SYMHC Classics: Benjamin Banneker

This 2013 episode covers Benjamin Banneker, a man of color in Colonial America who became an accomplished scholar despite having almost no formal schooling.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We mentioned Benjamin Banneker in our New Year's
Day episode on Almanacs and day Planners, and our episode
on him is from early in our time as hosts
of the show. It came out on June tenth, twenty thirteen,
and it is Today's Saturday Classic, and it's also connected
to our most recent episodes. Among other things, we talk

(00:23):
about some arrangements Banniker made for his later years using
information from actuarial tables. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and

(00:44):
welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying, and today we're going to talk about
a particularly amazing person in American history, and that is
Benjamin Banneker. Yes, who is someone I had not known
very much about before we started this little project. I'm
not I had not either, and I learned a whole
lot of fascinating stuff. There's really a lot that was

(01:05):
particularly amazing about his life. He had almost no official schooling,
but he turned out to be such a scholar that
today there are schools and professorships and educational foundations and
things like that named after him. He and his family
made up a really small handful of the about two
hundred free African Americans who were living in Maryland at

(01:28):
the time, where there were at that point about four
thousand slaves and thirteen thousand white people. And he lived
in an age when African Americans were really considered to
be inferior to white people and incapable of scholarly thought.
But he managed, in spite of that existing perception to
publish a series of really well respected almanacs. And he

(01:51):
was appointed by George Washington to help survey the land
that would eventually become Washington, d c. Which is really cool. Yeah,
And it all started when he was born on November
ninth in seventeen thirty one in Maryland. He has a
pretty interesting family history. His maternal grandmother was an English
woman named Molly Walsh or Welsh, it differs depending on

(02:11):
Here's account you're looking at. She had been falsely convicted
of stealing milk. The bucket had really been kicked over
by a cow. But she was sent to Maryland as
an indentured servant, and once she had completed her indenture,
she borrowed some money to rent a farm or rent
some land to start a farm, and she bought two slaves.

(02:33):
One of the slaves was known as Banicky, whose name
had originally been Banna as one word in Ka the
second word, and who had been a chief or a
king before being enslaved. And once she had paid off
all her debts, Molly actually freed both the slaves in
sixteen ninety six and she married Banickee. This marriage was
illegal in Maryland, so this was a lot of really

(02:54):
astounding events happening around the beginning of his family, right
or just completely usual for the time. One of Mollie
and Banickee's children was a daughter named Mary, and Mary
eventually when she grew up, purchased her own slave, who
had been named Robert when he was baptized. He was
from the region of Africa that was known at the

(03:14):
time as Guinea, and that most likely was somewhere in
the stretch of Africa that spans west to east from
Ghana to Nigeria. Like her mother, Mollie later freed and
married Robert, and when she did, he took her last name.
So it's a little bit unclear how exactly the last

(03:34):
name morphed into Banneker, but Mary and Robert had four children,
Benjamin and then his three younger sisters, and at some
point they were all going by the name Banniker and
not Banickee anymore. Yes, Benjamin's parents bought a small tobacco
farm next to Molly and Bannicke's farm. The farm was
registered to both Benjamin and his father. Mollie taught Benjamin

(03:59):
to read using the Bible, and he actually went to
an interracial Quaker school for boys for a little while
when he was young, but he didn't get much formal education.
As Tracy mentioned at the top of the podcast, the
school was only open in the winters, and so it
wasn't like a regular full time, year round school, and
it really was only available for lessons when the boys
weren't needed to help their families on the farms. So

(04:22):
even though he really had not much formal education at all,
he had a very avid interest in learning, and he
was especially interested in math and mechanics, and so he
wound up teaching himself. Almost his whole education was self taught,
and in addition to the mechanical and mathematic things that
he really delved into, he also studied the stars and

(04:44):
taught himself astronomy, and he also learned to play the
flute and the violin, which kind of blows my mind
because picking up a musical instrument and learning how to
play it is quite a feat, yeah, of itself, even
if you have lessons well. And picking up things like
complex mathematics and the kinds of calculations that are required
for astronomy without really having someone to help you along

(05:04):
is also pretty astounding. Yeah. When he was fifteen, Benjamin
took over the family farm, and one of the things
that he did was he designed and built an irrigation
system to divert water from a spring that was nearby
to their crops, so he was able to keep the
crops alive even when there were droughts going on. And
he also used crop rotation techniques that weren't really in

