Next in my mom’s guest series on views of slavery in colonial America is a look at one of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin’s View of Slavery

Benjamin Franklin was not a Christian but a deist. His attitude toward slavery shows the usual human propensity for inconsistency and gradual psychological change. He could hardly have failed to be affected by the abolitionist efforts of his own neighbours, the Philadelphia Quakers, but the transformation took a long time.

Franklin was a newspaper publisher. He printed many runaway-slave ads in his Pennsylvania Gazette, acted as agent for slaves that he advertised for sale, and purchased at least seven himself, all the while publishing essays by Quakers attacking slavery. Franklin would surely have been aware of a fellow printer in Lancaster County named Christopher Saur, who published a popular journal in German. Unlike the enterprising Franklin, Saur, as a Quaker, sacrificed much income by refusing on principle to publish runaway slave ads.

While slaves laboured in Franklin’s household, he succumbed to the hypocrisy of moralizing in print that owning slaves had an unhealthy effect on the work ethic of masters and their children. However, we can discern a change in attitude taking place.

We know from her letters to her husband that in 1758, Mrs. Franklin had a painting of the fanatical Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay hanging in her parlour. Then in 1760 Franklin became chairman of the philanthropic Associates of Dr. Bray which promoted education for blacks, and soon he wrote that he had “conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children.” We can see how his ideas were evolving by the change of wording in later editions of his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind: in 1751 he wrote “almost every slave being by nature a thief,” and then in 1769 revised the sentence to “almost every slave being from the nature of slavery a thief.”

In 1770 Franklin attacked slavery publicly in print for the first time, and in 1772 he wrote a letter to the editor of a London newspaper imploring the English not to buy slave-produced sugar for their tea because it was procured at the cost of “so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men.”

At this time Franklin was no longer a slave-owner, and yet from 1775 until the early 1780s he went silent on the issue. Then in 1787 he accepted the presidency of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (heavily influenced by Quakers), and wrote several anti-slavery essays in the next couple of years before his death. Finally, Ben Franklin had reached a position consistent with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence that he helped to write: “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”