Happy Saturday. We mentioned Benjamin Banneker in our New Year's Day episode on Almanacs and day Planners, and our episode on him is from early in our time as hosts of the show. It came out on June tenth, twenty thirteen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic, and it's also connected to our most recent episodes. Among other things, we talk about some arrangements Banniker made for his later years using information from actuarial tables. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying, and today we're going to talk about a particularly amazing person in American history, and that is Benjamin Banneker. Yes, who is someone I had not known very much about before we started this little project. I'm not I had not either, and I learned a whole lot of fascinating stuff. There's really a lot that was particularly amazing about his life. He had almost no official schooling, but he turned out to be such a scholar that today there are schools and professorships and educational foundations and things like that named after him. He and his family made up a really small handful of the about two hundred free African Americans who were living in Maryland at the time, where there were at that point about four thousand slaves and thirteen thousand white people. And he lived in an age when African Americans were really considered to be inferior to white people and incapable of scholarly thought. But he managed, in spite of that existing perception to publish a series of really well respected almanacs. And he was appointed by George Washington to help survey the land that would eventually become Washington, d c. Which is really cool. Yeah, And it all started when he was born on November ninth in seventeen thirty one in Maryland. He has a pretty interesting family history. His maternal grandmother was an English woman named Molly Walsh or Welsh, it differs depending on Here's account you're looking at. She had been falsely convicted of stealing milk. The bucket had really been kicked over by a cow. But she was sent to Maryland as an indentured servant, and once she had completed her indenture, she borrowed some money to rent a farm or rent some land to start a farm, and she bought two slaves. One of the slaves was known as Banicky, whose name had originally been Banna as one word in Ka the second word, and who had been a chief or a king before being enslaved. And once she had paid off all her debts, Molly actually freed both the slaves in sixteen ninety six and she married Banickee. This marriage was illegal in Maryland, so this was a lot of really astounding events happening around the beginning of his family, right or just completely usual for the time. One of Mollie and Banickee's children was a daughter named Mary, and Mary eventually when she grew up, purchased her own slave, who had been named Robert when he was baptized. He was from the region of Africa that was known at the time as Guinea, and that most likely was somewhere in the stretch of Africa that spans west to east from Ghana to Nigeria. Like her mother, Mollie later freed and married Robert, and when she did, he took her last name. So it's a little bit unclear how exactly the last name morphed into Banneker, but Mary and Robert had four children, Benjamin and then his three younger sisters, and at some point they were all going by the name Banniker and not Banickee anymore. Yes, Benjamin's parents bought a small tobacco farm next to Molly and Bannicke's farm. The farm was registered to both Benjamin and his father. Mollie taught Benjamin to read using the Bible, and he actually went to an interracial Quaker school for boys for a little while when he was young, but he didn't get much formal education. As Tracy mentioned at the top of the podcast, the school was only open in the winters, and so it wasn't like a regular full time, year round school, and it really was only available for lessons when the boys weren't needed to help their families on the farms. So even though he really had not much formal education at all, he had a very avid interest in learning, and he was especially interested in math and mechanics, and so he wound up teaching himself. Almost his whole education was self taught, and in addition to the mechanical and mathematic things that he really delved into, he also studied the stars and taught himself astronomy, and he also learned to play the flute and the violin, which kind of blows my mind because picking up a musical instrument and learning how to play it is quite a feat, yeah, of itself, even if you have lessons well. And picking up things like complex mathematics and the kinds of calculations that are required for astronomy without really having someone to help you along is also pretty astounding. Yeah. When he was fifteen, Benjamin took over the family farm, and one of the things that he did was he designed and built an irrigation system to divert water from a spring that was nearby to their crops, so he was able to keep the crops alive even when there were droughts going on. And he also used crop rotation techniques that weren't really in common practice at the time. And as an adult, Benjamin generally wore Quaker style clothing, so he stuck pretty much to simple dark jackets and white shirts. And although he had some affinity for the Quakers, he never actually joined. He just kind of emulated them in his style. Right. Here's a description of him from an eighteen fifty four sketch of his life Banneker, whilst in the vigor of manhood, was an industrious and thriving farmer. He kept his grounds in good order, had horses, cows, and many hives of bees, cultivated a good garden, and lived comfortably during the winter months and at other seasons of leisure. His active mind was employed in improving the knowledge