Revolution. But it reemerged in 1784 with Benjamin Franklin as the chair. Franklin came a long way, and did great things. Of course if you -- and you know history as much as I do -- that one Benjamin Franklin is worth about a thousand of anybody else. So when Franklin gives the word, and speaks to people in England and France, it has a big impact. Then the impact to Europe to several people, like Granville Sharpe and Thomas Clarkson -- the great British abolitionist leaders. Thomas Clarkson writes something called "An Essay of the Slave Trade" in 1786 and basically what he says, on a slave trade, one out of every six whites die. And the wives -- these houses in Massachusetts and England, the widow's peaks, I think. When the wives waited for their children, for their husbands to come home, they didn't come home, and it had a great impact. You wonder why society changes a little bit in 2009; it's because things are hurting the whites as much. Benezet tried to point that out, that slavery hurt the white mind as much as the black body, but it also hurt the white body because these mothers and wives lost their loved ones. And most importantly, the work of Granville Sharpe. Granville Sharpe was the man who was the initiator of something called the Somerset case. The Somerset case was basically the notion of if a slave comes to a territory -- if he is a slave and comes to an area that is free, he automatically gets his freedom. And this went before the magistrates and Lord Mansfield. Granville Sharpe distributed Benezet's pamphlets to every member of Parliament, Upper and Lower, Commons and Lords, and every member of the judicial bodies. And they came to the Somerset decision. It's been much debate about it, especially over at Georgetown Law School. B asically, while slaves believed that it freed any slave who went in a free church or it did not; it freed that one slave, but blacks took this and they instituted to what they called, freedom suits. Those who are jazz lovers, in the 1963, Sonny Rawlings put some freedom suite. He took this from the notion of these freedom of suits, that blacks had instigated. Blacks throughout America went to the courts all over to petition for freedom. It didn't work, but they had that notion. Lastly, about him, he had a great influence on John Wesley, who wrote thoughts upon slavery in 1784. Wesley took the ideas of Benezet and he wrote his pamphlet and took almost verbatim two-thirds of it. And then he wrote to Benezet and apologized. And Benezet said, "No." As you know now, you have a whole copyright office. The copyright office is bigger than the scholar's office at the Library of Congress. What did Duke Ellington say? "Great musicians steal." How many people have an original idea; you can count them on your hand, truly original idea in a sense. But Wesley and Benezet went back and forth and borrowed from each other. But in 1791, when the biggest debate on slavery the world had known came forward at the British Parliament, Wilberforce took the words of Benezet through John Wesley on Africa and quoted Addinson [spelled phonetically] and others and put it before Parlament. And it passed the Lower House; it did not pass the Upper House. But the first time in the western world a Parliamentary body had made a motion against slavery. Then the ideas went to France, and Benezet had been to France. [unintelligible] All these people came and saw this man, Benezet, when they came to America. And they translated his ideas and some of his pamphlets. Of course, he stayed up late night every night translating things into Dutch, German, and others, sending these letters all over the world. The Frenchmen formed something called the Socit des amis des Amis des noirs, the Society for the Friends of the Blacks. And this became the French society against slavery and had such people as Condorcet, the great French writer, the Abb Rinauld, and the Abb Rinauld, of course, had written on slavery in the West Indies, and the Abb Grgoire, and Grgoire wrote something that inspired Jefferson to write his notes on the state of Virginia. And in fact, Jefferson, as head, quoted in the state of Virginia that Africans produced no great minds, and Grgoire said, "Who have you produced? When Africans have been here 200 years, you can question them. You have been here 200 years, you produce no Plato nor Aristotle in this sense." And it created a great nation within that. And so you see that the ideas go back and forth, from Africa to France to Scotland to England, back to the Americas. Finally, Benezet worked closely in establishing schools for black people, starting full-time in 1770. And he had influence on several great people, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the people we know is the founder of the black Methodist and Baptist churches. They went on to found something called the Free African Society. Uniquely, they formed this society along with James Ford. They positioned themselves against the American Anti-Colonization Society, which was to send blacks back to Africa. Blacks had been here for a number of time; they knew not what country of Africa they had come from. Henry Clay and others of Congress wanted to send free blacks back. And Benezet mobilized against that, and his protgs then took up the lead. These black men, who in 1793, joined Benjamin Rush in a first effort against yellow fever. As the yellow fever epidemic hits Philadelphia, the notion was that the blacks couldn't suffer from yellow fever. And they showed that blacks did die; yet, these men gave their lives trying to help Philadelphia society as a whole. Benezet dies in 1784. At his death is the