Portrait Stories: African Americans and the Founding Era *Part 2* | BRIdge from the Past
What can portraits reveal about African Americans during the Founding Era? In her second episode exploring African Americans and the Founding Era, Mary looks at a woodcut portrait of Benjamin Banneker, a self-taught African American author and thinker born in 1731. What is the significance of the inclusion of this portrait in Banneker's own published almanac? What did Banneker's publishing of almanacs have to do with the fight against–in Banneker's own words–“the almost general prejudice and prepossession which is so prevalent in the world against those of my complexion”?
0:00 Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bridge from the Past art Across US. History. I’m your host Mary, and this series is meant for students like you to get ahead in your history class by thinking about complex topics, using images as our starting point. Once again, today we are using a portrait to start our discussion.
0:21 What can this image reveal about the lives of African American in the founding era? Let’s jump in and see. Here is our image for today. So I’ve given you a title over here. This is a woodcut portrait of Benjamin Banneker in the title page of Baltimore edition of his 1795
0:43 Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac. So, again, we’re just using an image as a starting point. So with any image, just take a minute to make some observations, and we’ll turn these observations into some questions and see what we can learn. So right off the bat, I see a name. I see Benjamin Banneker.
1:04 I can see it here in the title, and I can see it over here on the title page. So I’m told this is the title page of a book, and it looks like a book. You can kind of see the pages and you can tell that it’s old. It’s from 1795. It’s kind of yellowy and stained. I know that 1795. That’s the founding era.
1:25 So this is right at the beginning of our nation’s history as the country. George Washington is the president. I don’t know who Benjamin Banneker is. And here he is down here. Here’s this image. And interestingly, his name is spelled wrong, which I think is funny. So Banneker his name is actually spelled
1:45 with an E, but it’s spelled with an A here on this title page. So an early example of someone that didn’t proofread happens to the best of us. So I guess my question is, who is Benjamin Bannecker and why is he publishing this almanac? So an almanac is a word we should know if we’re going to consider this image.
2:05 And almanac is basically a handbook of practical observations. So information about the weather, about growing crops. It’s sort of maybe information about astronomy, information about tides. If you’re a fisherman or you are a merchant, you would need that sort of information.
2:27 So he’s published this almanac in 1795. This is a woodcut picture, so it’s literally a chunk of wood that’s carved into it and basically pressed down like a stamp to make this image. So it’s not terribly fancy. It’s sort of something that you could do rather quickly. And I can almost see in this image of Benjamin banned,
2:48 he has these lines in his jacket that almost look like tree rings. So just interesting observation. I guess my biggest question is, who is Benjamin Banneker? What is this almanac? How did he come to publish this almanac? I want to know more. But before he can go deeper into Bannecker’s story, I think what we need to do is step back and maybe have a little bit more context.
3:12 So let’s do that. So what do we need to know before we can learn more about Benjamin Banneker and his almanac specifically? So, again, just taking a step back, the bigger context, we’re in the founding era, so we are we the United States is very much a new nation. So we sort of start our founding era considering what we would call the founding era with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
3:35 And this Declaration of Independence puts down what we call founding principles, these ideas, these guiding concepts that are at the foundation of our country. So these ideas like liberty, equality, due process, all of these things are enshrined in these founding documents. And you’ll see them echoed in a lot of state constitutions.
3:56 Here’s the elephant in the room. If we say all men are created equal, if we’re fighting for our freedom, for our liberty from the British Empire, how can we reconcile or how can we account for slavery? And here’s where the story is messy and complex. But what we saw, especially in our last Bridge from the Past video with Elizabeth Freeman,
4:19 is that these words, these principles, are inspiring actions to end slavery and ensure that all men and women are created equal from the beginning. So Elizabeth Freeman used this language both in the Declaration of Independence and in the Massachusetts state constitution excuse me. To gain her freedom.
4:40 So we have this tension between founding principles from the very beginning, but there are individuals that are not in the system of slavery, and that’s where Benjamin Banneker comes in. So he’s an example of an African American who’s not born into the system of slavery and freed. African Americans in the founding era have these vibrant communities of support,
5:02 especially in Philadelphia and Boston, but elsewhere as well. And they’ll need that support because even though individuals like Baniker are not born into the system of slavery, they’re still dealing with racism and prejudice. So Benjamin Banneker is a really fascinating part of this story, and he lives from 1731 to 18 six.