he had gained at school. He thus became acquainted with the most difficult portions of arithmetic. He also read all the books on general literature that he could borrow, and occasionally diverted his mind with an ingenious effort in mechanics. That's kind of like a It's so quaint you would think it was out of fiction. I didn't know it was an actual humans, the real person. Yeah. So when he was twenty two, he actually made a clock. He had seen a pocket watch belonging to a friend. We're not sure on the pronunciation of the last name. It could be Joseph Levy or Levi, But Benjamin had been completely fascinated with this watch, and so Joseph actually let him take it apart, and so Benjamin sketched out all the opponents and put the watch back together in working order, and then used that experiential learning to make a clock from scratch. So today this probably doesn't sound like a giant deal because clocks are ubiquitous, but at the time, nearly all of the clocks in the United States were imported from England. There wasn't really anyone in the US who was making clocks. And Benjamin's clock was made entirely out of wood, apart from an iron bell that he got that was struck hourly, and this clock ran for more than forty years, keeping good time that entire time until the day that Benjamin was buried after his death when his home in all of its contents, burned in a fire. So, based on the watch he had seen and taken apart one time, he made a working wooden clock that kept time for forty years. Worked. Well. Yes, like you said, it seems simple because clocks are everywhere. But if anyone has ever taken apart a watch, even to replace a battery, and you lose one spring, like, forget it, it's over. You have to go to an expert at that point, right, So the idea that he just took one apart, put it back together, and they went, oh, I get it. Yeah, it's fine. Then I can make one went forward making its own. It's really pretty impressive. Yeah. So this clock is cited as the first striking clock built in the United States, and he used this experience to sort of start up a little side business or repairing people's watches and clocks. People who came to the area would stop by just to see the clock and to talk to Benjamin, who by this point had developed a reputation for being extremely intelligent but also modest and gentlemanly. He became familiar with the Ellikotts, a family from Pennsylvania who had built a mill and established a town not very far from Benjamin's farm, and Benjamin had been a frequent visitor while the mill was being built because he'd liked to observe all the mechanics and machinery involved in the process, and he and the Ellicotts became friends, and eventually Georgia Ellicott loned Benjamin all manner of books in math and astronomy, and so he now had a whole new assortment of resources to expand his knowledge and education. Later, he used these books, along with some tools that George loaned to him, to predict to predict the April fourteenth, seventeen eighty nine solar eclipse almost accurately. This is another thing that maybe doesn't sound like a crazy accomplishment today, because we know when all the eclipses are happening, and we can watch them on the internet. But most of the people who were predicting an eclipse at that point, they were predicting that one wrong. And the almost in his own calculations came from an error in one of the textbooks, not from his own calculations. So he turned out, even though he wasn't right on the money with it, his prediction was more accurate than a lot of the more well known astronomers had made at the time. Reportedly, he also had theorized that Sirius was actually two stars instead of one, which it is, but at the time it was believed to be just one heavenly body. In seventeen ninety, George Washington appointed Benjamin to the team that was going to survey the federal territory which would later become Washington, d C. And Major Andrew Ellicott was also on the team. In writing about this, Georgetown Weekly Ledger said quote Ellicott was attended by Benjamin Banneker, an Ethiopian whose abilities as a surveyor and an astronomer clearly proved that mister Jefferson's concluding that race of men were void of mental endowments was without foundation. That mister Jefferson Jefferson, of course, being Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, so he actually became quite an ambassador for the non Caucasians that were living in America at the time. Right, we'll talk about that more and just a little bit, but we'll talk for a moment about the survey work first. There's a story that when Pierre Lafont left the Washington d C Project, he took all the plans with him and then Benjamin recreated them from memory. So modern historians think that this is probably an embellishment. There aren't any documents at the time that confirm it. It seems to have arisen a little bit later. So while it's probably an apocryphal story, it speaks to the reputation that he had developed for himself at this point. And when Benjamin's parents passed away, they left him the family farm, so he built himself a cabin there where he could work, and he also had a study and it had a skylight so he could continue to study the stars. When he was about sixty, Benjamin worked out a deal with the Elikots for them to take possession of his farm where he continued to live, in exchange for a pension that he could live on so that he could spend more time studying and writing. And it was an arrangement very similar to today's reverse mortgages, and sometimes it's actually referred to as the first reverse mortgage in history. Yeah, where he's kind of pre selling the land that he's still living on. Yes, because, as we've talked about in other podcasts, sustaining yourself on a farm pretty