Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker (November 9, 1731October 19, 1806) was an African-American naturalist, mathematician, astronomer and almanac author. He was a landowner who also worked as a surveyor and farmer.

Born in Baltimore County, Maryland, to a free African-American mother and a father who had formerly been enslaved, Banneker had little or no formal education and was largely self-taught. He became known for assisting Major Andrew Ellicott in a survey that established the original borders of the District of Columbia, the federal capital district of the United States.

Banneker's knowledge of astronomy helped him author a commercially successful series of almanacs. He corresponded with Thomas Jefferson on the topics of slavery and racial equality. Abolitionists and advocates of racial equality promoted and praised Banneker's works. Although a fire on the day of Banneker's funeral destroyed many of his papers and belongings, one of his journals and several of his remaining artifacts are presently available for public viewing.

Banneker became a folk-hero after his death, leading to many accounts of his life being exaggerated or embellished.(1)
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Bedini, 1969, p. 7.
"The name of Benjamin Banneker, the Afro-American self-taught mathematician and almanac-maker, occurs again and again in the several published accounts of the survey of Washington City .C.begun in 1791, but with conflicting reports of the role which he played. Writers have implied a wide range of involvement, from the keeper of horses or supervisor of the woodcutters, to the full responsibility of not only the survey of the ten-mile square but the design of the city as well. None of these accounts has described the contribution which Banneker actually made."
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Bedini, 1972, p. 126.
"Benjamin Banneker's name does not appear on any of the contemporary documents or records relating to the selection, planning, and survey of the City of Washington. An exhaustive search of the files under Public Buildings and Grounds in the U.S. National Archives and of the several collections in the Library of Congress have proved fruitless. A careful perusal of all known surviving correspondence and papers of Andrew Ellicott and of Pierre Charles L'Enfant has likewise failed to reveal mention of Banneker. This conclusively dispels the legend that after L'Enfant's dismissal and his refusal to make available his plan of the city, Ellicott was able to reconstruct it in detail from Banneker's recollection. Equally untrue are legends that Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State invited Banneker to luncheon at the White House. Jefferson during this period was in Philadelphia, the national capital had not yet been built, and there was no White House.”
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Bedini, 1972, p. 186.
"Another important item in the 1793 almanac was "A Plan Of a ''Peace-Office'' for the United States," which aroused a good deal of comment at the time. It was believed by many to have been Banneker's own work. Even within recent decades its authorship has been debated. In 1947 it was identified without question as the work of Dr. Benjamin Rush, in a volume of his writings that appeared in that year."
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Bedini, 1972, p. 403, Item 85
"William Loren Katz. ''Eyewitness, the Negro in American History''. New York. Putnam Publishing Corp., 1967 pp. 19–31, 61–62.
Brief account of Banneker's career and contributions, which are stated to have been in "the fields of science, mathematics, and political affairs," illustrated with the fictional portrait from Allen's work (item 56) and the cover page of the almanac for 1793. Among the misstatements are the claims that Banneker produced the first clock made entirely with American parts, that Jefferson promised Banneker that he would end slavery, that George Ellicott worked with Banneker in the survey of Washington, that Banneker was appointed to the Commission at a suggestion made by Jefferson to Washington, and that Banneker selected the sites of the principal buildings. The fiction that Banneker re-created L'Enfant's plan from memory is again presented, and his almanacs are said to have been published for a period of ten years."
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Bedini, 1999, p. 43.
"Banneker's clock was by no means the first timepiece in tidewater Maryland, as occasionally has erroneously been claimed. Timepieces were well known and available from the very earliest English settlements, ...."
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Bedini, 1999, pp. 132–136.
"An exhaustive search of government repositories, including the Public Buildings and Grounds files in the National Archives, and various collections in the Library of Congress, failed to turn up Banneker's name on any of the contemporary documents or records related to the selection, planning and survey of the City of Washington. Nor was he mentioned in any of the surviving correspondence and papers of Andrew Ellicott and of Pierre Charles L'Enfant. .... Although the exact date of Banneker's departure from the survey is not specified in Ellicott's report of expenditures, it occurred sometime late in the month of April 1791, following the arrival of one of Ellicott's brothers. It was not until some ten months after Banneker's departure from the scene that L'Enfant was dismissed, by means of a letter from Jefferson dated February 27, 1792. This conclusively dispels any basis for the legend that after L'Enfant's dismissal and his refusal to make available his plan of the city, Banneker recollected the plan in detail from which Ellicott was able to reconstruct it. Equally untrue and in fact impossible is the legend that Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state invited Banneker to luncheon at the White House. Jefferson during this period was in Philadelphia, the national capital in Washington had yet not been built, and there was no White House."
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Toscano, 2000.
"Some writers, in an effort to build up their hero, claim that Banneker was the designer of Washington. Other writers have asserted that Banneker's role in the survey is a myth without documentation. Neither group is correct. Bedini does a professional job of sorting out the truth from the falsehoods."
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Cerami, 2002, p. 142.
"He (Banneker) has existed in dim memory mainly on mangled ideas about his work, and even utter falsehoods that are unwise attempts to glorify a man who needs no such embellishments."
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(16) Fasanelli, Florence D, "Benjamin Banneker's Life and Mathematics: Web of Truth? Legends as Facts; Man vs. Legend", a talk given on January 8, 2004, at the MAA/AMS meeting in Phoenix, AZ. ''Cited in''
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(32) The names of parks, schools and streets commemorate him and his works, as do other tributes.

