The Surgeon and the Abolitionist: William Chancellor and Anthony Benezet

Abstract

Anthony Benezet and William Chancellor might, at first, seem strange collaborators. They both arrived in Philadelphia at about the same time: Chancellor by birth in 1730, the eldest son of an Anglican father who was a politically connected sailmaker; Benezet by ship in 1731, the eighteen-year-old son of a French Huguenot émigré. From that coincidental starting point, Benezet’s and Chancellor’s lives diverged in significant ways. Benezet renounced the life of business after an unsuccessful early trial and became a pioneering schoolteacher, first in Germantown and then, more famously, at Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. He went on to establish and teach in a school for girls and a school for blacks, both among the first of their kind in America. Partly through his adopted Quaker faith, partly through his native humane disposition, and partly through his acquaintance with enslaved and free blacks in Philadelphia, he became a staunch campaigner against slavery and the slave trade, writing and publishing some of the most influential abolitionist tracts to appear before the American Revolution. Chancellor, by contrast, became a doctor of physic, selling medicines that he imported from London at his apothecary shop on Philadelphia’s Market Street. As a young man he sailed out of New York on a slave ship, using his medical skills to evaluate the health of potential slaves, either captured or purchased, and to keep them alive and healthy at sea so they could be sold at a profit in New York on the ship’s return.
It seems unlikely that the paths of these two would cross, or that the ardent abolitionist Benezet would choose to collaborate with a doctor who abetted the slave trade through his practice. Yet evidence suggests strongly that the two did work together, in a way—that Benezet used the slave physician’s testimony to powerful effect as he composed his first antislavery tract for public dissemination in 1759. In order to ascertain the probable nature of the relationship between the two men, how Chancellor came to share his experiences with the abolitionist, and what the consequences were of their collaboration, we must look first at Benezet to see what he might have desired from Chancellor, then follow the course of Chancellor’s background and life to evaluate the experiences that might have led him to aid Benezet. In the process we get a snapshot of Philadelphia mercantile society in the decades leading up to the separation from England and of the forces that shaped disparate responses to the institution of African slavery in America.

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