much a full time, constant job, and he wanted to have time to study and write. So he worked out this deal where you know, they would get all of his land upon his death. He could continue to live there, but they would pay him some money every month. He used some actuarial tables to do this. It turned out he lived a little longer than expected. Whoops, but it was okay. They continued. They continued to pay him throughout as agreed. For six years. From seventeen ninety two to seventeen ninety seven, Benjamin published Almanacs, which were known as the Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris. He was the first African American to publish an almanac, and those almanacs started out as celestial tables and charts of planetary movements, and as with other almanacs at the time, they mixed a lot of different information into one book, including Benjamin's astronomy work, tied information, medical knowledge, et cetera. And they also included a lot of essays, poems, and literature, so they weren't just books of straight up facts. They served an abolitionist purpose as well, since they contained a collection of anti slavery speeches and essays, so again going back to him being an ambassador for his people. In the end, he published six of these almanacs in twenty eight editions and they received a lot of high praise for being a very good quality, but they were eventually discontinued due to low sales. And he had created all of the ephemerists, which are star chart pieces, as well as other astronomical work, all the way through eighteen oh four, but these later years weren't published. And in addition to all of that writing, he also did some work about seventeen year locusts and bees, which is pertinent today since we're there's much talk in the news about the seventeen year locust cycle. I know that was an accident. I was delighted when I stumbled across them, across the locust thing, and went, well, this is going to turn out to be particularly relevant because of locusts. So a lot of his fame has to do with his self taught education and his work as a scientist. He was also an abolitionist and an activist for peace. His first almanac also recommended that the US government have a Department of Peace, which finally happened about two hundred years later when the founding of the with the founding of the US Institutes of Peace, and Benjamin also actively spoke and wrote about abolition before the US really even had a strong abolitionist movement. He was a complete forerunner. Yeah. In seventeen ninety one, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was at the time the Secretary of State, about slavery. He enclosed this letter with a handwritten copy of his not yet published almanac for that year, and this was in part a response to Jefferson's notes on the State of Virginia, in which Jefferson wrote at length about what he considered to be the inferiority of blacks. And in this letter he described who he was, and he he tried to appeal to Jefferson's better nature, and he wanted to point out the inconsistency in the Founding Father's talk about everyone being equal while still owning slaves and describing blacks's inferior And he wrote about the young colonies attempting to free themselves from the British crown, and how the government should be able to empathize with slaves having had their own struggles for freedom, And he pointed out the irony in the quote 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, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's very quite moving to me. Yeah, and he was very articulate. Here's a selection from near the end of the letter. I suppose that your knowledge of the situation of my brethren is too extensive to need a recital here, Neither shall I presume to prescribe methods by which they may be relieved, otherwise than by recommending to you and all others to wean yourself from these narrow prejudices, which which you have imbibed with respect to them. And as Job proposed to his friends, put your soul in their soul's stead. Thus shall your hearts be enlarged with kindness and benevolence toward them. And just shall you need neither the direction of myself or others in what manner to proceed herein. And so he's pretty much saying, you can put yourself in our shoes. Yeah, use a little empathy. Yeah, you might look at this differently. He's pretty much I'm not going to tell you that it's specifics of how to do it. Here's sort of just a simple step of showing some empathy. And then he turns to a rather more practical statement, because he says, announ sir, although my sympathy and affection for my brethren hath caused my enlargement. Thus far I ardently hope that your candor and generosity will plead with you in my behalf. Then I make known to you that it was not originally my design, but having taken up my pen in order to direct to you as a present a copy of an almanac which I have calculated for the succeeding year. I was unexpectedly and unavoidably led there too, so I hadn't just meant to write you a note with my almanac. But once I had the pen in my hand, once they got go in, I need to tell you the rest of this too, And Jefferson replied to him. He responded in less than two weeks, which at that time is a pretty quick turnaround. And the letter, which is dated August thirtieth of seventeen ninety one, says, I thank you sincerely for your letter of the nineteenth instant, and for the almanac it contained. Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our Black brethren talents equal to those of other colors of men, and that the appearance of the want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add with truth that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be. As far as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit. And then he goes on to say, I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur Condozette, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Paris and member of the philanthrop Thropic Society, because I considered it as a document to which your whole color had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them. I am with great esteem, sir, your most obedient, humble servant, just really quite lovely. Yeah, it's simultaneously a lovely and flattering letter without really acknowledging a lot of what was pointed out to him in the first place, which continues to be a running theme in the subject of Thomas Jefferson and slavery and race. And then Benjamin put this whole correspondence in his seventeen ninety three Almanac, and you can read it all online and we will link to it in the show notes. I wonder what Jefferson thought of that, Like, I didn't mean that for everybody. I just don't know well. And I know that there have been passed in the archive. There are other episodes about Thomas Jefferson, and there has been so much work at length about the subject of Thomas Jefferson and Racey. It's a whole giant field of discussion. That's there are people that spend their entire scholarly lives studying nothing else, yes, but his relationship to racial issues. Right. So, after his almanacs ceased to publish, and after his work in Washington, d c. Was finished, Benjamin spent a lot of his later life with study and writing. After he had an illness in his later years, he made arrangements for how he wanted all of his work to be taken care of after his death, but unfortunately much of it was destroyed when his house burned and Benjamin Bannaker died approximately on October twenty fifth of eighteen oh six. I know, as we said at the top of the podcast, today there are schools and professorships and foundations named after him, and he was put on a commemorative stamp in nineteen eighty. So even though in the world of African American scientists, in the world of early forerunners of the abolitionist movement in America. He's maybe not one of the most prominent names. He definitely had a legacy and did some just really amazing work, especially considering that he had almost no formal education. Well then, he was so ahead of his time on most Oh yes, I mean scientifically, mathematically abolition. He was like many steps ahead of the rest of the people around him. Yes, it was quite might be why he's not always associated with those things. He's kind of too early to play an obvious part in the bigger stage when things really heated up. Yeah, I am quite fond of him now too. I love his story. He knew very little about him before I started researching, And of course I'm always fond of scientists who like to study things like stars and bees who wouldn't. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed inistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. We mentioned Benjamin Banneker in our New Year's Day episode on Almanacs and day Planners, and our episode on him is from early in our time as hosts of the show. It came out on June tenth, twenty thirteen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic, and it's also connected to our most recent episodes. Among other things, we talk about some arrangements Banniker made for his later years using information from actuarial tables. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying, and today we're going to talk about a particularly amazing person in American history, and that is Benjamin Banneker. Yes, who is someone I had not known very much about before we started this little project. I'm not I had not either, and I learned a whole lot of fascinating stuff. There's really a lot that was particularly amazing about his life. He had almost no official schooling, but he turned out to be such a scholar that today there are schools and professorships and educational foundations and things like that named after him. He and his family made up a really small handful of the about two hundred free African Americans who were living in Maryland at the time, where there were at that point about four thousand slaves and thirteen thousand white people. And he lived in an age when African Americans were really considered to be inferior to white people and incapable of scholarly thought. But he managed, in spite of that existing perception to publish a series of really well respected almanacs. And he was appointed by George Washington to help survey the land that would eventually become Washington, d c. Which is really cool. Yeah, And it all started when he was born on November ninth in seventeen thirty one in Maryland. He has a pretty interesting family history. His maternal grandmother was an English woman named Molly Walsh or Welsh, it differs depending on Here's account you're looking at. She had been falsely convicted of stealing milk. The bucket had really been kicked over by a cow. But she was sent to Maryland as an indentured servant, and once she had completed her indenture, she borrowed some money to rent a farm or rent some land to start a farm, and she bought two slaves. One of the slaves was known as Banicky, whose name had originally been Banna as one word in Ka the second word, and who had been a chief or a king before being enslaved. And once she had paid off all her debts, Molly actually freed both the slaves in sixteen ninety six and she married Banickee. This marriage was illegal in Maryland, so this was a lot of really astounding events happening around the beginning of his family, right or just completely usual for the time. One of Mollie and Banickee's children was a daughter named Mary, and Mary eventually when she grew up, purchased her own slave, who had been named Robert when he was baptized. He was from the region of