Benjamin Rush
January 4, 1746
April 19, 1813 (aged 67)
Christ Church Burial Ground, Philadelphia
Physician, writer, educator
Signer of the United States Declaration of Independence
Reforms[edit]
Anti-slavery[edit]
In 1766, when Rush set out for his studies in Edinburgh, he was outraged by the sight of 100 slave ships in Liverpool harbor. As a prominent Presbyterian doctor and professor of chemistry in Philadelphia, he provided a bold and respected voice against the slave trade.[34] He warmly praised the ministry of "Black Harry" Hosier, the freedman circuit rider who accompanied Bishop Francis Asbury during the establishment of the Methodist Church in America,[35] but the highlight of his involvement was the pamphlet he wrote in 1773 entitled "An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping." In this first of his many attacks on the social evils of his day, he assailed the slave trade as well as the entire institution of slavery. Rush argued scientifically that Negroes were not by nature intellectually or morally inferior. Any apparent evidence to the contrary was only the perverted expression of slavery, which "is so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it."[36]
Anti-capital punishment[edit]
Rush deemed public punishments such as putting a person on display in stocks, common at the time, to be counterproductive. Instead, he proposed private confinement, labor, solitude, and religious instruction for criminals, and he opposed the death penalty.[37] His outspoken opposition to capital punishment pushed the Pennsylvania legislature to abolish the death penalty for all crimes other than first-degree murder.[4] He authored a 1792 treatise on punishing murder by death in which he made three principal arguments:[38]