By Charles A. Cerami / New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 2002
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Foiling
the Arsonists
A review by Winfield Swanson
To the ten books he has already written,
Charles Cerami, a former editor of Kiplinger Washington
Publications and an economist, now adds his masterful biography
of Benjamin Banneker (1731-1804). Cerami has gleaned the facts
of Banneker's life from a scant historical record consisting of
local archives, correspondence, a few journals, reminiscences,
and an earlier biography (Shirley Graham's 1949 Your Most
Humble Servant).
He has interwoven his tale with enough
historical information as well as social and political context
for the reader to readily understand the relative influence of
these factors on Banneker's life along with the magnitude of his
achievements. These facets include George Washington's
political genius and challenges; race and racism in the
eighteenth century; astronomy; the building of America's capital
city; and a number of Banneker's more famous contemporaries.
The book contains eighteen chapters and ends with two
appendixes--one on Banneker's probable Dogon ancestors in Africa
and one on Benjamin Franklin and his almanac--source notes for
each chapter, a bibliography, and an index.
Banneker's grandmother, Molly Welsh, was a
dairy maid in England accused of stealing a pail of milk she had
accidentally spilled. She could have been executed for the
presumed crime, but was instead transported to the North
American colonies. In 1683, she wound up in Annapolis,
Maryland, indentured for seven years to an honorable tobacco
farmer who released her with fifty acres of arable land near
Elkridge, Maryland and a small amount of cash, which she used to
purchase two slaves. One turned out to be of royal
heritage, perhaps from the Dogon people, who called himself
Banneka. After several years, when the three had established a
small farm, Mary freed Banneka and married him. A devoted
couple, they eventually had four daughters, but Banneka died
before he was fifty.
Their daughter Mary either married a slave
and freed him, or married a former slave. Regardless, this man
accepted the name Robert Banneky, and on November 9, 1731,
Benjamin Banneker was born. Benjamin's intellect was recognized
from the beginning and by the age of six he was helping
neighboring farmers with their accounts.
Methodical and analytical, he kept a
journal for most of his life, recording his thoughts, ideas, and
dreams, in addition to practical farming information. He
analyzed farming and broke it into thirty-six distinct steps;
not surprisingly, the Banneker farm was known for its fine
crops.
Between 1759 and the early 1770s, Banneker
underwent some life-altering change that caused him to stop
writing, except for the recording of his dreams. An early
biographer assigned the cause to a disappointed love affair;
however, Cerami's theory, although less romantic, seems more
likely: though free, Banneker recognized the limitations of his
possibilities as an uneducated black farmer living in a
backwater, rural slave society. A turning point came, however,
when he met the Ellicotts.
In 1772, the Ellicotts, a well-to-do Quaker
family of farmers who had never owned slaves, moved to the
Elkridge area and soon began building millworks and fitting them
out with machinery. Fascinated, Banneker spent more and
more time watching the progress. Eventually he met George
Ellicott, the son of Revolutionary War Major Andrew Ellicott
III. Ellicott had received an excellent formal education, was a
prodigious amateur scientist and astronomer, and owned a large
library. Recognizing a kindred spirit, he readily lent his
books to Banneker, and the two exchanged and discussed ideas for
the rest of Banneker's life (Ellicott was more than twenty years
younger).
Banneker's genius came to light in many
ways. Banneker took apart a pocket watch and, after studying the
works, in 1753 made a wooden clock, which ran well for at least
twenty years. In the 1780s, Ellicott leant Banneker a copy
of Gibson's Treatise of Practical Surveying, from which he
mastered surveying. Banneker's real love, however, was
astronomy, and he spent vast amounts of time watching the night
sky. Another indication of Banneker's genius was his
theory that each of the stars is a central sun and that many
have planets circling them. It was a revolutionary idea
and Banneker worked it out in isolation from other thinkers and
with minimal equipment.
In 1790, when Banneker was almost sixty,
Congress granted President George Washington the power to choose
a location for a permanent national capital. Washington selected
a ten-mile square site in Virginia and Maryland that was named
the District of Columbia in September, 1791. To survey the
site, he named the best surveyor he knew and trusted, Andrew
Ellicott III. Part of the agreement stipulated that
Ellicott could choose his own staff; as principal assistant to
survey the city, Ellicott chose Benjamin Banneker, based on an
assessment of his talent and character. The job of drawing the
four ten-mile boundary lines entailed crossing rivers and
slogging through as well as camping in miles of overgrown,
wooded, rocky, swampy wilderness to drive markers into the
ground.
Only by aligning the markers with the stars
could the surveyors be certain that neither Virginia nor
Maryland gave more land to the project than each had promised.
For this, Banneker's knowledge of astronomy was critical, and it
meant that, in addition to the hardships of surveying during the
day, the sixty-year-old was awake most nights for more than two
months. Banneker then declared that his services were no longer
needed and returned to his farm, eager to work on new projects.
One of Banneker's longtime ambitions had
been to write an almanac, a guide that not only published the
alignment of the stars and the timing of the tides for the
coming year, but also offered practical advice, recipes, and
humor. The first issue of Banneker's Almanac was
published in 1791, and it continued to appear annually until
1797.
