Spend enough time with someone, even someone you love, and they inevitably disappoint you. And so it was with Ben and me. Over the past few years, I’ve grown to like and admire Ben, maybe even love him, yet he disappoints me. He disappointed me when he failed to rush to his dying wife’s side and he disappointed when he couldn’t bring himself to reconcile with his son William. Nowhere does he disappoint more, though, than when it comes to slavery.
I wanted Ben to be different from, better than, other founders like Washington and Jefferson, who enslaved hundreds of people and, in the case of Jefferson, never freed the vast majority of them even upon his death. In the end, Franklin was better, but he took a good long while getting there. For much of his life Benjamin Franklin was an enslaver and a middleman who profited off the slave trade. Franklin enslaved at least seven Black people over the course of about four decades, records show. (By comparison, Jefferson enslaved more than six hundred people.)
In later years, Franklin no longer enslaved people; he became a cautious abolitionist and, shortly before his death, a vocal critic of slavery. It is this change of heart on which I hang my hopes for Ben—a glimmer of light, perhaps, in an otherwise dark aspect of his life.
Try as we might, we never fully rise above the blind spots of our era; we are all prisoners of a particular time and place. Benjamin Franklin was no exception. He inherited all the prejudices and fallacies of his time. This is not to excuse his words and actions. Ben wouldn’t excuse himself. “The man who is so good at making an excuse,” he once said, “is seldom good at anything else.” So, Ben, I will not attempt to justify your actions. I will try to understand them.
Ben owned and edited the Pennsylvania Gazette for nearly twenty years. During that time, the newspaper ran many advertisements for enslaved persons and for runaways, including absconding apprentices, as young Ben once was. These ads make for disturbing reading. What is most unsettling is their matter-of-fact tone, appearing alongside, and sometimes embedded in, ads for rocking chairs, fishing boats, and goose feathers. Here is one ad from 1734: “Two likely young Negroes, one a lad about 19: the other a girl of 15, to be sold. Inquire of the printer.” The printer, of course, was Benjamin Franklin. This heartbreaking ad Franklin ran in 1733: “There is to be sold a very likely Negro woman aged about thirty years who has lived in this city, from her childhood, and can wash and iron very well… and also another very likely boy aged about six years, who is son of the abovesaid woman. He will be sold with his mother, or by himself, as the buyer pleases. Enquire of the printer.”
Franklin had no qualms about running these ads, “being no more reluctant to advertise a runaway slave than a runaway horse,” says historian Gary Nash. Ads like these accounted for a sizable chunk of the Gazette’s revenue and helped make Franklin a wealthy man able to retire (at least for a while) at age forty-two.
The editorial side of Franklin’s newspaper was hardly more enlightened. In one news story, about a smallpox outbreak in 1731, Franklin reports that of the 288 people who died, 64 were enslaved Blacks. Then he engages in some appalling math: “If these may be valued one with another at £30 per head, the loss to the city… is near £2000.” That is all he had to say about those who died. To him, they were property, not people.
It’s true, as I said, that these reprehensible attitudes were common at the time. Most printers ran stories and ads like Franklin’s. Not all did, though. Christopher Sauer, publisher of a German-language newspaper in Pennsylvania, refused to accept any advertisements for enslaved persons. Why couldn’t you be the exception, not the rule, Ben?
Franklin also printed early abolitionist tracts, such as Benjamin Lay’s fiery 1738 pamphlet All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. Lay was an odd bird. A Quaker and a dwarf, standing just over four feet tall, he lived in a cave and was shunned by much of Philadelphia. He was arguably the first modern American abolitionist. He considered slavery the “mother of all sins,” believing it corrupted the entire community, not only enslavers. Lay was determined to rouse people from their moral stupor—and by any means necessary. At one Quaker meeting in Burlington, New Jersey, he drove a sword into a Bible, splattering worshippers with fake blood (red pokeberry juice) and shouting, “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures!”
Franklin admired Lay’s abolitionist essay, but it was Deborah who was the true devotee. She hung an oil painting of Lay in the Franklin home. Did Deborah shape her husband’s evolving views on slavery? We don’t know for sure, but it is certainly possible.
