Note (return) — Chapter III

Two persons—one in science and one in literature—because of their unusual attainments attracted much attention. The first was Benjamin Banneker of Maryland, and the second Phillis Wheatley of Boston. Banneker in 1770 constructed the first clock striking the hours that was made in America, and from 1792 to 1806 published an almanac adapted to Maryland and the neighboring states. He was thoroughly scholarly in mathematics and astronomy, and by his achievements won a reputation for himself in Europe as well as in America. Phillis Wheatley, after a romantic girlhood of transition from Africa to a favorable environment in Boston, in 1773 published her Poems on Various Subjects, which volume she followed with several interesting occasional poems.63 For the summer of this year she was the guest in England of the Countess of Huntingdon, whose patronage she had won by an elegiac poem on George Whitefield; in conversation even more than in verse-making she exhibited her refined taste and accomplishment, and presents were showered upon her, one of them being a copy of the magnificent 1770 Glasgow folio edition of Paradise Lost, which was given by Brook Watson, Lord Mayor of London, and which is now preserved in the library of Harvard University. In the earlier years of the next century her poems found their way into the common school readers. One of those in her representative volume was addressed to Scipio Moorhead, a young Negro of Boston who had shown some talent for painting. Thus even in a dark day there were those who were trying to struggle upward to the light.