largest funeral ever held in Philadelphia up until that time. In his will, he wills everything to his wife, and then after she has what she needs, every other penny goes to the maintaining of the African free school in Philadelphia. And as I was speaking in Philadelphia at the library the other day, they brought out this beautiful will of Benezet. He called on others to follow his example. Lastly, I will read you just one line of Benezet. Benezet seldom hardly wrote about his actual contact with blacks. The reason, I believe, is that he did not want to jeopardize their lives. But in the one time he did speak, he said this: And if they seldom complain of the unjust and cruel uses that they have received from being forced from their native country, it is not to be wondered at, as it is considerable time after their arrival, a month just before they can speak our language. And by the time they are able express themselves, they cannot but observe from the behavior from the whites that little or no notice would be taken of their complaints. It is their duty to speak judgment and relieve their prayers. What can be expected but that the groans and cries of these sufferers reach Heaven? And what shall ye do when God rises up and when he visiteth? What shall we answer Him? Benezet spent his life trying to provide that answer. [applause] I can take it. [laughter] Benny will ask the question. There's another of my students, Raj Patel, whose written a book on Haiti, so you see. Raj Patel: What was your biggest fear in writing this book? Maurice Jackson: That my wife would leave me before I finished. [laughter] And my kids would stop loving me. You know, we have a dog who's twelve, and my dog just hurt her leg. We've had to spend the fortune trying -- but I realize that his dog had been with every day as I took these long walks. Nobody -- but the dog was always with me, so I had her to keep me there. I guess greatest fear is that people would not understand what I'm trying to say. It's very interesting. I could give you an example. A young white person once said to me -- a scholar -- once said to me, "Jack, aren't you exaggerating?" So I looked and I was in the movement for many years, so I said, "When I was 16 or 17, I was working on the Goodwill truck, and as I worked on that truck and we were in Newport News, Virginia coming home from college and the truck ran out of gas in Virginia Beach. And as the truck ran out of gas, this drunken police came up to me. My brother had gone and this police put a gun to my head, and the only reason he didn't shoot was because some other police said, "If you shoot that man, we have to clean up the blood." And I say this because if anybody knows what a good person he is or an evil person he is, Jackson knows. And so when someone tells me it means that we are not looking -- because when the attorney general asked the question the other day, maybe he was -- language is one thing. But the question is, "Are there people that have really put the question to the fore?" And I want to make sure that they understood that even the generations, the years before Lincoln, people were putting these issues to the front, and I want to also show this in the book -- and people sometimes ask me, "Isn't it true that whites thought blacks were subhuman?" Well, I studied thousands of books, and I read it, and it was there. If somebody says it's there, I have to believe they believed it. Therefore, it is necessary to prove what all the blacks had to overcome, theoretically, ideologically, and socially. And these were the things. The other things you learn is this -- I think you know you are an historian when you find that you don't mind being wrong. Nobody likes being wrong; certainly politicians and I have my friend who is one of the labor leaders -- they don't like being wrong, but sometimes they are wrong. You don't mind, but as you find you are wrong about something, you can also find -- for example, Benjamin Franklin. I just wrote him off. And then the more I saw, the more I was wrong. When Benjamin Franklin put his word to it, then the movement really picked up because Franklin had such a sway all over the world, even though certain people had denied him their place. Yes ma'am. Female Speaker: I have question about Aaron Burr, who was the Vice President under Jefferson. And Aaron Burr was anti-slavery, as was Alexander Hamilton in New York. And I'm wondering -- and what I'm reading is that Jefferson was an enemy of Burr primarily -- I don't know if you came across this -- because Burr maybe wanted to go to Florida and Louisiana area and open up these areas to no slavery and stop this. And the more I read it about, the less I admire Jefferson. And I just wonder how your opinion of Jefferson and slavery, because they kind of quote him saying, "Yeah, I'm against slavery." But I don't think he was. Maurice Jackson: Is Jefferson in the room? Well, to be fair, there's many concepts of anti-slavery. There's anti-slave trade and there's anti-slavery. And one can be profoundly against slavery and yet at the same time, as Burr and others do not believe in the equality of human beings. And so this was the big separation. Adam Smith was against slavery because he thought that slavery made the whites corrupt, but it also he thought was not a profitable institution. So you had many people within the colonies who believed that slavery may have been wrong. They belived that slavery may have - well they couldn't believe that it would take -- when immigrants came to America in the 20th Century, people thought they were taking the jobs of whites. And German immigrants and others came, then the