Background.

Anthony Benezet was born on 31 January 1713 in Saint-Quentin, France, to Huguenot parents, Jean Etienne and Judith Benezet. In 1715 Jean Etienne took his family to London to avoid religious persecution. In London, where the Benezets remained for sixteen years, Anthony trained as an apprentice in a mercantile business but left his master to bind himself to a cooper. In 1731 the Benezet family of nine moved to Philadelphia, where Anthony worked as a commercial trader and started attending Quaker meetings. In 1736 Benezet married Joyce Marriott, a Quaker from Burlington, New Jersey, to whom he was married for forty-eight years. He and his wife moved around as Benezet tried to find a comfortable career in business, but he finally decided that business was not what he wanted. In 1739 he took his first teaching job as master of the Germantown Academy, where he succeeded...