A Short Account of the People Called Quakers

Anthony Benezet (1713–1784) was one of the most quietly influential Friends of the eighteenth century. Born into a Huguenot family that had fled France for its faith, he came at last to Philadelphia, joined the Society of Friends, and gave his life to teaching — founding a school for the poor, another for girls, and one of the first schools in America for Black children, whom he taught with his own hands. Out of that long labor of conscience came a stream of writings against the slave trade that reached Granville Sharp, John Wesley, and Thomas Clarkson, and helped set the abolitionist cause in motion on both sides of the Atlantic. This little book shows the ground on which he stood.

A Short Account of the People Called Quakers is exactly what its title promises: a clear, unpolemical introduction to the Friends, written by one of their own for readers who knew them only by rumor. Benezet traces the rise of the movement in England amid the confusions of the seventeenth century, the sufferings of its first preachers, and the settlement of Friends in America — reproducing the heart of William Penn’s Charter of Privileges of 1701, with its solemn and unalterable guarantee of liberty of conscience. He explains in plain terms the Quaker manner of worship and ministry, the testimony against war, the refusal of oaths and of the outward sacraments, and the discipline by which the meetings ordered their common life.

Running through the whole is Benezet’s own deepest concern. The account turns, near its close, to the keeping of slaves as a thing utterly at odds with the principles it has described — the same principles of the light of God in every man, and of love to all mankind, that had drawn Benezet himself into the Society. This Friends Illuminated edition presents his text in lightly modernized English, with the plain speech of Friends preserved where he used it, and scripture and historical references linked throughout.