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.]

Of a more normal but less conspicuous type was Jehu Jones, the colored
proprietor of one of Charleston's most popular hotels who lived in the same
manner as his white patrons, accumulated property to the value of some
forty thousand dollars, and maintained a reputation for high business
talent and integrity.[27] At New Orleans men of such a so