An Afternoon With Benjamin Franklin

I've been attempting to plot a coherent course through his thinking on political economy. 

When we are speaking of Benjamin Franklin, or most of pre-Independence, colonial America in the enlightening 18th c, this term in their terms generally means how to best achieve wealth, the most wealth for an individual and for the colonies.

The first item is population, meaning people who are there already (Indians, who might be hindrences or assets), and the people who arrive, whether they wish to or not. The second item is labor, which means the most labor = production extracted from the 'population' for the cheapest price you can manage.
There is the rub for the colonies, these two inextricably bound elements which are the foundation of wealth.  Because the North American British colonies have such a small population, while having infinite access to land, labor is always expensive.  Thus products from the colonies cannot, and will never be able to, compete either in Britain's  or the global market. The price of labor, that scarce commodity, essential for an individual to make his way into secure wealth, that leads to power and influence is too high, and will always be since newcomers can always push out west to the infinite accessible land there.

Thus, alas, we cannot do without slavery, and African slavery in particular, because the members of that class of (inferior) person can be tracked through the population and not light out for the territory where there is all that free land, as indentures (including himself as a young man, for that matter, though he went to Philadelphia merely) do all too often.  Anyway, the British forced slavery on us early on and now its too late (a deeply held conviction by the colonialists, which continues in certain venues to this very day).

BF gave much thoughtful written attention to slavery, its part in the road to riches for an individual and a nation. He also was a part of the colonial trade in slaves, by which he made a decent percentage of his personal wealth. His personal slaves disgusted, disappointed and irritated him continually, enough that he writes about them in his correspondence.  He's always stating he's going to get rid of them -- or else free them.   But he doesn't do either.  As Patrick Henry and others say, it's inconvenient to not have slaves, particularly when you're used to having slaves all your life.

Slavery, slaves and slave trade are not listed in the index of that lauded (2000) study of Franklin, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands. This is the case of many a study of Benjamin Franklin; when slavery's mentioned it's usually in the unexamined context that BF was anti-slavery and an abolitionist.  This was not the case until very late in his life, when 90 and  occasionally dotty, at the time of the Philadelphia (Constitutional) Convention; I'm not convinced, either, that it was on generally humanitarian grounds.This is one of the many reasons to appreciate David Waldstreicher's (2004) Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution.

Next installment in Benjamin Franklin and political economy: what he has to say about the relationships among wealth, labor, your wife.