Created Equal: How Benjamin Banneker Challenged Jefferson on Race and Freedom

On August 19, 1791, Benjamin Banneker sent a copy of his Almanac and wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson criticizing his pro-slavery stance and requesting justice for African Americans using language from the Declaration of Independence. An excerpt from the article:

"By 1791, Jefferson had already authored the Declaration of Independence, had been Governor of Virginia (1779-1781) and was serving as the first United States Secretary of State (1789-1793). The lifelong contradictions between Jefferson’s stated beliefs, politics, and practice on issues of race and slavery are so complicated that entire books have been written about them. Early in Jefferson’s political career, he made some attempts to gradually end slavery in the United States. In 1778, he drafted a law in Virginia that prohibited the future importation of enslaved Africans, and in 1784 he proposed a law that would ban slavery in the growing territories of the Northwest. He hoped that these limits would contribute to gradually phasing away the slave economy.

But despite Jefferson’s misgivings about the slave trade, he continued to believe in the moral and social superiority of whites over blacks. In fact, he personally owned and sold upwards of 700 slaves. And evidence suggests that Jefferson had a decades-long relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and fathered six children by her.

Meanwhile, in his famous Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Jefferson condemned slavery itself, but reiterated the idea of blacks’ physical and intellectual inferiority to whites.

I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.
He went on to write disparagingly of the physical appearance of blacks and witheringly dismissed the intellectual and creative potential of the entire race:

Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior . . . and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous . . . But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture.

In the light of such passages, Benjamin Banneker’s decision to take up his pen and address Jefferson with a plea for a change of heart might have seemed like an extraordinary, and potentially risky, gesture. He began:

SIR, I AM fully sensible of the greatness of that freedom, which I take with you on the present occasion; 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.

But Banneker had carefully thought through why he was the right person to address Jefferson, and why Jefferson was the right leader to whom he should make his plea. He enclosed a copy of the popular astronomical almanac he had authored, and mentioned in passing his employment on the survey of the District of Columbia, adding:

Sir, I freely and cheerfully acknowledge, that I am of the African race, and in that color which is natural to them of the deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that I now confess to you, that I am not under that state of tyrannical thraldom, and inhuman captivity, to which too many of my brethren are doomed, but that I have abundantly tasted of the fruition of those blessings, which proceed from that free and unequalled liberty with which you are favored; and which, I hope, you will willingly allow you have mercifully received, from the immediate hand of that Being, from whom proceedeth every good and perfect Gift.

In other words, Banneker suggested that his own achievements as a freeman were both a contradiction of Jefferson’s belief that blacks innately lacked intellectual ability, and proof of what they could achieve when they were not limited by the “tyrannical thraldom” of slavery.

He reminded Jefferson of the very language of religious humility that the Secretary himself had used elsewhere—the idea that the blessings of liberty come from a Supreme Being, rather than being doled out by one human being to another. Readers of this site will recognize the idea of an equality originating in God as one of the principles that inspired Moses Seixas's address to George Washington, a principle also found in the writings of Jefferson, Madison, and others among the Founding Fathers who sought to widen religious freedom as the national government took shape. Banneker hoped to get Jefferson to take that principle further and to accept that the same ideal applied to people of all races."