Throughout his life, Banneker had declined
to allow abolitionists to use him as an example to promote the
end of slavery. However, after completing the survey and his
almanac, Banneker apparently changed his mind. Perhaps
with encouragement from the Ellicotts, Banneker sent Thomas
Jefferson a 10,000-word letter pointing out the discrepancies
between the Declaration of Independence's assertion of the
equality of all men and the institution of slavery. He
encouraged Jefferson and other national leaders to devote their
efforts to end slavery and "to wean yourselves from those
narrow prejudices," and "Put your Souls in their
Souls' stead" (p. 166).
Banneker's letter, soon made public, exposed him to
physical violence from pro-slavery Marylanders, some of whom
occasionally vandalized Banneker's farm or fired shots at his
cabin.
These three accomplishments--Banneker's
participation in the survey of the capital city, the publication
of his first almanac, and his letter to Jefferson along with
Jefferson's reply--made 1791 Banneker's defining year, his annus
mirabilis. Benjamin Banneker died on October 6, 1806. Two
days later, while he was being buried, arsonists burned his
cabin to the ground and with it most of his papers and journals
and his wooden clock. The fire burned manifestations of
Banneker's genius and of his original and independent thinking,
hindered biographical research and writing, and generally
impeded recognition of the accomplishments of a colonial genius.
Not until the early 1970s was there a small public funding in
Maryland to memorialize Banneker's remarkable career. In
the mid-1980s the Baltimore County Department of Recreation and
Parks purchased the former Banneker Farmstead and surrounding
land in Oella, outside Ellicott City, and established the
Benjamin Banneker Historical Park.
Now, nearly two hundred
years later, Charles Cerami has foiled the arsonists.
Historians had never completely lost sight of Banneker (for
example, the Maryland Historical Society sponsored lectures on
him in the late 1800s and early 1900s), but now, as evidenced by
the number of sites that can be found on the Web, interest in
this colonial genius has renewed.
At the same time, Banneker's only other full-length
biography, Shirley Graham's 1949 book, is usually dismissed as a
"romanticized biography." Cerami's biography is
a welcome and long overdue addition to this sparse record.
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Charles A. Cerami.
Benjamin Banneker:
Surveyor, Astronomer, Publisher, Patriot. New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 2002. xiii + 257 pp. Appendices, bibliographical
references, index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-471-38752-5.
Reviewed by Winfield Swanson --
Freelance Writer and Editor, Washington, D.C. winfields@earthlink.net for H-DC@h-net.msu.edu (February, 2003)
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 |
BENJAMIN BANNEKER
(1731-1806) |
|
Born near Baltimore, Maryland, in
1731, Benjamin Banneker, a self-taught
mathematician, outstanding astronomer author of almanacs, surveyor,
humanitarian, and inventor, was the only child of a free mulatto mother and
an African father who
purchased his own freedom from slavery. He lived all of his life
on his parent's farm on the Patapsco River in Baltimore County. Young
Benjamin attended integrated private schools; by age 15, he obtained an eighth
grade educationand excelled in mathematics. He took over his
parents' farm and became an excellent farmer.
Josef Levi, a traveling salesman,
showed Banneker a pocket watch, something he had never seen before.
Benjamin became so fascinated with the watch that Levi gave it to him. He took
the watch home and spent days talking it apart and putting it back
together. In 1753, using the watch as as a model, Banneker produced the
first wooden clock ever built in the United States. It was made entirely
of wood, and each gear was carved by hand. His clock kept perfect time,
striking every hour; for more than forty years. News of the clock
created such a sensation that people came from all over to see it, and
the genius who made it.
During the revolutionary war period,
George Eillicot, a neighbor introduced Banneker to the science of
astronomy, which he rapidly mastered. His aptitude in mathematics and
knowledge of astronomy enabled him to predict the solar eclipse that
took place on April 14, 1789. In 1792, Banneker began publishing an
almanac that was widely read and became the main reference for farmers
in the Mid-Atlantic states. It offered weather data, recipes, medical
remedies, poems and anti-slavery essays. This almanac was the first
scientific book written by a Black American, and it was published
annually for more than a decade.
Banneker's major reputation stems from
his service as a surveyor on the six-man team which helped design the
blueprints for Washington, D.C. President Washington had appointed
Banneke,r making him the first Black presidential appointee in the
United States. Banneker helped in selecting the sites for the U.S.
Capitol building, the U.S. Treasury building, the White House and other
Federal buildings. When the chairman of the civil engineering team,
Major L'Enfant, abruptly resigned and returned to France with the plans,
Banneker's photographic memory enabled him to reproduce them in their
entirety. Washington, D.C., with its grand avenues and buildings, was
completed and stands today as a monument to Banneker's genius.
Banneker's preoccupation with
scientific matters in no way diminished his concern for the plight of
Blacks. In a twelve-page letter to Thomas Jefferson, he refuted the
statement that "Blacks were inferior to Whites." Jefferson
changed his position and, as a testimonial, sent a copy of Banneker's
almanac to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. Another was used in
Britain's House of Commons to support an argument for the education of
Blacks. Banneker was living proof that "the strength of mind is in
no way connected with the color of the skin."
Banneker's predictions were
consistently accurate, except for his prediction of his own death.
Living four years longer than he had predicted, Banneker died on October
25, 1806, wrapped in a blanket observing the stars through his
telescope.
Source: Empak "Black History" Publication Series
(1985). |
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updated 18 October 2007
