On July 4, 1776 explosive words from Thomas Jefferson captured the hearts of men and women, white and black, in the British Colonies in America. Those words read, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." These words set the world ablaze not only with war but with a new way of looking at humanity. The "Age of Liberty" though was not exactly as it appeared to be however.
Following the Revolutionary War, from 1783-1800, many of the Patriots lead a full blown retreat from the implications of the famous words above. The seventeen years following the war have been termed by the provocative work by Larry Tise as "the American Counter-Revolution." In fact Thomas Jefferson, who always retained the rhetoric of the pursuit of individual rights is deemed as "the most radical counterrevolutionary" of them all [1]!
Jefferson had published, in 1785, his Notes on Virginia that attained near canonical status among slave holding Americans. When Jefferson won the most contentious election in American history it was because of the "federal ratio" - that is the Three-Fifths Clause in the Constitution giving southern slave states a greater number votes in the Electoral College (Jefferson lost the popular vote). Future president John Quincy Adams wrote of the election of Jefferson, "The election of Mr. Jefferson to the presidency was, upon sectional feelings, the triumph of the South over the North - of the slave representation over the purely free" [2]. The Notes changed the way Americans thought and talked about liberty, freedom, equality and the rights of humans. Now even with the Revolution fresh in mind there was no vision that could bind all humans together within the United States. For Thomas Jefferson black folks were constitutionally inferior, morally bankrupt, and unfit for social equality with whites. They may be good for sexual exploitation however [3].
Thomas Jefferson's new doctrine reads rather clearly in his Notes, "I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of the body and mind." Liberty was colored even for the writer of the Declaration of Independence.
A "Black" Enlightenment
If Thomas Jefferson did not believe his own words they inspired folks on the other side of the colored liberty line. The period saw African Americans breaking out of the stifling limits and bigotry in significant ways. Phillis Wheatley dazzled white readers with her poetry. Olaudah Equiano became a world traveler and a crusader for black liberty. One man who emerged from the shadows was Benjamin Banneker.
By 1791 Banneker had become a well known celebrity of sorts. Banneker was a free black tobacco farmer in Maryland. He was in many ways he was the counter part of his white name sake Benjamin Franklin. He was born and raised in destitution. Both were self-taught. Both loved mathematical puzzles. Both were fascinated by nature, patterns of weather, and astronomy. Both enjoyed the challenge of creating almanacs. Both, it would seem, were products of the Age of Enlightenment. Banneker's first almanac was rejected because the publisher did not believe a black man was capable of performing the mathematics required for one. Yet when his almanac was published for 1792 that it was a "COMPLETE and ACCURATE EPHEMERIS for the year 1792" and had been
"calculated by a a Sable Descendant of Africa, who, by this Specimen of Ingenuity, evinces, to Demonstration, that mental Powers and Endowments are not the exclusive Excellence of white People, but that they Rays of Science may alike illumine the Minds of Men of every Clime, (however they may differ in the Colour of the Skin) particularly those whom Tyrant-Custom hath too long taught us to depreciated as a Race inferior in intellectual Capacity."
In other words black men were not mere brutish beasts. Further in 1791 Banneker had been engaged by President George Washington as one of the surveyors and planners for the soon to be capital of the United States. Banneker, a true son of the Enlightenment, was a man who believed that liberty came for those of a different color too. Thomas Jefferson did pass on the Almanac to the Academy of Sciences in Paris as possible evidence that some blacks were capable of science.
A Black Intellectual Writes Thomas Jefferson
On August 19, 1791 a sixty year old Benjamin Banneker sat down to write a short note to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. As Banneker explains at the end of the letter he initially intended to only send Mr. Jefferson a copy of almanac so he could peruse the contents. But something moved Banneker to express himself to the supposed Apostle of Human Liberty on the matter of liberty for black people within the United States. It is not without irony in the shadow of Jefferson's Notes that Thomas' Paine's The Right's of Man was published in May of 1791 just a few months prior to Banneker's letter. Paine's book was endorsed by Thomas Jefferson. But what did the black intellectual say to the author of the Declaration of Independence and Notes on Virgina? He opens
"Sir: - I am fully sensible of the greatness of that freedom, which I take with you on the present occasion {Banneker it will be recalled was a free black man}, a liberty which seemed to me scarcely allowable, when I reflected on that distinguished and dignified station in which you stand, and the almost general prejudice and prepossession which is so prevalent in the world against those of my complexion."
Banneker mentions how common the notion is that blacks are mere brutes ...
"I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of beings who have long laboured [sic] under the abuse and censure of the world, that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments."