I was hoping Ben’s decision to publish abolitionist tracts in the 1730s and 1740s represented a sea change. It did not. I detect no other signs that Ben was at all sympathetic to the plight of enslaved persons, or Africans in general. In the 1747 pamphlet Plain Truth, a rallying cry to defend the Pennsylvania frontier, he warned Whites that “your persons, fortunes, wives and daughters, shall be subject to the wanton and unbridled rage, rapine and lust, of Negroes, Molattoes, and others, the vilest and most abandoned of mankind.”
I want to know more about these people Franklin and his family enslaved but find little. We know their first names—Joseph, Jemima, Peter, Bob, George, Othello, and King—but not much else. History is written by the enslavers, not the enslaved. The Franklin Museum in Philadelphia includes many portraits of Ben and his male friends and family, but far fewer of the women in his life and virtually none of the people he enslaved. They are invisible, making only fleeting appearances in Ben’s voluminous writings. Yet they were a constant, often comforting, presence in his life. When Ben and William traveled to the Franklin ancestral home in Ecton, England, it was enslaved Peter who scrubbed the moss-covered tombstone of their ancestor.
In the 1750s, Ben began to slowly, cautiously question the institution of slavery. His initial concerns, though, were based on economic, not moral grounds. It was the welfare of Whites, not Blacks, that worried him. Whites who depend on slave labor grow lazy and “enfeebled” and their children “proud, disgusted with labour, and being educated in idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living by industry.” In a 1751 essay, Franklin fretted about the growing number of enslaved Africans in the colonies—not because it was morally repugnant but because it would “darken” the complexion of America. “Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?” Franklin’s blatant racism is tempered slightly by the next sentence: “But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my country, for such kind of partiality is natural to mankind.”
A glimmer of light. This marked, I think, the beginning of Ben’s transformation. By acknowledging his prejudices, he had planted the seeds of doubt, and as we saw at the Constitutional Convention, from those seeds mighty trees grow.
There were more specks of light. In 1757, just before sailing for England, Ben revised his will, directing the manumission of enslaved Peter and his wife, Jemima, in the event of Ben’s death. The next year, King, a man enslaved by William Franklin, ran away to the English countryside and was taken in by a kindly woman who taught him to read and write. Ben and William could have demanded his return but did not. Did that reflect a softening of Franklin’s heart? Or was it simply convenient to let King go since, as Ben told Deborah, “He was of little use, and often in mischief.” It’s difficult to say. Even the glimmers of light are dim and murky.
Stepping back and surveying a wider swath of Ben’s life, I see clearer signs of his shifting position on slavery. In his 1751 essay “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” Ben wrote how “almost every slave being by nature a thief…” Eighteen years later, he revised it to read, “almost every slave being from the nature of slavery a thief…” It may seem like a small change, but it is, I think, significant. The “thief” is a product of nurture, not nature.
The real sea change came in the early 1760s. Franklin was approached by an Anglican group, Bray Associates, who wanted to open a school in Philadelphia for Black children and requested Franklin’s advice. Ben obliged, eventually becoming chairman of the group’s board. A visit to the Philadelphia school in 1762 dramatically changed his view of Blacks. He now “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.”
Franklin’s revelation seems so obvious, so self-evident, today as to be patronizing, even racist. Yet the idea that Blacks were intellectual equals to Whites was, sadly, not at all self-evident at the time. It certainly wasn’t to Thomas Jefferson. Two decades after Franklin’s visit to the Philadelphia school, Jefferson defended slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia. He couches his racism in pseudoscientific jargon, which only makes it worse. Blacks need less sleep than Whites, he says, tolerate heat better and have “a very strong and disagreeable odour.” Their memory is equal to that of Whites but “in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” Jefferson concludes that Blacks “are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”
Benjamin Franklin may have shared Jefferson’s bigoted views at one point but when confronted with contrary evidence, Franklin, unlike Jefferson, changed his mind. It was his “empirical temper” at work. He was always open to experience and was willing to modify his views based on that experience.
By the early 1770s, Franklin was speaking out publicly against slavery. In 1772, he wrote an article for the London Chronicle in which he asked whether the “petty pleasure” of drinking sweetened tea could “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?”
