A LONG ROAD TO ABOLITIONISM: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’STRANSFORMATION ON SLAVERY ___________________ A University Thesis Presented to the Faculty of of California State University, East Bay ___________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History ___________________ By Gregory McClay September 2017 A LONG ROAD TO ABOLITIONISM: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S TRANSFORMATION ON SLAVERY By Gregory McClay Approved: Date: ..23 ~..(- ..2<> t""J ;.3 ~ ~11- ii Scanned by CamScanner Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 Existing Research………………………………………………………………….5 Chapter 1: A Man of His Time (1706-1762)…………………………………………….12 American Slavery, Unfree Labor, and Franklin’s Youth………………………...12 Franklin’s Early Writings on Slavery, 1730-1750……………………………….17 Franklin and Slavery, 1751-1762………………………………………………...23 Summary………………………………………………………………………....44 Chapter 2: Education and Natural Equality (1763-1771)………………………………..45 John Waring and the Transformation of 1763…………………………………...45 Franklin’s Ideas on Race and Slavery, 1764-1771……………………………....49 The Bray Associates and the Schools for Black Education……………………...60 The Georgia Assembly…………………………………………………………...63 Summary…………………………………………………………………………68 Chapter 3: An Abolitionist with Conflicting Priorities (1772-1786)…………………….70 The Conversion of 1772…………….……………………………………………72 Somerset v. Stewart………………………………………………………………75 Franklin’s Correspondence, 1773-1786………………………………………….79 Franklin’s Writings during the War Years, 1776-1786………………………….87 Montague and Mark Anthony….………………………………………………...91 George and Franklin’s Ownership and Use of Slaves, 1763-1781…...………...104 Summary………………………………………………………………………..110 Chapter 4: A Man Ahead of His Time (1787-1790)……………………………………112 The President of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society…….…112 The United States Constitutional Convention…………………………………..113 Slavery, 1787-1788……………………………………………………………..114 A Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks………………………..118 An Address to the Public…………………………………………………….....119 Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim…………………………………………………….……120 The Will………………………………………………………………………...123 Summary………………………………………………………………………..124 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...126 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………132 iii 1 Introduction Slavery was a defining feature of eighteenth-century America. A vital part of the economy for the southern colonies, and an accepted fact in the northern colonies, there was little opposition to the practice, on practical or moral grounds, in the earlier half of the century. It was a legally protected practice in all thirteen colonies. The world Franklin was born into in 1706 was a world in which individual freedom was not widely conceived of as a fundamental human right. Although a small number of freed blacks lived and worked in the Americas, all other Africans in British America were enslaved, and the majority of whites found their way to the new world as indentured servants. In the northern colonies, enslaved people worked on staple-crop farms and as household servants, tradesmen, or craftsmen rather than as the grueling cash-crop labor that was a mainstay of the southern economy until the Civil War, so Franklin would not have been familiar with slavery’s worst abuses. In any case, life was shorter and expected to be harder in the early eighteenth century than it was today, but most importantly, while the Enlightenment was born just a few decades before Franklin himself, it would be many years before emerging conceptions of freedom, liberty, and natural-born human rights were linked to Christian teachings and would challenge thinkers, politicians, and the public to seriously question the morality of slavery. In the early and middle years of his life, Franklin was largely indifferent to the practice of slavery, and he only occasionally wrote about or mentioned the institution or his conceptions of race, subscribing to the 2 common view that North America was made for “Anglo Saxons,” that is, white people. He appears to have tacitly accepted slavery and given the matter little thought. Beginning in the late 1750s and continuing through the 1770s, as his political views of the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain gradually shifted, Franklin began to oppose slavery, supporting a school for former enslaved people and writing, mostly in private, about his opposition to the practice. During the final period of Franklin’s life, from 1787 until the last weeks of his life in 1790, Franklin made his opposition to the practice of slavery public, serving as the head of an abolitionist society in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, publishing articles and letters opposing the system and encouraging Congress to ban slavery. By the end of his life, Franklin intensely opposed slavery. In other words, Franklin's views on slavery were not static, but constantly evolved alongside his political economy. Two points in particular standout: one is how Franklin’s half-way approach to opposing slavery was transformed into outright opposition by the time of his death. His attempts to abolish slavery across the nation and, in contrast with most other abolitionists of the period, his support for racial integration consumed the very last weeks of his life. The other point is that, although the details are often murky and incomplete, Franklin appears to have been a slave owner through most of his life, including into his final years. What was behind Franklin’s late-life conversion to antislavery, and his late-life emancipation of his own enslaved people? Considered in its context, coinciding with the 3 full sweep of the American Revolution, Franklin's acceptance of the concept of universal human rights, enshrined in the nation’s founding documents but often ignored when it came to the subject of slavery and race, helped push him to make slavery his final public project. This conflict between the perception of abolition as moral and just and the practical advantages that slavery offered to the slave owner was common in Franklin’s time. But Franklin was hardly alone in coming to support abolition only during the revolutionary period. The rhetoric of the patriots was centered around freedom and natural-born rights, ideas that clearly clashed with many realities of life in the colonies. How could slave owners cry for freedom from Britain and Parliament's taxes while keeping others in a state of bondage? During and immediately after the Revolution a true abolitionist movement began, spreading through the northern colonies that were not so economically reliant on the practice of slavery. Vermont was the first state to outlaw slavery in its 1777 constitution, and Pennsylvania was the first to pass an emancipation law in 1780. Within twenty years of the end of the Revolution, every northern state had either adjudicated or enacted abolition, either immediately or with a gradual implementation. The questions raised by the ideological and political arguments of the patriots underscored the injustice of slavery in a way that many American leaders could no longer ignore. For Franklin in particular, however, the issue was as much about pragmatism as it was about ideology. Perhaps more with Franklin than any of his contemporaries, as the 4 times changed, he did with them. Just as he slowly broke away from his pro-English political stance, so too did he gradually change his views of slavery as the political winds changed. This isn't to say that his views were ever insincere. Intellectually, he was an idealist with a life-long interest in Christian-based morality and Enlightenment-based self-improvement. As early as his attempt as a young man to make a list of thirteen virtues and follow them all, as discussed with a touch of humor in the Autobiography, Franklin demonstrated an idealist streak. Yet throughout his life Franklin was a realist, compromising when practicable. The driving point of his attempt to enumerate the important virtues in life wasn’t to make a list of them, but to actually follow them. Franklin was always a practical man, his philosophical wisdom based on practical advice, his inventions and scientific curiosity almost always turned with an eye towards the practical, using discovery to improve people's lives. He was not much of a political philosopher in the traditional vein. Broad concepts of natural rights or political freedom rarely are a focus in his writings until he was forced to face such issues by the growing rebellion across the ocean. It was fully within his character to embrace ideas as their historical moments came. Guided by emerging and shifting ideologies and conceptions of natural rights and freedom, Franklin gradually reversed his stance on slavery as abolition became an ever more serious political movement, finally dedicating the last years of his life to slavery’s eradication as abolition became a real political force in the northern colonies. 5 Existing Research While, in recent years, the slave ownership of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other Founders have been heavily studied, few secondary sources or interpretations of Franklin's complex relationship with slavery have been written. Franklin’s general biographers, especially those writing in more recent times, have tackled Franklin’s relationship with slavery, although most have covered the topic only superficially. The brevity of analysis on this subject is not altogether surprising when one considers Franklin’s numerous accomplishments in a wide variety of fields and the