Irish, other people complained. But in this case, he was trying to show that slavery really undermined the development of capital society. It became a great debate about it. This was the nature of the debate with Burr and others and especially John Jay, who also became a part of it. You had many anti-slavery leaders, such as John Woolman and such as others who said the most dastardly thing about blacks. I look -- I never saw -- Benezet had this wonderful statement, that we are all of one blood. All people are equal under God, and I believe that he believed. So it was not just a question of being free of slavery, but it's a question of equality. And this became a big debate in the 18th Century about that. So those contradictions exist for many. They existed with George Washington; they existed with Franklin. Jefferson -- I just read a wonderful book by Gary Nash about the link between Agrippa, Jefferson, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the great Polish leader. And the Polish leader gave Jefferson his whole will to get rid of slaves, but Jefferson knew that if he took the money and brought the freedom of the slaves, that was set a precedence. And of course, I follow here, Dr. Gordon Reed. She's the lady whose written so beautifully about that. It is very complex neither one or answer that would set a face question, but that on different levels in this whole struggle. We see the contradictions. Of course today we read about Lincoln, and we see the contradictions. Yes, sir. Yes ma'am and yes sir. Male Speaker: I just -- considering the Civil War was -- the institution of slavery was largely the center of that, I am wondering if you have an idea if Benezet had any influence on the politicians of that time period, particularly Lincoln. I know that Lincoln had some correspondence with Frederick Douglas. I don't know if he was influenced by Benezet. Maurice Jackson: Maybe 80 years later, but I will tell you this. In the 1780s, gradual abolition laws were passed. As the gradual abolition laws passed, they will say something like this: Any slave who bears a child after the age of such and such, that child will be free after the age of such and such. So it's a manumission, right? But it may take 40 years, so the law passed in 1780 but it may be 1820. In 1820, around the same time, you get the Missouri Compromise and other things like that, which really hardens slavery. So slavery at a certain point, with the cotton gin and everything else, a period comes, but then slavery hardens itself especially in the early 19th Century. In the early 1840s, they are these movements that take place. They were what they called the Black Convention Movement. And at this movement, there are people like James Ford Jr. and others. And James Ford Jr., the son of James Ford who was a student of Benezet, says, "Where are the Franklins, the Wispahs [spelled phonetically], the Caspers, the Benezets?" In essence, blacks believed that all the white leaders have abandoned them. In fact, many of them had until the culmination of other ideologies developed and the beginning of the Civil War. So it is a period that we still are studying. Of course, you don't often see Lincoln with philosophical notions about it. He speaks like that, but you don't -- I'll have to do more study on that with five or six books that have come out now. But it's a completely different period in society. And as I said, slavery really hardens itself and understand this, too -- ideologies usually don't develop until they must fight against something. So the anti-slavery ideology is much stronger than post-slave ideology. Post-slave ideology started developing right before the Civil War, because they have people fighting against slavery, and so they must be something. And so the justification is rather simplistic, but they do develop with Henry Clay and many others. Yes ma'am. Female Speaker: From an activist curiosity, how was Benezet able to establish these influential relationships? Maurice Jackson: Well, it was very difficult. Benjamin Franklin had this saying. "When Benezet starts, the whole crowd is against him. And when he dies, two-thirds have come to his way." I don't want to get into great man theory, but sometimes it takes a special person; it's just life. I know a bunch of smart guys. I go to the barber shops and I see guys just as smart as Mr. Obama all the time. But I don't see people put the whole package together. That's the difference. And Benezet was able to do it for a very long period of time of working every night, copying things copiously, being ridiculed. I used to be in the movement. Sometimes people say, "There comes Jack. There he comes again. Same thing." Then I read Benezet. "There goes Benezet again. Leave it to Anthony. If nobody does it, Anthony will do it." And so he went through this whole period. At a certain point, however when his worth was seen and the international movements started reading these pamphlets, and then ideas -- ideas really are a beautiful thing, and as ideas circulated as they debate these ideas. Africans have something what they call the transmigration of the soul. And you see it, it never -- and it operates in circular time, not linear. There is no beginning or no end. If you listen to Randy West or listen to some of the great drummers, you see the polyrhythm, and so Benezet's ideas were very much that. They kept in a circular motion, and as they come back to America and then people see what can happen. And the movements were different everywhere. In England, it pretty much operates from the top from Wilberforce and down. In France, as many intellectuals, they don't do