John Benezet (225)

John Benezet (?–c. 1781) was a wealthy Philadelphian and public officeholder, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. The son of a prosperous merchant, he briefly attended the College of Philadelphia in 1757 but did not enter a profession. He subscribed to John Bulkeley and John Cummings’s A Voyage to the South Seas (1757) and John Beveridge’s Familiar Epistles (1765), and he donated medals, coins, and other objects to APS member Pierre-Eugène Du Simitière’s museum, but his interest in science and learning seems to have extended no further. In 1772, Benezet returned from a trip to Europe and entered public life. He served as a Philadelphia delegate to the Pennsylvania Provincial Congress and as assistant secretary to the Committee of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia in 1775. In 1777 the Continental Congress named him commissioner of claims in the Treasury office. But aside from his membership in the Republican Society, which called for revisions to the state constitution in 1779, he played no other role in the American Revolution. Benezet occasionally imported West Indian sugar, rum, and molasses, but otherwise lived a gentleman. He was a donor to the Pennsylvania Hospital and the Silk Society, and as befitted a nephew of the prominent abolitionist Anthony Benezet, he contributed funds for the purchase and emancipation of slaves. He died in the winter of 1780-1781 when his ship was lost at sea en route to France. His brother-in-law William Bingham was an APS member. (PI)