Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had already heard the name Benjamin Banneker by the time the Maryland-born free black wrote to him on August 19, 1791. Banneker, a farmer and self-taught man of scientific pursuits, lived near the Quaker Ellicott brothers in what is now Ellicott City, just north of the nation’s capital.
Around the outset of the first Washington administration, Banneker set about to learn astronomy, with the help of books loaned from one of the Ellicott brothers’ children. Using his knowledge, Banneker “conceived the idea of publishing an almanac in order to promote ‘the Cause of Humanity as many are of Opinion that Blacks are Void of Mental endowments,’” as National Archival records quoted from a letter written by one of the Ellicotts. His first publication in 1790, an ephemeris, interested a family cousin, Andrew Ellicott, who had been asked by Jefferson to survey the land chosen for what would become Washington, D.C. Ellicott received Jefferson’s approval to employ Banneker and his mathematical skills as an aide in his work.
In addition to being good with math, Banneker was also good with the pen. He leveraged his almanac-writing, which was more widely regarded by scientific authorities the following year, to address Jefferson on the topics of black intellectualism and slavery. Just a few years before, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was published, in which the statesman criticized the reason and imagination (“dull, tasteless, and anomalous”) of blacks generally.
Banneker rebutted Jefferson in a letter which he sent to the secretary of State, enclosed with the latest copy of his almanac. Two-hundred and twenty-six years ago today, this is what he wrote:
Banneker tried to trap Jefferson in a contradiction based on what he proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”—and the way the colonists rebelled against their own “state of slavery.”
You can’t actually compare the subjugation under George III to the sheer brutality and oppressiveness of American slavery. But if anything, that makes the comparison more potent: If colonists were moved to revolution by a lack of self-rule, how must black slaves have felt with a lack of self-determination of almost any kind? The full letter is here.
Jefferson responded kindly, if briefly, in a matter of days. “Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America,” he wrote in a single paragraph. His opinions of Banneker would become complicated in future years, particularly after his death.
Banneker’s letter is timely beyond just the symbolic connection between Jefferson and Charlottesville. The last week has forced Americans, and especially those in public life, to reaffirm their belief and commitment to national equality. The very basics of that equality—the 13th amendment, subsequent and fundamental civil rights—were hard-won, through much bloodshed and political conflict. There are times the country has felt the ripples of its original sin and shortcomings since. There are times those ripples have swelled to waves, such as last weekend.
The letter also provides an opening to reconsider Jefferson, his slaveholding, and his relationship with blacks. A superb, lengthy account of Monticello published in Smithsonian magazine in 2012 includes this bracing paragraph:
It was a common theme among many early Americans who professed to “abhor” slavery but accepted—and even profited from—its existence that they tried creating middle ground on an issue of absolute right and wrong. I detest this problem so much that I want to be alleviated of it, was the gist. In the meantime, Jefferson built Monticello into a machine. He came to realize the birth of black children on his property was providing him a 4-percent annual profit. “Jefferson’s 4 percent theorem threatens the comforting notion that he had no real awareness of what he was doing, that he was ‘stuck’ with or ‘trapped’ in slavery, an obsolete, unprofitable, burdensome legacy,” the Smithsonian story continues. “The date of Jefferson’s calculation aligns with the waning of his emancipationist fervor.” The date also aligns with the time just after he had received and responded to Banneker’s letter.
There has emerged a debate in recent days over American history as it is told through memorials. There are situations in which this is a false choice. There’s also the option of acknowledging history—and all of it. The same Jefferson who enslaved blacks was the same one who blasted George in an early draft of the Declaration for waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation [there].”
Faced with these contradictions of the past, there’s a lesson for the present: Choose and preserve what’s right and just.
