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Quirky Founding Fathers and Other Bonkers Bits of American History

Khalid Elhassan May 2, 2020 36 min

Thomas Jefferson - United States — Jefferson was determined to demonstrate the majestic size of American animals. PBS

34. Benjamin Rush Had Some… Eccentric Views

Benjamin Rush is not one of the more famous Founding Fathers. He was not even the most famous Benjamin in that bunch. However, in his day, Rush was famous enough. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rush was a politician, doctor, humanitarian, social reformer, educator, and the founder of Dickinson College. During the Revolutionary War, he served as Surgeon General of the Continental Army.

He was also an antislavery activist, and by the standards of his day, Rush was as liberal and progressive as it gets. However, his quest for racial justice took him down some weird paths. Among other things, his argument that blacks deserved freedom and equality rested on the belief that blacks were actually white people – just ones suffering from a weird form of leprosy.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.