Nothing is gained without a price. As “natural” and “Heaven-sent” as the great production of Afrikan slave labor seemed to the planters, this wealth was bought at the cost of mounting danger to settlers as a whole. For the slave system imported and concentrated a vast, enemy army of oppressed right in the sinews of white society. This was the fatal contradiction in the “Slave Power” so clearly seen by early settler critics of slavery. Benjamin Franklin, for example, not only gave up slave-owning himself, but in 1755 wrote that slavery should be banned and only Europeans permitted to live in North America. (1) Twenty years later, as the Articles of Confederation were being debated, South Carolina’s Lynch stated that since Afrikans were property they shouldn’t be taxed any more than sheep were. Franklin acidly replied: “Sheep will never make insurrection!” (2) https://readsettlers.org/ch3.html