I first discovered Anthony Benezet in the reading room of the British Museum in 1990. I was there to study Enlightenment rhetoric, a rather dry and forbidding topic. Benezet was there in the pages of a small leather-bound book that looked well-used in the 220 years since its publication in Philadelphia. But the passion of the man, the sheer force of his convictions and his energy in condemning slavery captivated me and made me want to learn much more about him and his urgent project--to end the transatlantic slave trade and free enslaved Africans in the Americas. In the years since then, I have learned a great deal about Benezet, and he now seems even more remarkable than he did in that first encounter. But many people in the United States still have never heard of him, largely because his writings have not, until now, been collected and published in a format that makes them readily available to people who are curious about America's troubled relationship with slavery and its consequences. He is not difficult to read, but he has been difficult to find outside of rare book rooms and microfilm readers, and more recently, in digital reprint editions that are often plagued by misprints and errors. My critical edition now makes him available to the average reader. What is so special about Benezet? In an era (the era of the founding of the United States) when slavery was considered benevolent, charitable, and necessary to insure a steady supply of labor; when unloading black slaves in cities like New York and Philadelphia was as unremarkable as unloading hogsheads of Madeira wine or Jamaican rum, one man raised his voice to object and to insist that slavery was unchristian, unjust, unnatural, and founded on violence. He was not an "important" man as such measures are usually applied; he held no public office, was not a statesman, politician, or military leader. He was a schoolteacher, but he had a sharp pen and an unrelenting devotion to his cause. He not only wrote emotionally compelling arguments against slavery, but he also organized his fellow Quakers and others who would listen into a remarkable lobbying force to put pressure on individual slave owners, the British parliament, and colonial assemblies. By the time of his death in 1784, the Anglo-American world no longer took slavery for granted, but was engaged in a pitched battle between advocates for slavery (who became increasingly isolated) and a growing antislavery movement that enforced a ban on the transatlantic slave trade by 1807. His achievements and his passion deserve to be remembered by the country he fought so hard to cleanse from the stain of slavery and oppression.