But Banneker submits his almanac as proof of the mental endowments and human qualities of his race. He tells Jefferson that "we are all of the same family, and stand in the same relation to him [i.e the universal Father]." Banneker likwise appeals to the "obligations of christianity" [sic]. It is because blacks and whites are part of the same family and "christian" obligation that Jefferson should pursue liberty for all men regardless of color. He appeals directly to the Revolutionary heritage in his letter to Jefferson. Surely the men of 1776 were no hypocrites.
"Sir, I have long been convinced that if your love for yourselves and for those inesteemable laws, which preserve to you the rights of human nature, was found on sincerity, you could not but be solicitous that every individual thereof, neither could you rest satisfied, short of the most active diffusion of your exertions in order to their promotions from any state of degradation to which the unjustifiable cruelty and barbarism of men have reduced them.
Sir, I freely and cheerfully acknowledge that I am of the African race, and in that colour which is natural to them of the deepest dye, and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Being of the universe that I now confess to you that I am not under that state of tyrannical thraldom and inhuman capacity to which to many of my brethren are doomed ..."
Banneker reminds Jefferson of the "powerful effort" of the "British Crown" to reduce the colonists to a "State of Servitude." At that time Jefferson "clearly saw into the the injustice of a state of slavery." So clearly did he see that Banneker ironically quotes back to Jefferson those nearly immortal words that filled so many oppressed with a sense of hope.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator [sic] with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Banneker confesses his dismay at how any person could say those words much less write them and justify the existence of slavery and the racism required for the peculiar institution to survive in the atmosphere of the post-Revolutionary War. Banneker forthrightly points out Jefferson's hypocrisy witnessed in his Notes and in his own possession of slaves.
"Here, sir, was a time in which your tender feelings for yourselves had engaged you thus to declare, you were then impressed with proper ideas of the great valuation of liberty and the free possession of those blessings to which you were entitled by nature; but sir, how pitiable is it to reflect that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges which he had conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at that same time be found guilty of that most criminal act which you professedly detested in others with respect to yourselves."
The black intellectual pleads with Jefferson to become empathetic with black slaves. Appealing to the the words of a lamenting Job "put your soul in their souls stead." Thomas Jefferson did not and could not ever do that.
Adding Benjamin Banneker to the "Canon"
The letter of Benjamin Banneker to Thomas Jefferson on August 19, 1791 was laden with potential to renew the promise of the American Revolution. Banneker knew that Jefferson symbolically stood at the head of the revolution but also sadly was the man who derailed. Jefferson went on to become President of the United States on the back of slaves who were not even recognized as a full human and denied even three-fifths representation and his Notes became the water hydrant to quench the fervor for rights for all Americans.
Banneker, an elderly self-educated genius saw through Jefferson and called Jefferson's bluff. This man can serve as a model of what can be every bit as his white counterpart Benjamin Franklin. He did not let his circumstances define him. He had limited "formal" schooling but was a life long disciple in the best sense of the word. He disciplined himself daily and nightly in the path of knowledge rather than property or wealth. His physical travels were very limited but his mind traveled the entire Creation of God. He broke through the stereotype that black men were ignorant sexual brutes. He even shows that "elderly" people are not over the hill with nothing to accomplish or contribute - after all he did not publish his first almanac until he was nearly 60 years of age. Facing systemic bigotry on a daily basis he overcame by the power of his God-given and cultivated intellect. When I read the story of Banneker I am reminded of the startling quote Thomas Chatterton Williams attributes to his father regarding basketball, "If you're going to complete then do your best, son, always do your best, but remember that I really don't care if we ever have another black athlete or entertainer" [4]. The problem is not athletes or entertainers but the stereotype that pigeon holes African-American males in those roles ... they do not define "blackness." Banneker destroys that image and can show both white folks who still retain a subtler form of Jefferson's blatant racism and at the same time inspire a generation of new intellectuals. Both black and white. He is worthy of emulation.
Perhaps Banneker should be in the Canon of American Saints as much - perhaps more - than Thomas Jefferson. The more I think about it I think Tise was correct, Jefferson was the most radical counterrevolutionary.
Perhaps you do not know much about the great American hero Benjamen Banneker. If not let me recommend the excellent study by Robert Silverstein and Charles Cerami, Benjamen Banneker: Surveyor, Astronomer, Publisher, Patriot (Wiley, 2002). You will be blessed.
Notes:
1] Larry E. Tise, The American Counter Revolution: A Retreat from Liberty, 1783-1800 (Stackpole Books, 1998), 439-451.
2] The only book length study on the role of the "Three-Fifths" clause in Jefferson's election is the marvelous work by Garry Wills, "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003). Quote from p. 1.
3] See Jan Ellen Lewis & Peter S. Onuf, eds, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory and Civic Culture (University of Virginia Press, 1999).
4] Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How A Father's Love and 15, 000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture (Penguin Press, 2010), 34-35. Emphasis in original.
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