A very able and learned man.................they don't like to see that from a black man................
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Benjamin Banneker -- author, scientist, mathematician, farmer,
astronomer, publisher and urban planner -- was descended from enslaved
Africans, an indentured English servant, and free men and women of
color. His grandmother, Molly Welsh, was an English dairy maid who was
falsely convicted of theft and indentured to a Maryland tobacco farmer.
After working out her indenture, Welsh rented and farmed some land,
eventually purchasing two African slaves whom she freed several years
later.
In violation of Maryland law, Welsh wed one of her
former slaves, Bannke or Bannaka, said to be the son of a chief. Their
daughter Mary also married an African -- a man from Guinea who had been
enslaved, baptized as Robert, and freed -- who took Banneker as his
surname upon their marriage. In 1731, they named their first child
Benjamin.
Young Benjamin grew up in Baltimore County, one of two
hundred free blacks among a population of four thousand slaves and
thirteen thousand whites. He was taught to read by his grandmother
Molly, and briefly attended a one-room interracial school taught by a
Quaker. He showed an early interest in mathematics and mechanics,
preferring books to play.
At the age of 22, having seen only two
timepieces in his lifetime -- a sundial and a pocket watching --
Banneker constructed a striking clock almost entirely out of wood, based
on his own drawings and calculations. The clock continued to run until
it was destroyed in a fire forty years later.
Banneker became
friendly with the Ellicott brothers, who built a complex of gristmills
in the 1770s. Like Banneker, George Ellicott was a mathematician and
amateur astronomer. In 1788, with tools and books borrowed from
Ellicott, Banneker nearly accurately predicted the timing of an eclipse
of the sun, discovering later that his minor error was due to a
discrepancy in his expert sources rather than a miscalculation on his
part.
In 1791, Banneker accompanied Major Andrew Ellicott to the
banks of the Potomac to assist him in surveying the new federal city
that would become the nation's capital. A notice first printed in the
Georgetown Weekly Ledger and later copied in other newspapers stated
that Ellicott was "attended by Benjamin Banneker, an Ethiopian, whose
abilities, as a surveyor, and an astronomer, clearly prove that Mr.
Jefferson's concluding that race of men were void of mental endowments,
was without foundation."
In 1792, Banneker published an almanac,
based on his own painstakingly calculated ephemeris (table of the
position of celestial bodies), that also included commentaries,
literature, and fillers that had a political and humanitarian purpose.
The previous summer, he had sent a copy of the ephemeris to Thomas
Jefferson, along with a letter in which he challenged Jefferson's ideas
about the inferiority of blacks.
Between 1792 and 1797, Banneker
published six almanacs in twenty-eight editions. He continued to live
alone, selling off and renting his land, then giving the rest to the
Ellicotts in exchange for a small pension. He died in 1806. On the day
of his burial, his house and its contents (including his clock) caught
fire and burned to the ground.
Image Credit: Maryland Historical Society
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