woman and her black slave. Their daughter married a Negro and Benjamin was their only son.
Born in 1731 in Maryland he was educated in a
private school with whites and spent his life on
his father’s farm. He had taste for mathematics
and early constructed an ingenious clock.
He became expert in the solution of difficult mathematical problems, corresponding with interested
persons of leisure.
Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Marquis de Condorcet: “We now have in the United States a Negro, the son of a black man born in Africa and 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
