Seasoned to the Country: Slavery in the Life of Benjamin Franklin: Slavery in the Life of Benjamin Franklin

By Marilyn Wise

"Seasoned to the Country" brings together the details of slavery in the life of one of the most famous founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin.Franklinstarted life as a poor boy, receiving only two years of education before starting to work at age ten. When he opened his print shop, he hired an indentured servant, and advertised slaves for sale and runaway servants and slaves for capture. After he became married, he adopted the local practice of relying on slave labor in his home. By the end of his life,Franklincontributed funds to establish the first all-black church inPennsylvania, and established a loan program for young businessmen, which was not limited to whites. The story of Franklin's struggle with slavery illuminates the national character, and provides a good comparison with Southern political leaders in the colonial period. The book includes a section on slave exploitation and genocidal mentality, a selected annotated bibliography of slavery in the North and slave narratives, and a list of black appearances, uprisings, laws and codes from 1513 to 1865.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479764525

Marilyn Wise

Marilyn Wise lives in Los Angeles and works as lawyer in Culver City, California. She graduated from the University of California at Irvine, worked as an intern for the Copyright Royalty Tribunal and the Copyright Office, and received her law degree from Southwestern University School of Law. Wise enjoys hiking in California and Hawaii, and quilting. This is her first book.

Book preview

Seasoned to the Country

Slavery in the life of

Benjamin Franklin

Marilyn Wise

The Glowery

Los Angeles

Copyright © 2013 by Marilyn Wise.

Library of Congress Control Number:            2012923251

ISBN:                  Hardcover                            978-1-4797-6451-8

                            Softcover                             978-1-4797-6450-1

                             Ebook                                 978-1-4797-6452-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

BOOK ONE

SLAVERY IN THE LIFE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Chapter 1 Africa, Europe, and the Colonies in the Seventeenth Century

Chapter 2 Born in Boston

Chapter 3 Domestic Slaves and Servants

Chapter 4 The Twist: Don’t Treat Me Like a Slave

Chapter 5 Sexual Conduct

Chapter 6 Slave Contacts in France

Chapter 7 Antislavery Man

Chapter 8 The Last Will: Dream of Dynasty

BOOK TWO

SLAVE EXPLOITATION AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

Part I Status in the Exploitation of Slavery

Part II Eye to Eye: Human Passion and Identity Imposed in the Moment

Part III Slave Exploitation Mentality Distinguished from Genocide Mentality

Conclusion

Discussion Questions

Selected Annotated Bibliography of Slavery in the North and Slave Narratives

Slavery in the North

Other Sources

Slave Narratives and Accounts

Related Fiction

Appendix A

Endnotes

This book is dedicated to

GAIL B. WISE

1938-2012

Acknowledgments

I have had the wonderful support of family and friends, especially my mother, Gail B. Wise, who died of pancreatic cancer on September 23, 2012. She voted for Eldridge Cleaver for president in 1968, long before anyone heard of Barack Obama. When I was in grade school, she bluntly told me that when the black people wouldn’t work for free anymore, the white people killed them. These were my civics lessons.

I would like to thank Kyra E. Hicks for her suggestion to write an annotated bibliography. The staff at the Charles E. Young Research Library, on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, has been very helpful. Research libraries are essential to a civilized community.

Self-publication has been available since before the days of Benjamin Franklin. There are occasions when it becomes necessary. Many thanks to Frederick G. Sutherland of FredCo, a West Los Angeles design firm, for the generous gift which greatly assisted in payment of publication costs.

auction.jpg

Union and Hanover in modern-day Boston, where Josiah Franklin operated his store under The Sign of the Blue Ball. Author photo.

Chronology of Franklin’s Involvements with Slavery by Year

Introduction

The task of the historian is to create a dialogue between the living and the dead.

—Marc Bloch

There have been many books written about Benjamin Franklin, but I have not been able to find one book about the slaves who fell under his influence. Many Franklin biographers prefer to write about his public accomplishments, not his private conduct. This approach tends to reinforce the sanitized iconic image, which is traditional and largely acceptable, but fails to present a complete account.

