An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America upon Slave Keeping

Rush identifies himself as the author of this unsigned address in a 29 April 1773 letter to Barbeu Dubourg (see Butterfield, Letters, 76). Butterfield (77-78, n. 2) says that this unsigned address, the first of Rush's "controversial tracts, and his first effort in behalf of the Negroes . . . is one of his most forceful productions and remains one of the most read-able."

Rare. Only 9 copies at auction in the last 125 years, the latest in 2004.

From Catalog II

Rush was twenty-eight years old when he published this pamphlet -- already Benjamin Franklin's student in the broadest sense, following the older man's example of using the press as an instrument of civic improvement. The argument is both moral and medical: slavery is incompatible with natural rights principles; the experience of enslavement produces precisely the moral and physical degradation that slave-holders use to justify the institution. Publication in 1773 -- two years before the Revolution and two years before the founding of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society -- marks Rush as one of the earliest antislavery voices in America. Franklin read it with approval.