Africa that was known at the time as Guinea, and that most likely was somewhere in the stretch of Africa that spans west to east from Ghana to Nigeria. Like her mother, Mollie later freed and married Robert, and when she did, he took her last name. So it's a little bit unclear how exactly the last name morphed into Banneker, but Mary and Robert had four children, Benjamin and then his three younger sisters, and at some point they were all going by the name Banniker and not Banickee anymore. Yes, Benjamin's parents bought a small tobacco farm next to Molly and Bannicke's farm. The farm was registered to both Benjamin and his father. Mollie taught Benjamin to read using the Bible, and he actually went to an interracial Quaker school for boys for a little while when he was young, but he didn't get much formal education. As Tracy mentioned at the top of the podcast, the school was only open in the winters, and so it wasn't like a regular full time, year round school, and it really was only available for lessons when the boys weren't needed to help their families on the farms. So even though he really had not much formal education at all, he had a very avid interest in learning, and he was especially interested in math and mechanics, and so he wound up teaching himself. Almost his whole education was self taught, and in addition to the mechanical and mathematic things that he really delved into, he also studied the stars and taught himself astronomy, and he also learned to play the flute and the violin, which kind of blows my mind because picking up a musical instrument and learning how to play it is quite a feat, yeah, of itself, even if you have lessons well. And picking up things like complex mathematics and the kinds of calculations that are required for astronomy without really having someone to help you along is also pretty astounding. Yeah. When he was fifteen, Benjamin took over the family farm, and one of the things that he did was he designed and built an irrigation system to divert water from a spring that was nearby to their crops, so he was able to keep the crops alive even when there were droughts going on. And he also used crop rotation techniques that weren't really in common practice at the time. And as an adult, Benjamin generally wore Quaker style clothing, so he stuck pretty much to simple dark jackets and white shirts. And although he had some affinity for the Quakers, he never actually joined. He just kind of emulated them in his style. Right. Here's a description of him from an eighteen fifty four sketch of his life Banneker, whilst in the vigor of manhood, was an industrious and thriving farmer. He kept his grounds in good order, had horses, cows, and many hives of bees, cultivated a good garden, and lived comfortably during the winter months and at other seasons of leisure. His active mind was employed in improving the knowledge he had gained at school. He thus became acquainted with the most difficult portions of arithmetic. He also read all the books on general literature that he could borrow, and occasionally diverted his mind with an ingenious effort in mechanics. That's kind of like a It's so quaint you would think it was out of fiction. I didn't know it was an actual humans, the real person. Yeah. So when he was twenty two, he actually made a clock. He had seen a pocket watch belonging to a friend. We're not sure on the pronunciation of the last name. It could be Joseph Levy or Levi, But Benjamin had been completely fascinated with this watch, and so Joseph actually let him take it apart, and so Benjamin sketched out all the opponents and put the watch back together in working order, and then used that experiential learning to make a clock from scratch. So today this probably doesn't sound like a giant deal because clocks are ubiquitous, but at the time, nearly all of the clocks in the United States were imported from England. There wasn't really anyone in the US who was making clocks. And Benjamin's clock was made entirely out of wood, apart from an iron bell that he got that was struck hourly, and this clock ran for more than forty years, keeping good time that entire time until the day that Benjamin was buried after his death when his home in all of its contents, burned in a fire. So, based on the watch he had seen and taken apart one time, he made a working wooden clock that kept time for forty years. Worked. Well. Yes, like you said, it seems simple because clocks are everywhere. But if anyone has ever taken apart a watch, even to replace a battery, and you lose one spring, like, forget it, it's over. You have to go to an expert at that point, right, So the idea that he just took one apart, put it back together, and they went, oh, I get it. Yeah, it's fine. Then I can make one went forward making its own. It's really pretty impressive. Yeah. So this clock is cited as the first striking clock built in the United States, and he used this experience to sort of start up a little side business or repairing people's watches and clocks. People who came to the area would stop by just to see the clock and to talk to Benjamin, who by this point had developed a reputation for being extremely intelligent but also modest and gentlemanly. He became familiar with the Ellikotts, a family from Pennsylvania who had built a mill and established a town not very far from Benjamin's farm, and Benjamin had been a frequent visitor while the mill was being built because he'd liked to observe all the mechanics and machinery involved in the process, and he and the Ellicotts became friends, and eventually Georgia Ellicott loned Benjamin all manner of books in math and astronomy, and so he now had a whole new assortment of resources to expand his knowledge and education. Later, he used these