But the forthcoming social questions concerning the negro will be even more exciting than the military.  What are we to expect from the unsealed Afreet,—­good or evil?  It was whilst studying in this direction that I came upon the few facts which relate to Benjamin Banneker,—­facts which, though not difficult of access, are scarcely known beyond the district in Maryland where, on the spot where he was born, his unadorned grave receives now and then a visit from some pilgrim of his own race who has found out the nobleness which Jefferson recognized and Condorcet admired.

Benjamin Banneker was born in Baltimore County, near the village of Ellicott’s Mills, in the year 1732.  There was not a drop of the white man’s blood in his veins.  His father was born in Africa, and his mother’s parents were both natives of Africa.  What genius he had, then, must be credited to that race.  Benjamin’s mother was a remarkable woman, and of a remarkable family.  Her name was Morton, before marriage, and a nephew of hers, Greenbury Morton, was gifted with a lively and impetuous eloquence which made its mark in his neighborhood.  Of him it is related that he once came to a certain election-precinct in Baltimore County to deposit his vote; for, prior to the year 1809, negroes with certain property-qualifications voted in Maryland.  It was in this year, in which the law restricting the right of voting to free whites was passed, that Morton, who had not heard of its passage, came to the polls.  When his vote was refused, Morton in a state of excitement took his stand on a door-step, and was immediately surrounded by the crowd, whom he addressed in a strain of passionate and prophetic eloquence which bore all hearts and minds with him.  He warned them that the new law was a step backward from the standard which their fathers had raised in the Declaration, and which they had hoped would soon be realized in universal freedom; that that step, unless retraced, would end in bitter and remorseless revolutions.  The crowd was held in breathless attention, and none were found to favor the new law.

This man, we have said, was the nephew of Benjamin’s mother.  She was a woman of remarkable energy, and after she was seventy years of age was accustomed to run down the chickens she wished to catch.  Her husband was a slave when she married him, but it was a very small part of her life’s task to purchase his freedom.  Together they soon bought a farm of one hundred acres, which we find conveyed by Richard Gist to Robert Bannaky, (as the name was then spelt,) and Benjamin Bannaky, his son, (then five years old,) on the tenth of March, 1737, for the consideration of seven thousand pounds of tobacco.  The region in which Benjamin was born was almost a wilderness; for in 1732 Elkridge Landing was of more importance than Baltimore; and even in 1754 this city consisted only of some twenty poor houses straggling on the hills to the right of Jones’s Falls.  The residence of the Bannekers was ten miles into the wilderness from these.