Benjamin Franklin
Slavery

Franklin's views and practices concerning slavery evolved over the course of his life. In his early years, Franklin owned seven slaves, including two men who worked in his household and his shop, but in his later years became an adherent of abolition. A revenue stream for his newspaper was paid ads for the sale of slaves and for the capture of runaway slaves and allowed the sale of slaves in his general store. He later became an outspoken critic of slavery. In 1758, he advocated the opening of a school for the education of black slaves in Philadelphia. He took two slaves to England with him, Peter and King. King escaped with a woman to live in the outskirts of London, and by 1758 he was working for a household in Suffolk. After returning from England in 1762, Franklin became notably more abolitionist in nature, attacking American slavery. In the wake of Somerset v Stewart, he voiced frustration at British abolitionists:

O Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land 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!

Franklin refused to publicly debate the issue of slavery at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

At the time of the American founding, there were about half a million slaves in the United States, mostly in the five southernmost states, where they made up 40% of the population. Many of the leading American founders – most notably Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison – owned slaves, but many others did not. Benjamin Franklin thought that slavery was "an atrocious debasement of human nature" and "a source of serious evils." In 1787, Franklin and Benjamin Rush helped write a new constitution for the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and that same year Franklin became president of the organization. In 1790, Quakers from New York and Pennsylvania presented their petition for abolition to Congress. Their argument against slavery was backed by the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society.

In his later years, as Congress was forced to deal with the issue of slavery, Franklin wrote several essays that stressed the importance of the abolition of slavery and of the integration of African Americans into American society. These writings included:
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