books, along with some tools that George loaned to him, to predict to predict the April fourteenth, seventeen eighty nine solar eclipse almost accurately. This is another thing that maybe doesn't sound like a crazy accomplishment today, because we know when all the eclipses are happening, and we can watch them on the internet. But most of the people who were predicting an eclipse at that point, they were predicting that one wrong. And the almost in his own calculations came from an error in one of the textbooks, not from his own calculations. So he turned out, even though he wasn't right on the money with it, his prediction was more accurate than a lot of the more well known astronomers had made at the time. Reportedly, he also had theorized that Sirius was actually two stars instead of one, which it is, but at the time it was believed to be just one heavenly body. In seventeen ninety, George Washington appointed Benjamin to the team that was going to survey the federal territory which would later become Washington, d C. And Major Andrew Ellicott was also on the team. In writing about this, Georgetown Weekly Ledger said quote Ellicott was attended by Benjamin Banneker, an Ethiopian whose abilities as a surveyor and an astronomer clearly proved that mister Jefferson's concluding that race of men were void of mental endowments was without foundation. That mister Jefferson Jefferson, of course, being Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, so he actually became quite an ambassador for the non Caucasians that were living in America at the time. Right, we'll talk about that more and just a little bit, but we'll talk for a moment about the survey work first. There's a story that when Pierre Lafont left the Washington d C Project, he took all the plans with him and then Benjamin recreated them from memory. So modern historians think that this is probably an embellishment. There aren't any documents at the time that confirm it. It seems to have arisen a little bit later. So while it's probably an apocryphal story, it speaks to the reputation that he had developed for himself at this point. And when Benjamin's parents passed away, they left him the family farm, so he built himself a cabin there where he could work, and he also had a study and it had a skylight so he could continue to study the stars. When he was about sixty, Benjamin worked out a deal with the Elikots for them to take possession of his farm where he continued to live, in exchange for a pension that he could live on so that he could spend more time studying and writing. And it was an arrangement very similar to today's reverse mortgages, and sometimes it's actually referred to as the first reverse mortgage in history. Yeah, where he's kind of pre selling the land that he's still living on. Yes, because, as we've talked about in other podcasts, sustaining yourself on a farm pretty much a full time, constant job, and he wanted to have time to study and write. So he worked out this deal where you know, they would get all of his land upon his death. He could continue to live there, but they would pay him some money every month. He used some actuarial tables to do this. It turned out he lived a little longer than expected. Whoops, but it was okay. They continued. They continued to pay him throughout as agreed. For six years. From seventeen ninety two to seventeen ninety seven, Benjamin published Almanacs, which were known as the Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris. He was the first African American to publish an almanac, and those almanacs started out as celestial tables and charts of planetary movements, and as with other almanacs at the time, they mixed a lot of different information into one book, including Benjamin's astronomy work, tied information, medical knowledge, et cetera. And they also included a lot of essays, poems, and literature, so they weren't just books of straight up facts. They served an abolitionist purpose as well, since they contained a collection of anti slavery speeches and essays, so again going back to him being an ambassador for his people. In the end, he published six of these almanacs in twenty eight editions and they received a lot of high praise for being a very good quality, but they were eventually discontinued due to low sales. And he had created all of the ephemerists, which are star chart pieces, as well as other astronomical work, all the way through eighteen oh four, but these later years weren't published. And in addition to all of that writing, he also did some work about seventeen year locusts and bees, which is pertinent today since we're there's much talk in the news about the seventeen year locust cycle. I know that was an accident. I was delighted when I stumbled across them, across the locust thing, and went, well, this is going to turn out to be particularly relevant because of locusts. So a lot of his fame has to do with his self taught education and his work as a scientist. He was also an abolitionist and an activist for peace. His first almanac also recommended that the US government have a Department of Peace, which finally happened about two hundred years later when the founding of the with the founding of the US Institutes of Peace, and Benjamin also actively spoke and wrote about abolition before the US really even had a strong abolitionist movement. He was a complete forerunner. Yeah. In seventeen ninety one, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was at the time the Secretary of State, about slavery. He enclosed this letter with a handwritten copy of his not yet published almanac for that year, and this was in part a response to Jefferson's notes on the State of Virginia, in which Jefferson wrote at length about what he considered to be the