The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

Yet in the governor Franklin found a kindred temperament, if not a kindred intellect. Politics aside, Morris was as reasonable as Franklin. “He was so good-natured a man that no personal difference between him and me was occasioned by the contest, and we often dined together.” At one of these dinners Morris remarked jokingly that he much admired the idea of Sancho Panza, the companion and foil of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, who, when offered a government, requested that it be a government of Africans, as then, if he could not agree with his black subjects, he might sell them for slaves. A friend of Morris, seated next to Franklin, picked up the governor’s theme (perhaps by previous arrangement). “Franklin,” he queried, “why do you continue to side with these damned Quakers? Had you not better sell them? The Proprietor would give you a good price.” Franklin responded, “The Governor has not yet blacked them enough.” In his recollection Franklin went on to say of Morris (and of himself), “He had indeed laboured hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wiped off his colouring as fast as he laid it on, and placed it in return thick upon his own face.”