(05:26):
common practice at the time. And as an adult, Benjamin
generally wore Quaker style clothing, so he stuck pretty much
to simple dark jackets and white shirts. And although he
had some affinity for the Quakers, he never actually joined.
He just kind of emulated them in his style. Right.
Here's a description of him from an eighteen fifty four

(05:48):
sketch of his life Banneker, whilst in the vigor of manhood,
was an industrious and thriving farmer. He kept his grounds
in good order, had horses, cows, and many hives of bees,
cultivated a good garden, and lived comfortably during the winter
months and at other seasons of leisure. His active mind
was employed in improving the knowledge he had gained at school.

(06:11):
He thus became acquainted with the most difficult portions of arithmetic.
He also read all the books on general literature that
he could borrow, and occasionally diverted his mind with an
ingenious effort in mechanics. That's kind of like a It's
so quaint you would think it was out of fiction.
I didn't know it was an actual humans, the real person. Yeah.

(06:41):
So when he was twenty two, he actually made a clock.
He had seen a pocket watch belonging to a friend.
We're not sure on the pronunciation of the last name.
It could be Joseph Levy or Levi, But Benjamin had
been completely fascinated with this watch, and so Joseph actually
let him take it apart, and so Benjamin sketched out
all the opponents and put the watch back together in

(07:02):
working order, and then used that experiential learning to make
a clock from scratch. So today this probably doesn't sound
like a giant deal because clocks are ubiquitous, but at
the time, nearly all of the clocks in the United
States were imported from England. There wasn't really anyone in
the US who was making clocks. And Benjamin's clock was
made entirely out of wood, apart from an iron bell

(07:25):
that he got that was struck hourly, and this clock
ran for more than forty years, keeping good time that
entire time until the day that Benjamin was buried after
his death when his home in all of its contents,
burned in a fire. So, based on the watch he
had seen and taken apart one time, he made a
working wooden clock that kept time for forty years. Worked. Well. Yes,

(07:51):
like you said, it seems simple because clocks are everywhere.
But if anyone has ever taken apart a watch, even
to replace a battery, and you lose one spring, like,
forget it, it's over. You have to go to an
expert at that point, right, So the idea that he
just took one apart, put it back together, and they went, oh,
I get it. Yeah, it's fine. Then I can make
one went forward making its own. It's really pretty impressive. Yeah.

(08:12):
So this clock is cited as the first striking clock
built in the United States, and he used this experience
to sort of start up a little side business or
repairing people's watches and clocks. People who came to the
area would stop by just to see the clock and
to talk to Benjamin, who by this point had developed
a reputation for being extremely intelligent but also modest and gentlemanly.

(08:36):
He became familiar with the Ellikotts, a family from Pennsylvania
who had built a mill and established a town not
very far from Benjamin's farm, and Benjamin had been a
frequent visitor while the mill was being built because he'd
liked to observe all the mechanics and machinery involved in
the process, and he and the Ellicotts became friends, and
eventually Georgia Ellicott loned Benjamin all manner of books in

(08:59):
math and astronomy, and so he now had a whole
new assortment of resources to expand his knowledge and education. Later,
he used these books, along with some tools that George
loaned to him, to predict to predict the April fourteenth,
seventeen eighty nine solar eclipse almost accurately. This is another
thing that maybe doesn't sound like a crazy accomplishment today,

(09:23):
because we know when all the eclipses are happening, and
we can watch them on the internet. But most of
the people who were predicting an eclipse at that point,
they were predicting that one wrong. And the almost in
his own calculations came from an error in one of
the textbooks, not from his own calculations. So he turned out,
even though he wasn't right on the money with it,

(09:44):
his prediction was more accurate than a lot of the
more well known astronomers had made at the time. Reportedly,
he also had theorized that Sirius was actually two stars
instead of one, which it is, but at the time
it was believed to be just one heavenly body. In
seventeen ninety, George Washington appointed Benjamin to the team that

(10:06):
was going to survey the federal territory which would later
become Washington, d C. And Major Andrew Ellicott was also
on the team. In writing about this, Georgetown Weekly Ledger
said quote Ellicott was attended by Benjamin Banneker, an Ethiopian
whose abilities as a surveyor and an astronomer clearly proved

