What did Benjamin Franklin say about slavery?

My views on slavery evolved considerably over the course of my life, and I am not proud of every chapter of that story. In my earlier years I owned slaves and ran advertisements for their sale in my newspaper — practices I came to regard with deep shame. But let me tell you where I arrived. By 1789, as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, I wrote plainly that “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils” That is from my Address to the Public, published in the Federal Gazette on September 12, 1789. Even in condemning slavery, I urged care for those emancipated — recognizing that a man long treated as a brute animal requires genuine support to flourish in freedom, not merely the formal grant of liberty. Earlier, in a letter defending the American colonies against British critics, I was blunt about shared guilt, arguing “if you have stolen Men to sell to us, and we buy them, you may urge against us the old and true saying, that the Receiver is as bad as the Thief” Britain began the slave trade, repeal'd colonial laws that would have discouraged it, and then had the impudence to lecture us. My final position was unambiguous: the trade must be abolished, and free Black Americans must be educated and integrated into society as full members of it.