Franklin’s change of heart was reflected not only in word but deed. Revising his will, he essentially purchased the freedom of a man enslaved by his son-in-law, Richard Bache. He had sailed for London in 1757 with two enslaved people; nearly twenty years later, he sailed for France with his two grandchildren and no enslaved people. In France, his abolitionist views gelled further, thanks in part to the French intellectuals whispering in his ear.
By the time he returned to Philadelphia for the final time in 1785, Ben, now nearly eighty years old, was an all-in abolitionist. No, he did not splatter anyone with ersatz blood or deploy other confrontational tactics. That wasn’t his style. He worked hard, though, to change minds in his own way. He was appointed president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and, in 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, signed an antislavery petition declaring that God had made “of one flesh, all the children” of the world. Writing in 1789, a year before his death, he struck his toughest abolitionist stance to date. He called slavery “an atrocious debasement of human nature” and, perhaps for the first time, put himself in the shoes of an enslaved person.
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. Accustomed to move like a mere machine, by the will of a master, reflection is suspended; he has not the power of choice; and reason and conscience, have but little influence over his conduct: because he is chiefly governed by the passion of fear. He is poor and friendless—perhaps worn out by extreme labor, age and disease.
Benjamin Franklin’s final public writing, penned less than a month before his death, was a biting satire of the institution of slavery. He wrote it in response to the angry tirade of a Georgia congressman who had objected to an abolitionist motion brought before the first federal Congress. In his satire, Ben dons one last mask: that of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, an Algerian prince who defends the practice of enslaving Christians captured by Barbary pirates. If we end our practice of enslaving Christians, Ibrahim/Franklin asks, “who, in this hot climate, are to cultivate our lands?” Surely not us, says Ibrahim, for then we would “be our own slaves.” Besides, he says, we are actually improving the lives of these enslaved people by introducing them to the infinite mercy of Allah and providing “an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal souls.”
Ben had taken every American justification for the institution of slavery and turned it on its head. He accomplished the satirist’s goal, and with devastating effect. Rather than shine a light directly on injustices like slavery, he held a mirror to them. The reflection was not pretty.
I return one last time to the Franklin Museum. By now, I am a regular, though not the only one. Washington and Jefferson have scholars. Franklin has fans. I head directly to the last exhibit. “Did Franklin oppose slavery?” it asks. The museum doesn’t answer the question but instead kicks it back to the visitor: “You be the historian; weigh the evidence and decide.”
I am then presented with ten moments from Franklin’s life—such as his early role as a go-between for enslavers and his later writings against slavery—and asked which way each tipped the scales. My final score: seven in favor of Franklin the Abolitionist, three against. There, it is settled.
Or is it? Walking back to my hotel, I wonder whether historical verdicts are ever so clear-cut. Might someone else, an African American for instance, review the same set of facts and reach a different conclusion? Also, I know I am invested in my conceit of Ben as a guide for our troubled times. Have I fallen into the trap of confirmation bias, seeing only Good Ben while downplaying Bad Ben? My eighteen-year-old daughter said as much when I told her about Franklin’s involvement with slavery. “He enslaved people, Dad. How can we learn anything from him?”
At the time, I had no answer for her, but now, walking down Chestnut Street in Philadelphia on a warm spring day, I think I do. There is no excuse for Ben’s past as an enslaver. Slavery is wrong now, and it was wrong then. But to conclude we have nothing to learn from him is, I think, a mistake. Great people—and I do believe Franklin was a great person—teach us by both positive example and negative. Object lessons are still lessons. Sometimes they are the most valuable of all.
Rather than demythologizing a founder like Benjamin Franklin, we should, I think, remythologize him. We need myths. Not myths as in falsehoods but myths as Joseph Campbell defined them: animating stories that inspire. All cultures need these kinds of myths. They wouldn’t be a culture without them. So, let’s look at Benjamin Franklin unflinchingly, flaws and all, and rather than ask whether he was perfect or not, pose a different question. Is the story of his long life, the good and the bad, useful? If not, move on. If yes, I think we owe it—not to Ben but to ourselves—to sit up and pay attention.