The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (137 page)

The overseas slave
trade
was another matter. It was especially barbaric, and, in its barbarity, had no real counterpart in the traffic in indentured servants or felons. Moreover, it was something British slave traders tried to force on the American colonies—even colonies that wanted no part in it. Franklin made this argument in one of his pseudonymous pieces for the London press in the early 1770s. The piece put an Englishman, an American, and a Scotsman in conversation; the Englishman called Americans hypocrites for demanding liberty for themselves while denying it to their black slaves. The American acknowledged that his countrymen were not blameless, being, as it were, receivers to the theft of Africans from their native lands. But the Americans were not entirely willing receivers, having passed laws discouraging the importation of slaves—laws the British government had disallowed as being—in the words of Franklin’s American, “prejudicial, forsooth, to the interest of the African Company.”

Franklin subsequently leveled sharper attacks on the slave trade. A British court ordered the freedom of a certain slave irregularly landed in England; the slave’s legal costs had been covered by “some generous humane persons,” in the words of Franklin, who went on, “It is to be wished that the same humanity may extend itself among numbers, if not to the procuring liberty for those that remain in our colonies, at least to obtain a law for abolishing the African commerce in slaves, and declaring the children of present slaves free after they become of age.” Franklin quoted a computation that one-third of the hundred thousand persons shipped from Africa each year to America died in passage.

Can the sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste compensate for 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?
Pharisaical Britain!
to pride thyself in setting free
a single slave
that happens to be landed on thy coasts, while thy merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many
hundreds of thousands
are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!

Until independence, Franklin’s attacks on the slave trade doubled as attacks on Britain. He endorsed the section in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence that condemned the slave trade and Britain’s refusal to allow the American colonies to restrict it—although he apparently was not surprised that the southern colonies insisted on deleting that section. Franklin acquiesced in the compromises on slavery at the Constitutional Convention, believing, as he said in his closing speech, that the bargain struck was the best that could be achieved at that time and place. If waiting twenty years was the cost of killing the American slave trade—an institution nearly ten times that old—it was worth paying.

Yet if the slave trade was evil, its evil reflected the evil of the underlying institution. By the mid-1780s Franklin was convinced slavery itself must be eradicated. To some extent his conversion to abolitionism was simply the logical consequence of his fundamentally generous view of human nature—a nature that long life and an open mind had showed him was no different in Negroes (such as those he had seen educated years before) or Indians than in whites. To an equal extent it revealed his continuing concern that unless American republicanism were founded on virtue, it would fail. As a Briton, Franklin had been able to countenance slavery as one public vice among many received from the past. As an American, he could no longer countenance it, for the new nation could not abide public vice—certainly not of the magnitude of slavery—without jeopardizing its very existence.

Philadelphia Quakers had founded the first abolitionist group—what came to be called the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage—in 1775, but independence and the war distracted most of those who could have made the group a force. Franklin proposed to do just that, enlisting after his return from France and accepting the society’s presidency in 1787. A major stumbling block to emancipatory efforts was the question of what to do with the former slaves; Franklin advocated a carefully considered program of education. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature,” he wrote, “that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” Apologists of slavery pointed to former slaves who became a burden on society, and used this as an argument against emancipation. What do you expect?, Franklin answered. “The unhappy man who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains that bind his body do also
fetter his intellectual faculties and impair the social affections of his heart.” Lacking power of choice in his life, he never learned to choose; lacking responsibility, he became irresponsible. “Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.” But this was no argument against emancipation; it was an argument for education. Society must rid itself of slavery, but it must also make provision for the entry into free society of former slaves. Franklin and the antislavery group published a plan for the education of former slaves, and he solicited public support. “To instruct, to advise, to qualify those who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty; to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employment suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances; and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto much neglected fellow-creatures.”

“Our grand machine
has at length begun to work,” Franklin wrote in the spring of 1789 to Charles Carroll, his colleague from the 1776 expedition to Canada. The new government, headed by Washington as president, had taken office; Carroll himself was a senator from Maryland. “If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy, ours I think bids fair now for producing that effect.”