I never had any intention of becoming an expert on slavery in the North prior to the Civil War. I have a full-time family law practice in Culver City, California, including the explosive developments in same-sex relationships. I started reading slave narratives in 1994, after finding a paperback book of excerpts at the local library. When I read Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball, I became aware of the claim that Benjamin Franklin owned house slaves, which I had never heard before. I could not confirm or disprove this assertion it by consulting available biographies about Franklin. My search led to Benjamin Franklin: An Extraordinary Life, An Electric Mind, broadcast in November, 2002. The topic of slavery was addressed late in the series, with a statement that Franklin had a couple of servants, bought and sold slaves through his business as a young man, and became President of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society in 1787. I knew there had to be more to the story than that and, after due consideration, commenced research on Martin Luther King Day 2003.

The answers to my questions were scattered in tiny pieces throughout dozens of books. This book is intended to bring these sources together in a comprehensive manner for further education and study. Dependence on slavery was not limited to the South. Brutality and tight restrictions on blacks, free and slave, were common and pervasive in the North. Slavery in the North was accompanied by constant lawsuits and violent actions. Child slaves were imported into the North from the West Indies and South Carolina. Slaves escaped from the South and traveled to or through the North. Slavery was a national means of economic exploitation. The consequences of slavery are still a national problem.

By the time of the Constitutional debates, 1776 to 1787, Northerners referred to themselves as the Eastern states and Southerners as the slaveholding states, ready to forget about the slaves in New Jersey and New York, the children born with the legal obligation to work as servants for specified terms, and Northern profits from the international slave trade. Victory in the Civil War allowed the North to compose a historical narrative in which it attained moral superiority and superficially cleansed its own slave-owning past by enacting a legal end to slavery in the United States.

Much like other Founding Fathers, Franklin was gifted with the ability to write clever and provocative words, but his conduct did not always conform to the spirit of his ideas. Slavery continues to be a shameful topic, so his involvements with slavery are almost totally suppressed by his modern biographers, while his associations with antislavery and abolition are used to enhance his public image. These attempts to portray Franklin as an intellectual giant and saint fall short of reality. Franklin was no better than Washington or Jefferson on issues of slavery, and no worse.

Nonfiction sources abound for the statistics of slavery and the slave trade, but something more is needed to dig deeper and apprehend the emotional effects of slavery. Narratives and slavery-focused fiction bring interpretive assistance to anyone who desires to understand more about the human dynamics of the US slave system. There is no substitute for the slave narratives. The annotated bibliography has been designed to assist readers in entering their world, through their personal experiences.

Genocide and oppression were my topics of study after law school, before I started reading slave narratives. My studies have taken me back to these topics, especially the Holocaust of the Third Reich, the Shoah. I cannot avoid the conclusion that such atrocities are rooted in human nature and can happen again unless a constant vigilance is kept. The corner of Union and Hanover in Boston, where Josiah Franklin used to hold slave auctions, is the northeast corner of the Holocaust Memorial, located on the Freedom Trail. Yet there is no memorial, no plaque, no mention of the slave trade. That is a silent holocaust.

The aftereffects of slavery in the United States continue to the present day. It will be far more difficult to make further progress in our nation without an adequate understanding of our past.

BOOK ONE

SLAVERY IN THE LIFE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Chapter 1

Africa, Europe, and the Colonies in the Seventeenth Century

The Dutch, who ruled this city, and the Europeans who traded in this harbor, sought one freedom only, the freedom to make money, and in searching for this freedom they did not hesitate to use women and small children, as well as thieves and pirates and murderers.

—James Baldwin,

The Negro in New York

It was a mixed blessing when the Portuguese sailors first learned how to use their superior ship-making skills to traverse the Atlantic, leading to the bloody triangle known as the African slave trade. Traders from Holland, Belgium, Spain, England, and France followed suit, making contacts with Africans, obtaining slaves one way or another, crossing the sea to the New World, entering into commercial transactions, and returning to Europe, laden with treasure. The development of the modern world depended on the greed and strength of these colonizers, who left much suffering in their wake. Thousands of emigrants left Europe and Africa for the New World, by choice or by force.¹

As John Thornton has described in exhaustive detail, Africa had a long history of slavery, which contributed to the power of the royal leaders, but was not attached to a concept of private property.² In the colonies that would soon become the United States, the ability to combine slave labor with concepts of private property and the easy identification of Negroes as presumed slaves, resulted in a pernicious form of chattel slavery that was difficult to escape, often life-threatening and highly damaging to family and community structure.

