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.[1] 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.

[Footnote 1: For a full study see Chapter II of _The Negro in Literature
and Art_.]

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW WEST, THE SOUTH, AND THE WEST INDIES

The twenty years of the administrations of the first three presidents of
the United States--or, we might say, the three decades between 1790
and 1820--constitute what might be considered the "Dark Ages" of Negro
history; and yet, as with most "Dark Ages," at even a glance below the
surface these years will be found to be throbbing with life, and we have
already seen that in them the Negro was doing what he could on his own
account to move forward. After the high moral stand of the Revolution,
however, the period seems quiescent, and it was indeed a time of
definite reaction. This was attributable to three great events: the
opening of the Southwest with the consequent demand for slaves, the
Haytian revolution beginning in 1791, and Gabriel's insurrection in
1800.