Yet happiness required virtue—as it always did for Franklin. The new Congress was contemplating a bill of rights. Franklin supported such a bill, but he worried that in the enthusiasm for popular rights, popular responsibilities might be forgotten. “After all, much depends upon the people who are to be governed. We have been guarding against an evil that old states are most liable to,
excess of power
in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be
defect of obedience
in the subjects.” He offered this as a caution, not a condemnation. For himself he was willing to hope that “from the enlightened state of this age and country, we may guard effectually against that evil as well as the rest.”

Happiness and virtue rested on reason. And reason advanced apace, which further encouraged Franklin. “I have long been impressed,” he wrote an admirer in 1788, “with the same sentiments you so well express
of the growing felicity of mankind, from the improvements in philosophy, morals, politics, and even the conveniences of common living.” Present progress was rapid, and would continue far into the future. “I have sometimes almost wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence.”

The present was exciting enough. The summer of 1788 brought news of reforms in France conferring rights on non-Catholics. “The
arrêt
in favour of the
non-catholiques
gives pleasure here,” Franklin wrote a Paris friend, “not only from its present advantages, but as it is a good step towards general toleration, and to the abolishing in time all party spirit among Christians, and the mischiefs that have so long attended it.” As one who always deplored sectarian intolerance, Franklin was especially gratified. “Thank God, the world is growing wiser and wiser; and as by degrees men are convinced of the folly of wars for religion, for dominion, or for commerce, they will be happier and happier.”

It was the following summer, of course, that produced the great changes in France. From the distance of Philadelphia the initial view was cloudy and confused. “The revolution in France is truly surprising,” Franklin wrote Benjamin Vaughan. “I sincerely wish it may end in establishing a good constitution for that country. The mischiefs and troubles it suffers in the operation, however, give me great concern.” Some of his concern, naturally, was for the welfare of those he had come to know in Paris. “It is now more than a year since I have heard from my dear friend Le Roy,” he wrote his old chess partner in November 1789. “What can be the reason? Are you still living? Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?” On the assumption that Le Roy retained his head (he did), Franklin went on to say he found the news of the violence “very afflicting.” He hoped for the best, but feared for the country he cherished second only to America. “The voice of
Philosophy
I apprehend can hardly be heard among those tumults.”

Yet if France survived the tumults, it—and the world—would benefit in the end. “I hope the fire of liberty, which you mention as spreading itself over Europe,” he wrote an English friend, “will act upon the inestimable rights of man, as common fire does upon gold: purify without destroying them; so that a lover of liberty may find a country in any part of Christendom.” To David Hartley he wrote, “The convulsions in France are attended with some disagreeable circumstances, but if by the struggle she obtains and secures for the nation its future liberty and a
good constitution, a few years’ enjoyment of those blessings will amply repair all the damages their acquisition may have occasioned. God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the Earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, ‘This is my country.’”

In his letter
to Le Roy, Franklin explained that the new government in America gave an appearance that promised permanency. “But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Taxes had been important in his past; death was the larger concern now. In the summer of 1789 he answered a French friend who had inquired of his health, “I can give you no good account. I have a long time been afflicted with almost constant and grievous pain, to combat which I have been obliged to have recourse to opium, which indeed has afforded me some ease from time to time, but then it has taken away my appetite and so impeded my digestion that I am become totally emaciated, and little remains of me but a skeleton covered with a skin.”

His family and friends did what they could to alleviate his pain. Sally tended him with diligence and care. Her sons took dictation from their grandfather when he felt too weak to write. Polly Hewson—who had finally succumbed to Franklin’s arguments that her children would have better prospects in America than in England, and had moved her family to Philadelphia—read to Franklin when the pain or medication prevented him from concentrating.

For years he had been too busy to finish his memoirs; now he was too ill. He reviewed what he had written—“which, calling past transactions to remembrance, makes it seem a little like living one’s life over again,” he told Abbé Morellet. And he contemplated what he might add. (“Canada—
delenda est,”
he noted to himself, recalling his long struggle to win Canada for Britain.) But the sustained effort required to finish the job was beyond him.

That many were interested in his life story was evident from the queries he received. Ezra Stiles of Connecticut was one of the more forward. “As much as I know of Dr. Franklin, I have not an idea of his religious sentiments,” Stiles wrote Franklin. Would he be so kind as to enlighten an old friend?