Benjamin Banneker: Letter to Thomas Jefferson

About the Author

Benjamin Banneker was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 9, 1731. Banneker’s maternal grandmother, Molly Welsh, was an Englishwoman who had been falsely accused and convicted of theft. As punishment, she became an indentured servant to a Maryland tobacco farmer. After she finished her service, she farmed some rented land, which enabled her to buy two slaves; she freed both later. Molly married one of these former slaves, Banneky, in defiance of Maryland law. One of their daughters, Mary, also married a freed African slave, Robert, who took the name Banneker as his own family name. Benjamin Banneker was their first child.

Mary and Robert Banneker and their children lived with Mary’s mother as they worked to earn enough money for their own farm. Molly taught Benjamin to read, and for a short time he attended a small interracial Quaker school. Growing up, he showed a great capacity for mathematics and mechanics, and he read while other children played. His talent led him to construct a striking clock at the age of twenty-two, made mostly of wood and based on his own designs and computations. Despite the fact that he had seen only one pocket watch at this point in his life, the clock he made not only worked but, indeed, continued to run until it was destroyed by a fire forty years later.

Banneker’s talents were nurtured further by his friendship with the Ellicott brothers. The Ellicott family was a Quaker family who owned flour mills and had furthered the technology of flour production and wheat cultivation. The family was known for stressing the importance of education and for bringing in the best teachers for the instruction of all the children in the community. Like Banneker, George Ellicott was a mathematician with a keen interest in astronomy, and he had probably encouraged Banneker’s own interests. In 1788, making use of books and tools of Ellicott’s, Banneker predicted an eclipse of the sun almost exactly. (He would have timed it precisely, except that one of his sources contained an error.)

In 1791, Major Andrew Ellicott (a cousin of George’s and his brother Elias Ellicott) brought Banneker with him to the banks of the Potomac River to participate in an engineering project. This project was the surveying and designing of the city that would be the new federal capital. The Georgetown Weekly Ledger mentioned 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.” After the French architect of the project, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, quit in 1792, taking his plans with him, Banneker proved his capacities yet again. Duplicating L’Enfant’s plans from memory, he enabled the group to finish laying out the capital city.

In 1792, Banneker published his first almanac, the same one he had sent to Jefferson with his letter in August of the previous year. Over the next six years, he published six almanacs in twenty-eight editions. Although he associated with the Quakers and even wore Quaker clothing, he never formally joined the Society of Friends. He never married, and he lived alone, renting and selling off his land, until his death in 1806. His house caught fire and burned down (including the still-working clock) on the day he was buried.