Benjamin Banneker: Letter to Thomas Jefferson

Context

On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed, stating that “all men are created equal” and entitled to “certain unalienable rights.” Every colony had practiced slavery, and slavery was legal in all the colonies at the time the Declaration was signed. Americans fought a war for independence from Britain, ultimately winning and giving birth to a new nation. During the Revolutionary War many slave masters persuaded their slaves to fight in the American army against the British. Some were ordered to fight, while others were swayed by promises of freedom. When the fervor of republicanism and liberty for all died down after the war, however, few of these promises were actually kept.

In the midst of a country built on the virtues of freedom, liberty, and republicanism, there was the contradiction of slavery. The territory of Vermont banned slavery when it broke from New York in 1777 and maintained this ban in its constitution when it became the fourteenth state in 1791. Pennsylvania abolished slavery from the state in 1780, Massachusetts in 1781, New Hampshire in 1783, and Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784. But despite these states’ decisions to emancipate their slaves, whether immediately or gradually, and the budding social movement toward abolition, the second government of the United States under the Constitution, adopted in 1787, protected the rights of slave owners and, in consequence, the institution of slavery in America.

The American institution of slavery was based on race. The first slaves introduced into North America, after it was found that Native Americans were not a viable option as slave labor, were brought over from the western coast of Africa. The racial nature of American slavery gave rise to many arguments in defense of the institution that also were based on race. Many of the arguments in favor of slavery stressed much-debated theories about the mental and moral inferiority, heartier physical constitutions, and greater suitability for hard labor of African natives. Thus, slavery was said to provide a way for Africans to be cared for, since they lacked the mental abilities to care for themselves, to have their moral deficiencies checked, and to have their strength yoked for the economic good of the entire country—whether or not this country technically included the African slaves.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote against the abolition of slavery, using much the same argument about the inherent inferiority of black Africans. It was well known in America at the time that Jefferson, a slave owner from Virginia, regarded slavery as a necessary evil; he believed that the practice was indispensable to ensuring the economic health of the southern states and of the nation as a whole. However, in Jefferson’s opinion, the evil had more to do with the effect of slavery upon the slaveholder himself, not upon the slave. The Notes provided a basis for quite a few proslavery arguments that would be developed more fully in the early nineteenth century.

In a world where the ability to read and write, much less to calculate an ephemeris for an almanac, were rare for African Americans, even freedmen, Benjamin Banneker’s letter to Jefferson stands out. His prose is clear, and his arguments are coherent and logical. Many white Americans would not have been able to compose a letter half so well. Abolitionists in Banneker’s time, as well as in the later antebellum period, used his achievements to demonstrate that the proslavery writers—who held that African Americans did not have the mental or moral capacity to take care of themselves—were wrong. Correspondingly, Jefferson’s arguments in Notes on the State of Virginia could also be refuted by arguments based upon Banneker’s achievements.