5:25 So let’s go back to our image and think about Benjamin Banneker and what can he tell us about the lives of African Americans in the founding era? So, again, Banneker is born to he’s born free, and his family owns a farm in Baltimore County, Maryland, and they’re fairly successful. His maternal grandmother teaches him
5:46 to read, and for a short time, he attends a Quaker school. So the Quakers are an important group, not only in Banneker’s story, but in the story of the United States. The Quakers are a religious group who believe in the equality of men and women, and they’re pacifists, so they are against violence of any sort. So even in colonial times,
6:07 the Quakers play a leading role in abolitionist movement. So Banneker attends a Quaker school for some time, but he’s largely self taught, and he is clearly a genius. He is very talented. He’s very intelligent. He builds an irrigation system for his family’s farm. He’s observing the night sky.
6:28 He can predict astronomical events. And his intelligence is going to come to the attention of a nearby prosperous Quaker family, the Ellicott family. So the Ellicotts, George Ellicott develops his friendship with Benjamin Banneker and loans him books. And again, if you think about books in this time period, they’re very rare and they’re very expensive.
6:49 So Banneker is going to benefit from this friendship. He’s going to be able to access the books that George Ellicott has in his library. And later, in 1791, george Ellicott is going to say to his cousin Andrew, hey, I know this guy, Benjamin Banneker. He’s super smart, and he could help you as you are surveying the nation’s capital,
7:10 because we are creating a new capital city, what will become Washington, DC. In 1791. So Baniker surveys the city, surveys, plans, maps it out with Andrew Ellicott. So he’s his partner in this. So he’s clearly incredibly talented, incredibly intelligent, and he’s there from the very beginning,
7:33 and his work is very much a part of the city of Washington, DC. And it’s during this time that he gets the idea to publish these almanacs. And again, he’s going to use the support of the Quakers to get his almanacs published. So by publishing his almanac, he is showing people not only his own intelligence and sharing his practical knowledge, but he’s also fighting this
7:56 idea of racial inequality and prejudice, because there’s a prevailing view in this time period that African Americans are intellectually inferior to white people. And Banneker, by publishing these almanacs and he publishes for six consecutive years, is very much showing them by his actions that that’s absolutely utter nonsense.
8:18 The story gets even better here. So in these almanacs, it’s not just the practical information that Baniker, you know, is predicting tides and information like that that’s useful for people, but he’s also including essays and literature and opinion pieces. And he’s going to include essays and thoughts on abolition. He’s going to include poems by Phyllis Wheatley to show again
8:41 that this idea that African Americans are intellectually imperial is nonsense. Phyllis Wheatley was an enslaved woman who wrote poetry, and the story gets even better. So in 1791, Banneker sends a copy of this almanac to none other than Thomas Jefferson. And what I love about this part
9:02 of the story is that Banneker includes a letter, and this is a subject of one of our close reads that you should definitely check out if you have a chance. And Banneker basically says in this letter, he calls out Thomas Jefferson and says, how can you talk about equality, you of all people, the chief author of this declaration when we still have slavery? And he also acknowledges this prevailing view, this prejudice against what he says
9:27 prevalent in the world, against those of my complexion against African Americans that were not intelligent. Clearly, we are right. He’s showing them in this almanacon, in his letter that that’s not true. He’s calling him out on it. I love it. It’s the most wonderful color ever. So there’s a lot of information. There’s a lot of information about Banneker’s story.
9:49 And again, we can use this as a starting point to think about these questions, but there’s always a way to go deeper, and that’s what’s so interesting about these images. So we started by asking what this portrait could reveal about African Americans in the founding era. And we learned that Banneker was a free man. He was prosperous, he was well-known in his time.
10:09 His talents and intelligence led to his role in helping to create the nation’s capital, as well as challenging prevailing views on racial inequality. But as always, there’s so much more to the story. Banneker is just one man, and there’s so many other stories that could be told. So now I’m going to toss it back to you guys. What do you want to know more about?
10:32 What’s the next question in our discussion? If you learned something, please be sure to like this video. Subscribe to our channel to be in the know about other videos and contests that we’ll have throughout the school year. I’ll be back with another image to help us think about these complex and layered stories in American history in two weeks. So until then, everybody take care.
