Ben Franklin vs. slavery

[aaron_of_mpls]

I was Wikipedia surfing tonight, and ended up at (among other things) the article on Benjamin Franklin. Ben Franklin opposed slavery later in his life, and one of the last things he wrote before his death was a letter to the editor of the Federal Gazette in 1790, satirizing the most popular arguments in favor of slavery and the slave trade. I remember reading about it several months ago in a book about Franklin (among other places), and I wanted to find the full text somewhere. A Google search for the letter found it quoted in someone's blog, and a link to the source, the Benjamin Franklin Papers online.

Basically, the pro-slavery arguments were:

• If we end the slave trade with Africa, how will we get the things we need from those countries?


• We're improving Africans' lives by enslaving them. In Africa, they were slaves to despotic kings and chiefs, and were worse-fed, -clothed, and -housed; they're better off here in America, free from intertribal wars and living in the light of Christianity.
• Without slave labor, the economy will collapse. There'd be nobody to do the hard work in the South, and we obviously can't be our own slaves.
• Slaves are valuable property; if the slaves are freed, who will compensate slaveowners for the loss of that property? The government can't afford the amount of money that would be needed, and abolitionists certainly can't either.
• What will freed slaves do in this country if they're freed? Even if they wanted to go back to Africa, it's not feasible to send them there, and few people here will pollute themselves by intermarrying with them. They'd never work for themselves, and we won't have them as beggars or criminals.
• Some abolitionists have suggested settling freed slaves in the undeveloped wilderness of the West, and letting them build their own free country there. Freed slaves would be too lazy to build it on their own and too ignorant to build a good government, and the Indians would only attack them and either kill or re-enslave them anyway.

Some of these arguments are just bigotry, some are from (partly willful) ignorance. About the only valid argument I see is the compensation one (the 5th Amendment says it's against the US Constitution for the government to take people's property without due process and just compensation, and the principle existed in common law before that), but I could think of some counter-arguments to that one too: one could argue that the slaves' freedom was unjustly taken to begin with, and that owning a slave is possession of stolen property.

Overall, though, the pro-slavery arguments have no truck with me, and they didn't with Ben Franklin either. Franklin had a wry sense of humor (if I had a time machine, I'd love to go back and trade jokes -- especially puns -- with him), and he often argued by satirizing his opponents' points of view; his March 23, 1790, letter to the editor of the Federal Gazette was one of those satires. Here's the intro; BTW, the Erika are supposed to be like the Quakers of Franklin's day:

To the Editor of the Federal Gazette.
March 23. [1790]
Sir,

Reading last night in your excellent paper the speech of Mr. Jackson in Congress, against meddling with the affair of slavery, or attempting to mend the condition of slaves, it put me in mind of a similar one made about one hundred years since, by Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers, which may be seen in Martin's account of his consulship, anno 1687. It was against granting the petition of the Sect called Erika or Purists, who prayed for the abolition of piracy and slavery, as being unjust. Mr. Jackson does not quote it; perhaps he has not seen it. If therefore some of its reasonings are to be found in his eloquent speech, it may only show that men's interests and intellects operate and are operated on with surprising similarity in all countries and climates, whenever they are under similar circumstances. The African's speech, as translated, is as follows: [...]

I highly recommend reading the rest at franklinpapers.org.

I enjoy intellectual excursions like these, even when they keep me away from other things I want to do. :-)