Biography

Early life

Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9, 1731, in Baltimore County, Maryland, to Mary Banneky, a free black woman, and Robert, a freed slave from Guinea who died in 1759. There are two conflicting accounts of Banneker's family history.

Banneker himself and his earliest biographers described him as having only African ancestry.Perot, full text
pp. 5, 19–21, 33–36, 67. None of Banneker's surviving papers describe a white ancestor or identify the name of his grandmother.

However, later biographers have contended that Banneker's mother was the child of Molly Welsh, a former white indentured servant, and an African slave named Banneka. The first published description of Molly Welsh was based on interviews with her descendants that took place in 1836, long after the deaths of both Molly and Benjamin. According to that story, Molly purchased Banneka to help establish a farm located near the future site of Ellicott's Mills, Maryland, west of Baltimore.

A biographer suggested in 2002 that Banneka may have been a member of the Dogon people, who several anthropologists have claimed had an early knowledge of astronomy (see Dogon astronomical beliefs).Cerami, 2002, pp
715
Molly supposedly freed and married Banneka, who may have shared his knowledge of astronomy with her. The biographer suggested that Benjamin acquired this knowledge from Molly, as Benjamin was born after Banneka's death.

A genealogist who in 2016 reported an analysis of records related to Banneker's family tree was unable to identify any documents that showed that Banneker had a white grandmother, but could not rule out that possibility. The report noted that the name "Bannaker" may have had the same origin as that of Banaka, a small village in the present-day Klay District of Bomi County in northwestern Liberia that had once participated in the African slave trade. A 2021 update to this genealogy stated that Benjamin Banneker's father, Robert, was by May 18, 1731, married to Mary Lett (then called Mary Beneca), the daughter of a white woman by an enslaved man. The update noted that Banaka is the home of the Vai people, who have lived there since about 1500 when they left the Mali Empire.

In 1737, Banneker was named at the age of 6 on the deed of his family's farm in the Patapsco Valley in rural Baltimore County. A letter writer stated in 1791 that Banneker's parents had sent him to an obscure school where he learned reading, writing and arithmetic as far as double position. However, the remainder of Banneker's early life is not well documented.

Unverified accounts that first appeared in books published more than 140 years after Banneker's death relate that, as a young teenager, Banneker met and befriended Peter Heinrich, a Quaker who later established a school near the Banneker family farm.(1
Cerami, 2002, pp. 24–28.
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Corrigan, 2003, p. 2
"Cerami constructs a credible narrative of Banneker's life, but fails to document his research." (Quakers were leaders in the anti-slavery movement and advocates of racial equality (see Quakers in the abolition movement and Testimony of equality)). These accounts state that Heinrich shared his personal library and provided Banneker with his only classroom instruction. Banneker's formal education (if any) presumably ended when he was old enough to help on his family's farm.

Notable works

Around 1753, at about the age of 21, Banneker reportedly completed a wooden clock that struck on the hour. He appears to have modelled his clock from a borrowed pocket watch by carving each piece to scale. The clock continued to work until his death.

After his father died in 1759, Banneker lived with his mother and sisters. In 1768, he signed a Baltimore County petition to move the county seat from Joppa to Baltimore. An entry for his property in a 1773 Baltimore County tax list identified Banneker as the only adult member of his household.

In 1772, brothers Andrew Ellicott, John Ellicott and Joseph Ellicott moved from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and bought land along the Patapsco Falls near Banneker's farm on which to construct gristmills, around which the village of Ellicott's Mills (now Ellicott City) subsequently developed. The Ellicotts were Quakers who held the same views on racial equality as did many of their faith. Banneker studied the mills and became acquainted with their proprietors.

In 1788, George Ellicott, a son of Andrew Ellicott, loaned Banneker books and equipment to begin a more formal study of astronomy. During the following year, Banneker sent George his work calculating a solar eclipse.

In 1790, Banneker prepared an ephemeris for 1791, which he hoped would be placed within a published almanac. However, he was unable to find a printer that was willing to publish and distribute the work.

