Benjamin Banneker , livre ebook

Benjamin Banneker
Benjamin Banneker. (Library of Congress collection)
Benjamin Banneker

Surveyor, Astronomer, Publisher, Patriot
Charles Cerami

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 2002 by Charles Cerami. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., New York Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, (212) 850-6011, fax (212) 850-6008, e-mail: PERMREQ@WILEY.COM.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
ISBN: 0-471-38752-5
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
to my long-time and valued friend James C. (Jimmy) Littlejohn
Contents


Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Prince and the Convict
2 Lessons, Precious and Painful
3 The Lurking Terror
4 A Door Opens Wider
5 The Great Unknown
6 Enter the Ellicotts
7 Turning Night into Day
8 The Unfinished Revolution
9 Attracted to the City
10 Meanwhile, at Mount Vernon
11 Astonishing Choices
12 Back Home to Plant . . . and Publish
13 A Declaration of Indignation
14 A Founder s Crafty Response
15 A Place Among the Greats
16 The Sage s Years of Glory
17 Living Off the Land Again
18 Ennobled by Flame
Appendix I: The Dogon Ancestors
Appendix II: A Significant Similarity
Sources
General Source Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface

Why, I had long wondered, was the name of Benjamin Banneker so little known? For a black man of the late eighteenth century to have had a leading role in surveying the new capital city of Washington, D.C., surely was a feat to recall and celebrate. Yet even in Washington, his name on one school building is the main memorial-and its students have no idea who he was.
When I began learning more about this brilliant man, I was astonished to find that the Washington survey was far from his chief accomplishment, a revelation that deepened the mystery of his relative obscurity. One of the finest minds of the age and surely one of the greatest untutored scientists of all time has been passed over with minimal attention. Only after researching Banneker s contacts with the Founding Fathers and their reactions to this African American did I realize that his rare talents and sterling character were quite consciously obscured by his white colleagues. Having become dependent on him without knowing his race, they clearly feared the political backlash if Southern leaders suspected a move to demonstrate that blacks were capable of more than manual labor and should not be considered mere chattel. It would be misleading to say that there was a cover-up in the modern sense, but with the limited press coverage of that time, the lack of even minimal recognition accomplished much the same result.
The man we meet here was actually the mental superior when he found himself among the Founding Fathers. Most of them were brilliant men and some multifaceted, but unlike Banneker, they were not geniuses with the rare innate ability to discover truths for themselves and then make them seem obvious to others. Among the founders, only Benjamin Franklin was on that level, but he was older than the others and died at about the time Banneker moved beyond his tobacco farm.
In a perfect world, the subject of race would occupy no more than a single line in this book, like a description of height or weight. It would be simply the biography of a great scientist. But if that were the case, he would have been world-famous for two centuries and the subject of many biographies. The insights he had-with hardly any education or equipment-make it likely that adequate schooling and a normal place in society would have enabled him to accelerate the history of astronomy itself. But in the real world, it would be incomplete and unfair to assess Banneker s deep wisdom and his accomplishments as scientist, philosopher, and publisher without recognizing that all this was done while scratching out a living as a tobacco farmer and thinking himself lucky to be a free black. As a personal accomplishment, Benjamin Banneker s life story surpasses the careers of later scientists whose image of the cosmos was formed among brilliant colleagues in the world s great universities. And perhaps it is a greater lesson in living for all, a sharper perspective on the distorting role of ethnic background.
From the time he was five, it had been obvious that young Benjamin had a remarkable mind. With little or no formal schooling, he made the most of help from his loving grandparents and books borrowed from a Quaker teacher to achieve an elegant writing style and an acquaintance with the classics. But it was in science that he truly excelled. Even before he had help of any kind, he was fascinated by astronomy and developed some amazing intuitions. When he finally had access to a telescope and two books on the subject, he reached independent conclusions far in advance of his time. On his own, too, he mastered such science-oriented skills as watchmaking and surveying-which made him ready to assist in the planning of Washington, D.C., when the call came.
Today, when every difference of origin or complexion puts us on the shaking tightrope of race, it requires a mental feat to imagine how a mind with such cosmic interests saw itself in a frozen world where blacks were supposed to behave deferentially. His own ancestry was probably the most unusual in the history of this country. For sixty years, he lived a divided life, doing his expected duty as a freeborn farmer on his own acreage while thinking great thoughts in his off-hours. Through a few patrician neighbors who could share his scientific interests, he had one foot in the white world, often as the leader in solving any technical problem they discussed. He probably had at least three sharp encounters with the kind of terror that could strike a black person at any moment. One of these may have involved his only adventure in love and a tragic ending, although I question the truth of that story. Because these incidents were spread over an otherwise tranquil lifetime, even friends and neighbors thought he lived an exceptionally peaceful life. Indeed, for those first six decades, he was outwardly little affected by the horrors his enslaved black brethren were experiencing.
Then, when he had come to know Thomas Jefferson personally, Banneker struck. To the author of the Declaration of Independence, he wrote a blistering letter that can stand with it proudly in reasoning and style-similarly audacious, courageous, and potentially explosive. The mores of early American society were at least civil enough to make Secretary of State Jefferson refrain from punishing Banneker for the raging insult. He hushed it up instead. It was more than half a century before the great black leaders we have come to know as pioneers of civil rights began to make themselves heard. But Banneker had taken the first risk-and the greatest, because he could not know how Secretary Jefferson and the whole white world might react.
The fact that other, more venomous enemies burned down the scientist s cabin and all his papers at the moment of his funeral makes it daunting to attempt a full and responsible biography. The lost journals of his youthful years would have helped to pierce the obscurity that cloaked all black persons in that day. As it is, the series of early snapshots we are able to see helps to intensify his emergence as a vibrant person when all his gifts come into view. Indeed, many white persons became great admirers and sought him out for his wise counsel. The challenge of making this most remarkable early American known to today s more enlightened readership is exhilarating. And the fact that his life ran a course opposite that of most human stories, gathering force and joy as he grew older, adds to the pleasure of describing it.
Acknowledgments

Well beyond the usual pro forma bow to one s editor, I have been struck by Hana Umlauf Lane s rare ability to note the smallest details while also relating every sentence to an overall plan. Not many editors read with such interest that they can pencil a reminder on a late page, saying, Slightly repetitious?-see Chapter 2. I am tired, but very grateful. Hana surely joins me in gratitude to my friend and agent, Bob Silverstein. He is truly a collaborator who frequently drives me into rewriting before the editors do, and we all benefit from his judgment.
While every person or organization shown in my list of sources was genuinely helpful to me, and some of the libraries named are much larger, I want to single out the Howard County (Maryland) Historical Society for the special interest shown by its librarians and even some of its members who came forward to suggest new places to look.
It was less of a surprise, because of long experience, to find that the Washingtoniana Room of the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., gave generous personal attention and brought forth old books and papers of great interest.
Of all the persons I talked with