(10:26):
that mister Jefferson's concluding that race of men were void
of mental endowments was without foundation. That mister Jefferson Jefferson,
of course, being Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, so he actually became
quite an ambassador for the non Caucasians that were living
in America at the time. Right, we'll talk about that
more and just a little bit, but we'll talk for

(10:47):
a moment about the survey work first. There's a story
that when Pierre Lafont left the Washington d C Project,
he took all the plans with him and then Benjamin
recreated them from memory. So modern historians think that this
is probably an embellishment. There aren't any documents at the
time that confirm it. It seems to have arisen a little

(11:08):
bit later. So while it's probably an apocryphal story, it
speaks to the reputation that he had developed for himself
at this point. And when Benjamin's parents passed away, they
left him the family farm, so he built himself a
cabin there where he could work, and he also had
a study and it had a skylight so he could

(11:29):
continue to study the stars. When he was about sixty,
Benjamin worked out a deal with the Elikots for them
to take possession of his farm where he continued to live,
in exchange for a pension that he could live on
so that he could spend more time studying and writing.
And it was an arrangement very similar to today's reverse mortgages,
and sometimes it's actually referred to as the first reverse

(11:50):
mortgage in history. Yeah, where he's kind of pre selling
the land that he's still living on. Yes, because, as
we've talked about in other podcasts, sustaining yourself on a
farm pretty much a full time, constant job, and he
wanted to have time to study and write. So he
worked out this deal where you know, they would get
all of his land upon his death. He could continue
to live there, but they would pay him some money

(12:11):
every month. He used some actuarial tables to do this.
It turned out he lived a little longer than expected. Whoops,
but it was okay. They continued. They continued to pay
him throughout as agreed. For six years. From seventeen ninety
two to seventeen ninety seven, Benjamin published Almanacs, which were
known as the Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris.

(12:33):
He was the first African American to publish an almanac,
and those almanacs started out as celestial tables and charts
of planetary movements, and as with other almanacs at the time,
they mixed a lot of different information into one book,
including Benjamin's astronomy work, tied information, medical knowledge, et cetera.
And they also included a lot of essays, poems, and literature,

(12:55):
so they weren't just books of straight up facts. They
served an abolitionist purpose as well, since they contained a
collection of anti slavery speeches and essays, so again going
back to him being an ambassador for his people. In
the end, he published six of these almanacs in twenty
eight editions and they received a lot of high praise

(13:17):
for being a very good quality, but they were eventually
discontinued due to low sales. And he had created all
of the ephemerists, which are star chart pieces, as well
as other astronomical work, all the way through eighteen oh four,
but these later years weren't published. And in addition to
all of that writing, he also did some work about
seventeen year locusts and bees, which is pertinent today since

(13:41):
we're there's much talk in the news about the seventeen
year locust cycle. I know that was an accident. I
was delighted when I stumbled across them, across the locust thing,
and went, well, this is going to turn out to
be particularly relevant because of locusts. So a lot of
his fame has to do with his self taught education
and his work as a scientist. He was also an
abolitionist and an activist for peace. His first almanac also

(14:05):
recommended that the US government have a Department of Peace,
which finally happened about two hundred years later when the
founding of the with the founding of the US Institutes
of Peace, and Benjamin also actively spoke and wrote about
abolition before the US really even had a strong abolitionist movement.
He was a complete forerunner. Yeah. In seventeen ninety one,

(14:34):
he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was at the time
the Secretary of State, about slavery. He enclosed this letter
with a handwritten copy of his not yet published almanac
for that year, and this was in part a response
to Jefferson's notes on the State of Virginia, in which
Jefferson wrote at length about what he considered to be
the inferiority of blacks. And in this letter he described

(14:59):
who he was, and he he tried to appeal to
Jefferson's better nature, and he wanted to point out the
inconsistency in the Founding Father's talk about everyone being equal
while still owning slaves and describing blacks's inferior And he
wrote about the young colonies attempting to free themselves from
the British crown, and how the government should be able
to empathize with slaves having had their own struggles for freedom,

(15:22):
And he pointed out the irony in the quote we
hold these truths to be self evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. That's very quite moving to me. Yeah,
and he was very articulate. Here's a selection from near
the end of the letter. I suppose that your knowledge

(15:44):
of the situation of my brethren is too extensive to
need a recital here, Neither shall I presume to prescribe
methods by which they may be relieved, otherwise than by
recommending to you and all others to wean yourself from
these narrow prejudices, which which you have imbibed with respect
to them. And as Job proposed to his friends, put

(16:05):
your soul in their soul's stead. Thus shall your hearts
be enlarged with kindness and benevolence toward them. And just
shall you need neither the direction of myself or others
in what manner to proceed herein. And so he's pretty
much saying, you can put yourself in our shoes. Yeah,
use a little empathy. Yeah, you might look at this differently.