much; they talk a lot. My friend, John [unintelligible], who is a great French philosopher and teacher can tell you. And they say it beautifully, in their beautiful French language, but they don't fight. The ideas are important and they circulate back. It took a great person who worked his whole life. My grandmother had this old saying, "Hard work won't kill you." And I never believed her because hard work will kill you. This man worked himself basically to death. In fact, Benjamin Rush, the medical doctor, criticized him because he became a vegetarian. Benezet believed that vegetarianism would lengthen his life. And his medical doctor believe that it wouldn't, but they debated these philosophical ideas, because Rush knew. And as Rush wrote a pamphlet, he asked Benezet not to put his name on it. And Benezet broke his word and put Rush's name because Benjamin Rush's name meant a lot and had a lot to do with the anti-slavery movement. So sometimes you lose friends. It wasn't easy, but what's the term -- eternal vigilance. Liberty is the price of eternal vigilance. And so Benezet was very much like that. He had no choice. Yes, ma'am. I call everybody ma'am and sir, so don't -- nothing to do with age. [laughter] Female Speaker: Did he have any role other than his connection with Franklin in the American Revolution or in the formation of the Constitution or the dates going up to that? Maurice Jackson: He didn't. There were different elements of the Quakers, the fighting Quakers and others. As the revolution is going on, he works to build hospitals. He works with the Indians who have been driven off their land. But he took absolute very little position on it. But during this period of time, during those years in Philadelphia, the anti-slavery movement sort of went under -- the anti-slavery committee started in 1775 and stayed dormant for the next four or five years. It had very little with that. And it could be that some of the Quakers who did not support the revolution were seen as being supporters of Britain, when in fact they weren't. Some were and some weren't. Some people did not believe that war was the particular answer. And of course, you get confused, because up until now, we've always believed that if a black person joined the British military regiment, that somehow they were Benedict Arnolds. No, they just wanted freedom. Whoever gave it to them, they took it. So there was this contradiction notion -- they were in a period where again it went under, very much as the Quakers when they came to America after the English Revolution -- a period of Quaker quietism where they moved mainly on humanitarian issues. Female Speaker 3: Do we have any contact that he wrote to John Adams? Maurice Jackson: I didn't see any letters. There were thousands of letters. Jefferson never answered, but John Jay answered in beautiful tones. Most others did answer in that sense, but none that I saw with Adams. And he wrote thousands of letters to everyone. He wrote to Queen Sophia of Spain, the Queen of Portugal, wrote to Queen Charlotte, just everybody throughout the world. These letters were passed forward. Sometimes they would take six to eight months to get there. Then he would translate them so it became a staple, and you can see them collected in anti-slavery societies, letters all over the world. Yes, ma'am. Female Speaker 4: In England and France, where would I find remnants or traces of Benezet in those two countries? Maurice Jackson: If you went to England, you would find them at the British Museum. You would find them in an exhaustive collection; you find the letters. You find them in -- Dr. Brown's son, son of Christopher Brown, has written a magisterial book called "Moral Philosophy." And in that book, he talks a lot about Granville Sharpe. And in the Granville Sharpe letter books, there were many letters that Benezet wrote to Granville Sharpe, hundreds of them, where they exchange these philosophical ideas. And then in France, at the Bibliotech Nationale, you see the letters of the Abb Rinauld and many others. The French have not put together a document, except some books. They have not put together a compilation about the anti-slavery movement. It may be because it was happening around the time of the Haitian Revolution, and France was really conflicted. That had this notion, there are no slaves in France. Actually, they are because they are in the French colonies, but they had this notion that somehow they were above this particular issue, then we finally realized that they weren't. So throughout -- most of his letters are located in Haverford College in Philadelphia, but a lot of them are at Swarthmore. I found letters all over the place. I found wonderful letters at Rutgers University. He wrote at Rutgers a wonderful pamphlet -- a man named Thomas Thompson had written criticizing Benjamin Rush. And Benezet took this pamphlet and he wrote that -- what's the word -- he doesn't understand the Jewish laws of oppression, things like that he wrote in this book. So I didn't have to go to Rutgers to see the book, but there's something special about seeing it, and I could and I did. My students asked, "What is the beauty about being a historian?" It is smelling the books, going to the archives, and looking at the maps." And I don't see Mike Lamb, but is he here? Mike Lamb was in the map division, and he helped me wonderfully with the maps -- to see these first edition maps. And he and my daughter worked there. I'm not very good with maps; my daughter is, so I could just leave her. They came back with great maps for the books. So you save all that money for education, and it paid off. Yes, ma'am