The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
BANNEKER, BENJAMIN
I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United
States a Negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and of a black
woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable
mathematician. I procured him to be employed under one of our chief
directors in laying out the new federal city on the Potomac, and in
the intervals of his leisure, while on that work, he made an almanac
for the next year, which he sent me in his own handwriting, and which
I enclose to you. I have seen very elegant solutions of geometrical
problems by him. Add to this that he is a very worthy and respectable
member of society. He is a free man. I shall be delighted to see these
instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of
talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded
condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of
the parts on which intellect depends.
to Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas, 30 August 1791
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