Survey of the original boundaries of the District of Columbia

In early 1791, U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson asked surveyor Major Andrew Ellicott (a son of Joseph Ellicott and a cousin of George Ellicott) to survey an area that would contain a new federal district. In February 1791, Ellicott left a surveying team that he had been leading in western New York so that he could begin the district's survey. Ellicott then hired Banneker as a replacement to assist in the initial survey of the federal district's boundaries, advancing him $60 for travel expenses to and at Georgetown.(1) Bedini, 1999, pp
110–114133–134

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Crew, pp. 87–103.
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The territory that became the original District of Columbia was formed from land along the Potomac River that the states of Maryland and Virginia ceded to the federal government of the United States in accordance with the 1790 federal Residence Act and later legislation. The territory was a square that measured on each side, totaling (see: Founding of Washington, D.C.). Ellicott's team placed boundary marker stones at or near every mile point along the borders of the new capital territory (see: Boundary markers of the original District of Columbia).

Biographers have stated that Banneker's duties on the survey consisted primarily of making astronomical observations and calculations to establish base points, including one at Jones Point in Alexandria, Virginia, where the survey started and where the south corner stone was to be located. They have also stated that Banneker maintained a clock that he used to relate points on the ground to the positions of stars at specific times.

However, some have noted that Banneker's actual role in the survey is uncertain, as his involvement in the effort "rests on extremely meager documentation". An April 21, 1791, news report of the April 15 dedication ceremony for the first boundary stone (the south corner stone) stated that it was Andrew Ellicott who "ascertained the precise point from which the first line of the district was to proceed". The news report did not mention Banneker's name.

Banneker left the boundary survey in April 1791 within three months of its initiation because the time that he was devoting to the project was conflicting with the time that he had expected to use to calculate an ephemeris for the year of 1792.Bedini, 1999, pp
132

136
Further, the arrival of spring required him to direct more attention to his farm than was needed during the winter. In addition, Andrew Ellicott's younger brothers, Benjamin and Joseph Ellicott, who usually assisted Andrew, had completed the New York survey and were able to join the survey of the federal district at around that time.

Banneker therefore returned to his home near Ellicott's Mills. The Ellicotts and other members of the surveying team then laid the remaining Virginia marker stones later in 1791. The team laid the Maryland stones and completed the boundary survey in 1792.

Banneker's almanacs

After returning to Ellicott's Mills, Banneker made astronomical calculations that predicted eclipses and planetary conjunctions for inclusion in an almanac and ephemeris for the year of 1792. To aid Banneker in his efforts to have his almanac published, Andrew Ellicott (who had been authoring almanacs and ephemerides of his own since 1780) forwarded Banneker's ephemeris to James Pemberton, the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.

Pemberton then asked William Waring, a Philadelphia mathematician and ephemeris calculator, and David Rittenhouse, a prominent American astronomer, almanac author, surveyor and scientific instrument maker who was at the time serving as the president of the American Philosophical Society, to confirm the accuracy of Banneker's work. Waring endorsed Banneker's work, stating, "I have examined Benjamin Banneker's Almanac for 1792, and am of the Opinion that it well deserves the Acceptance and Encouragement of the Public."

Rittenhouse responded to Pemberton by stating that Banneker's ephemeris "was a very extraordinary performance, considering the Colour of the Author" and that he "had no doubt that the Calculations are sufficiently accurate for the purposes of a common Almanac. .... Every instance of Genius amongst the Negroes is worthy of attention, because their suppressors seem to lay great stress on their supposed inferior mental abilities." A biographer wrote that Banneker replied to Rittenhouse's endorsement by stating: "I am annoyed to find that the subject of my race is so much stressed. The work is either correct or it is not. In this case, I believe it to be perfect."

Pemberton then made arrangements for Joseph Crukshank (a Philadelphia Quaker who was a founder of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery and who had since 1770 been publishing almanacs, including at least one that Waring had calculated) to print Banneker's almanac. Having thus secured the support of Pemberton, Rittenhouse and Waring, Banneker delivered a manuscript containing his ephemeris to William Goddard, a Baltimore printer who had published ''The Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris'' for every year since 1782. Goddard then agreed to print and distribute Banneker's work within an almanac and ephemeris for the year of 1792.

Banneker's ''Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, for the Year of our Lord, 1792'' was the first in a six-year series of almanacs and ephemerides that printers agreed to publish and sell. At least 28 editions of the almanacs, some of which appeared during the same year, were printed in seven cities in five states: Baltimore; Philadelphia; Wilmington, Delaware; Alexandria, Virginia; Petersburg, Virginia; Richmond, Virginia; and Trenton, New Jersey

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