Female Speaker: If there were all these letters, I'm wondering if we know very much about Benezet personally. And specifically, I'm interested if there is anything in his background that kind of pointed him towards this interest in slavery and toward Quakerism. Maurice Jackson: He was from a persecuted minority, the Huguenots; that's one. His family had been a mixture of what they call the congenial Quakers, where they came from the surveying mountains. Then you had the [unintelligible]; the [unintelligible] were like mountain gorillas. But he did not believe in these ideas because they represented a certain violence. And some of his ancestors were a part of what you call French Prophets. However, Quakers go against these because the French Prophets are quite emotional, and they believe in expressions and spirit possession, so to speak, which the Quakers did not believe. But he took those and so I believe that a Quaker religion became a natural for him. And when he married Joyce Marriott, then I think -- there's a lot things to say about being a decent human being. There's a lot to say about human decency. I've seen kids at four and you can say, "That kid is not going -- something's going to happen. They have not been raised to be decent." I've raised kids, so I have a little idea about it, but it is something to say about human decency. And I think because he related to the sufferings of others, because of what he saw in France, and then came to America and saw the buying and selling of human beings right, I think it had a tremendous click on. And then he saw what was happening to Native Americans. And then he saw what was happening to the Arcadians. I think all these things developed with philosophical notions that had something special. And then it's hard to quite put together -- some people might think -- but I think his ideas on vegetarianism had a lot to do with it. "I bring you, my honest friend to see this cheese and candle lands." And what happens is these children had brought mice into the room, and they put cheese in candles, believing the mice would eat them. He came and said, "Go poor thing. Go and let the mice out." Someone asked him -- his sister-in-law brought him to a fixed dinner for him one day, chicken. He said, "What, would you have me eat my neighbor?" He believed that one should not take anything that had a life in itself. Now, it's a stretch, but he believed that none of God's creatures should be used. A lot of this had to do because he believed that using slave labor was wrong, and therefore, using any of God's creatures. He used some of that and put these ideas together. Then I think his wife, who was a Quaker elder, had tremendous influence. He doesn't write about her so much; Quakers don't write about things like that. But he does say that "she was with me in every spirit." And as he writes this letter, he doesn't say much about her, but he leaves everything there for her. I think his own suffering -- it's not an easy thing to every day go to work, working in fear, and then come home, and teach the black children when you have been ostracized, and then translate over candlelight, losing your health and things like that. It took a tremendous effort, and I think all those things helped form him. And I think they had great influence on other people who did the same thing in that sense. Is that Rhonda Hanson [spelled phonetically]? My goodness, that's one of my oldest and dearest friends. Rhonda Hanson: Hi Maurice. Maurice Jackson: [inaudible] she teaches the tough -- she teaches junior high school students, which -- high school, oh man that's tough. Rhonda Hanson: Actually I retired this year. You've talked a lot about his letters and his correspondence and his letters to very influential people of his time. Have you ever given any thought to collecting and publishing his letters as a kind of companion piece to this book? Maurice Jackson: Well, Rhonda, I would if I thought that it would be appreciated as much as I did. The letters -- there are thousands of letters, and some of the letters can be very, very mundane. And one person did put the letters together in 1938. But as they put these letters together, and I went through every letter he wrote, here's the problem. This person excerpted [unintelligible] letters. The other thing is Quaker files. When you go into a Quaker record, you go into it and then you get one letter. And then you put it back, and you get another. So it would take me 30 years to get through all the letters. [laughter] I may have 30 years, but I got to finish this book on Washington D.C. [laughter] But now somebody's talking about doing a better documentation of it. But the letters -- and he writes on education; he develops like the first spelling book in America, one of the first. He has a new method of arithmetic; he writes on Native Americans; he writes on Arcadians. He's one of the first to write on the temperance movement; the ill effects of whiskey. He writes on the necessity of drinking tea three or four times a day. He has a hundred books in his library on medical journals, because his wife has had two miscarriages -- one child died before she was born and one dies in miscarriage -- because he believed that it was something about the dad that creates that. So the letters are over in a number of fields. If I had one or two young, enthusiastic, dynamic, you know, young students, I could do it. Hands? Students? [laughter] And I'll stick around and I'll walk the halls. You see that the more books you buy, the quicker it comes Thank you. Female Speaker: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov. [end of transcript]