[Footnote 23:  W.W.  Wightman, Life of William Capers (Nashville, 1858), pp. 124-129.]

In the line of intellectual attainment and the like the principal figures lived in the eighteenth century.  One of them was described in a contemporary news item which suggests that some journalists then were akin to their successors of more modern times.  “There is a Mr. St. George, a Creole, son to the French governor of St. Domingo, now at Paris, who realizes all the accomplishments attributed by Boyle and others to the Admirable Creighton of the Scotch.  He is so superior at the sword that there is an edict of the Parliament of Paris to make his engagement in any duel actual death.  He is the first dancer (even before the Irish Singsby) in the world.  He plays upon seven instruments of music, beyond any other individual.  He speaks twenty-six languages, and maintains public thesises in each.  He walks round the various circles of science like the master of each; and strange to be mentioned to white men, this Mr. St. George is a mulatto, the son of an African mother."[24] Less happy was the career of Francis Williams of Jamaica, a plaything of the human gods.  Born of negro parents who had earned special privilege in the island, he was used by the Duke of Montague in a test of negro mental capacity and given an education in an English grammar school and at Cambridge University.  Upon his return to Jamaica his patron sought his appointment as a member of the governor’s council but without success; and he then became a schoolmaster and a poet on occasion in the island capital.  Williams described himself with some pertinence as “a white man acting under a black skin.”  His contempt for his fellow negroes and particularly for the mulattoes made him lonely, eccentric, haughty and morose.  A Latin panegyric which is alone available among his writings is rather a language exercise than a poem.[25] On the continent Benjamin Banneker was an almanac maker and somewhat of an astronomer, and Phyllis Wheatley of Boston a writer of verses.  Both were doubtless more noted for their sable color than for their positive qualities.  The wonder of them lay in their ambition and enterprise, not in their eminence among scientific and literary craftsmen at large.[26] Such careers as these had no equivalent in the nineteenth century until its closing decades when Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B.  DuBois set new paces in their several courses of endeavor.

[Footnote 24:  News item dated Philadelphia, Mch. 28, in the Georgia State Gazette and Independent Register (Augusta), May 19, 1787.]

[Footnote 25:  Edward Long, History of Jamaica (London, 1774), II, 447-485; T.H.  MacDermott, “Francis Williams,” in the Journal of Negro History, II, 147-159.  The Latin poem is printed in both of these accounts.]

[Footnote 26:  John W. Cromwell, The Negro in American History (Washington, 1914), pp. 77-97.]