Slavery has ancient roots, including Celtic slaveholding in the first century AD.³ Slavery was practiced among the Cherokee and other tribes of the southeastern United States, and the Tlingit and other tribes in the coastal northwest, extending to what is now Alaska.⁴ Slavery was frequently imposed on war captives, with the justification that they could have been killed, which would be worse than slavery.

The Mediterranean slave trade was well entrenched by the eighth century, when the Slavs were captured so frequently that slave entered the language as the name of one who could not leave the job, who was probably transported a great distance to inhibit escape and was subject to restrictive customs and laws. From the early ninth century to the mid-twentieth century, the Celts of the British Isles and Scandinavians were the main victims of Viking raids. The loss of beautiful women was lamented by Valgard, a poet: Locked fetters held the women’s bodies. Many women passed before you to the ships, fetters bit greedily the bright-fleshed ones.⁵

By AD 859, the presence of blue men (African slaves) was noted in Ireland. From the late thirteenth century to the early fifteenth century, Christian Spain added rapidly to its slave population through piracy and profiteering. The Portuguese were observed selling African slaves in Portugal by 1444, and they decimated the population of the Canary Islands by kidnapping and enslaving many of its inhabitants, who were forcibly taken to the Madeira Islands, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands, primarily to work on the brutal sugar plantations established there.

The first African slaves arrived in the Caribbean as early as 1501.⁶ Juan Garrido and Juan Gonzalez [Ponce] de Leon, free Africans, arrived in Florida with Ponce de Leon in 1513 (joining him there again in 1521).⁷ Spanish explorers attempted to enslave natives in North America by 1520 but did not succeed. The enslavement of First Nations citizens was outlawed by Spain in 1542, too late to prevent the devastating destruction of the precontact populations in the Caribbean.

An early attempt to use African slaves in the colony of Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon, near the mouth of the Pedee River in South Carolina,⁸ resulted in a successful slave rebellion. These slaves were identified as skilled artisans. They may have been purchased from Portuguese slave traders and trained in southern Spain. Encouraged in their rebellion by the native tribespeople, taking advantage of an epidemic of dysentery among the colonists, the slaves walked off the job, perhaps setting fire to the colony or dispatching a few of their captors as they left. The Spanish explorers went home, and the Africans stayed. Some of their descendants greeted Menendez in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, much to his surprise. They refused to become his slaves, forcing him to obtain new African slaves for his labor needs.

Slave codes and other restrictions were adopted, religious authority reigned, and the militia was well armed. Despite these efforts, Florida had a long tradition of marronage, independent living, and providing refuge for slaves from other states. Florida achieved statehood, along with Iowa, in 1821. President Jackson erased the previous freedoms by removing the native tribes to the west in the mid-1830s, eliminating the previous cooperation with blacks, who were also captured and enslaved (although some were able to arrange for their families to move west instead⁹).

Elizabeth I launched England into the slave trade in 1563, but it was not until 1619 that an observer wrote of twenty negroes arriving in Jamestown, Virginia, after being captured by an English pirate flying a Dutch flag for protection. These Negroes were needed to support the labor-intensive production of tobacco. The crop was so profitable that slaves and indentured servants were valued by and traded for pounds of tobacco. White slavery brought street children, criminals, and women of ill repute to Virginia to work in the tobacco fields or marry plantation owners.¹⁰ Indentured servitude brought large numbers of Irish and English, especially in the early seventeenth century. Their living and working conditions were comparable to those of African slaves, and the Irish were portrayed as brutal, disloyal, and animalistic.

African slaves arrived in New York by 1626, Pennsylvania by 1628, and Massachusetts by 1638. The necessity for labor overcame the qualms many might have felt over enslaving their fellow man. Even Puritans readily accepted slavery but required that servants be taught religion, reading, and writing by their keepers.¹¹ After the African slave trade developed into a profit machine, blacks became increasingly associated with the devil, sin, heathenism, and inferiority. Blackness of color made identification and capture of slaves easier. By 1640, the New Netherlands prohibited anyone from harboring or feeding fugitive slaves.¹² In spite of these efforts, runaway slaves were able to establish communities in the Ramapo Mountains¹³ and in the Dismal Swamp between Virginia and North Carolina.¹⁴ Free blacks had difficulties of their own, many times caused by white fears of their motivations and