inferiority of blacks. And in this letter he described who he was, and he he tried to appeal to Jefferson's better nature, and he wanted to point out the inconsistency in the Founding Father's talk about everyone being equal while still owning slaves and describing blacks's inferior And he wrote about the young colonies attempting to free themselves from the British crown, and how the government should be able to empathize with slaves having had their own struggles for freedom, And he pointed out the irony in the quote 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, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's very quite moving to me. Yeah, and he was very articulate. Here's a selection from near the end of the letter. I suppose that your knowledge of the situation of my brethren is too extensive to need a recital here, Neither shall I presume to prescribe methods by which they may be relieved, otherwise than by recommending to you and all others to wean yourself from these narrow prejudices, which which you have imbibed with respect to them. And as Job proposed to his friends, put your soul in their soul's stead. Thus shall your hearts be enlarged with kindness and benevolence toward them. And just shall you need neither the direction of myself or others in what manner to proceed herein. And so he's pretty much saying, you can put yourself in our shoes. Yeah, use a little empathy. Yeah, you might look at this differently. He's pretty much I'm not going to tell you that it's specifics of how to do it. Here's sort of just a simple step of showing some empathy. And then he turns to a rather more practical statement, because he says, announ sir, although my sympathy and affection for my brethren hath caused my enlargement. Thus far I ardently hope that your candor and generosity will plead with you in my behalf. Then I make known to you that it was not originally my design, but having taken up my pen in order to direct to you as a present a copy of an almanac which I have calculated for the succeeding year. I was unexpectedly and unavoidably led there too, so I hadn't just meant to write you a note with my almanac. But once I had the pen in my hand, once they got go in, I need to tell you the rest of this too, And Jefferson replied to him. He responded in less than two weeks, which at that time is a pretty quick turnaround. And the letter, which is dated August thirtieth of seventeen ninety one, says, I thank you sincerely for your letter of the nineteenth instant, and for the almanac it contained. Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our Black brethren talents equal to those of other colors of men, and that the appearance of the want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add with truth that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be. As far as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit. And then he goes on to say, I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur Condozette, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Paris and member of the philanthrop Thropic Society, because I considered it as a document to which your whole color had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them. I am with great esteem, sir, your most obedient, humble servant, just really quite lovely. Yeah, it's simultaneously a lovely and flattering letter without really acknowledging a lot of what was pointed out to him in the first place, which continues to be a running theme in the subject of Thomas Jefferson and slavery and race. And then Benjamin put this whole correspondence in his seventeen ninety three Almanac, and you can read it all online and we will link to it in the show notes. I wonder what Jefferson thought of that, Like, I didn't mean that for everybody. I just don't know well. And I know that there have been passed in the archive. There are other episodes about Thomas Jefferson, and there has been so much work at length about the subject of Thomas Jefferson and Racey. It's a whole giant field of discussion. That's there are people that spend their entire scholarly lives studying nothing else, yes, but his relationship to racial issues. Right. So, after his almanacs ceased to publish, and after his work in Washington, d c. Was finished, Benjamin spent a lot of his later life with study and writing. After he had an illness in his later years, he made arrangements for how he wanted all of his work to be taken care of after his death, but unfortunately much of it was destroyed when his house burned and Benjamin Bannaker died approximately on October twenty fifth of eighteen oh six. I know, as we said at the top of the podcast, today there are schools and professorships and foundations named after him, and he was put on a commemorative stamp in nineteen eighty. So even though in the world of African American scientists, in the world of early forerunners of the abolitionist movement in America. He's maybe not one of the most prominent names. He definitely had a legacy and did some just really amazing work, especially considering that he had almost no formal education. Well then, he was so ahead of his time on most Oh yes, I mean scientifically, mathematically abolition. He was like many steps ahead of the rest of the people around him. Yes, it was quite might be why he's not always associated with those things. He's kind of too early to play an obvious part in the bigger stage when things really heated up. Yeah, I am quite fond of him now too. I love his story. He knew very little about him before I started researching, And of course I'm always fond of scientists who like to study things like stars and bees who wouldn't. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. 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