(16:27):
He's pretty much I'm not going to tell you that
it's specifics of how to do it. Here's sort of
just a simple step of showing some empathy. And then
he turns to a rather more practical statement, because he says,
announ sir, although my sympathy and affection for my brethren
hath caused my enlargement. Thus far I ardently hope that
your candor and generosity will plead with you in my behalf.

(16:51):
Then I make known to you that it was not
originally my design, but having taken up my pen in
order to direct to you as a present a copy
of an almanac which I have calculated for the succeeding year.
I was unexpectedly and unavoidably led there too, so I
hadn't just meant to write you a note with my almanac.
But once I had the pen in my hand, once
they got go in, I need to tell you the

(17:11):
rest of this too, And Jefferson replied to him. He
responded in less than two weeks, which at that time
is a pretty quick turnaround. And the letter, which is
dated August thirtieth of seventeen ninety one, says, I thank
you sincerely for your letter of the nineteenth instant, and
for the almanac it contained. Nobody wishes more than I
do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature

(17:33):
has given to our Black brethren talents equal to those
of other colors of men, and that the appearance of
the want of them is owing merely to the degraded
condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I
can add with truth that nobody wishes more ardently to
see a good system commenced for raising the condition both
of their body and mind to what it ought to be.

(17:54):
As far as the imbecility of their present existence, and
other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit. And then
he goes on to say, I have taken the liberty
of sending your almanac to Monsieur Condozette, Secretary of the
Academy of Sciences at Paris and member of the philanthrop
Thropic Society, because I considered it as a document to
which your whole color had a right for their justification

(18:17):
against the doubts which have been entertained of them. I
am with great esteem, sir, your most obedient, humble servant,
just really quite lovely. Yeah, it's simultaneously a lovely and
flattering letter without really acknowledging a lot of what was
pointed out to him in the first place, which continues
to be a running theme in the subject of Thomas

(18:39):
Jefferson and slavery and race. And then Benjamin put this
whole correspondence in his seventeen ninety three Almanac, and you
can read it all online and we will link to
it in the show notes. I wonder what Jefferson thought
of that, Like, I didn't mean that for everybody. I
just don't know well. And I know that there have
been passed in the archive. There are other episodes about

(19:02):
Thomas Jefferson, and there has been so much work at
length about the subject of Thomas Jefferson and Racey. It's
a whole giant field of discussion. That's there are people
that spend their entire scholarly lives studying nothing else, yes,
but his relationship to racial issues. Right. So, after his
almanacs ceased to publish, and after his work in Washington,

(19:25):
d c. Was finished, Benjamin spent a lot of his
later life with study and writing. After he had an
illness in his later years, he made arrangements for how
he wanted all of his work to be taken care
of after his death, but unfortunately much of it was
destroyed when his house burned and Benjamin Bannaker died approximately
on October twenty fifth of eighteen oh six. I know,

(19:48):
as we said at the top of the podcast, today
there are schools and professorships and foundations named after him,
and he was put on a commemorative stamp in nineteen eighty.
So even though in the world of African American scientists,
in the world of early forerunners of the abolitionist movement
in America. He's maybe not one of the most prominent names.

(20:11):
He definitely had a legacy and did some just really
amazing work, especially considering that he had almost no formal education.
Well then, he was so ahead of his time on
most Oh yes, I mean scientifically, mathematically abolition. He was
like many steps ahead of the rest of the people

(20:32):
around him. Yes, it was quite might be why he's
not always associated with those things. He's kind of too
early to play an obvious part in the bigger stage
when things really heated up. Yeah, I am quite fond
of him now too. I love his story. He knew
very little about him before I started researching, And of
course I'm always fond of scientists who like to study

(20:54):
things like stars and bees who wouldn't. Thanks so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
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(21:16):
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(21:37):
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