uncompromising.............

 

     For these reasons, as much as any, his signature carried stentorian weight when at age eighty-four, wracked by gout, seized by pain, barely able to walk or sit and subsisting on laudanum, a dying Franklin now south to be uncompromising on one matter facing the young republic: slavery.  Here, as in so many other areas, Franklin seemed ahead of his time.  When a South Carolina delegate argued slaves were property, akin to sheep or dogs, Franklin shot back: "there is some difference. . . . Sheep will never make insurrections."

     So, on that grim winter day in 1790, could Franklin's endorsement of the petition once again move the country and make it whole?

     It was not to be.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800