armest friend of that extraordinary man."[145] Her
father had many of Banneker's manuscripts, from which he intended to
compile a biography of his friend, but his unusually busy commercial
life afforded him no leisure in which to carry out this much cherished
plan. Mrs. Tyson's account, therefore, can be relied upon as coming
directly from those who, personally knowing Banneker, and living in
the same community in frequent contact with him, had preserved
accurate data from which to publish the true record of his life.

On a farm located near the Patapsco Eiver, within about ten miles of
the city of Baltimore, in the State of Maryland, on the 9th day of
November, 1731, Benjamin Banneker was born. Various accounts are given
of his ancestry. One of his biographers states that "there was not a
drop of white blood in his veins," another asserts with positiveness
that his parents and grandparents were all native Africans.[146] In
still another sketch of Banneker's life, read before the Maryland
Historical Society, on May 1, 1845, it is stated that "Banneker's
mother was the child of _natives_ of Africa so that to no admixture of
the blood of the white man was he indebted for his peculiar and
extraordinary abilities."[147] Thomas Jefferson said that Banneker was
the "son of a black man born in Africa and a black woman born in the
United States."[148]

According to Mrs. Tyson's account Banneker's mother and father were
Negroes, but his maternal grandmother was a white woman of English
birth, who had been legally married to a native African. The
antecedent circumstances of this marriage were so unusual as to
justify special mention. Mollie Welsh was an English woman of the
servant class, employed on a cattle farm in England where a part of
her daily duty was the milking of the cows. She was one day charged
with having stolen a pail of milk that had, in fact, been kicked over
by a cow. The charge seems to have been taken as proved, and in lieu
of a severer punishment she was sentenced to be shipped to America.
Being unable to pay for her passage she was sold, on her arrival in
America, to a tobacco planter on the Patapsco Eiver to serve a term of
seven years to pay the cost of her passage from England. At the end of
her period of service, this Mollie Welsh, who is described as "a
person of exceedingly fair complexion and moderate mental powers," was
able to buy a portion of the farm on which she had worked.[149] In
1692, she pu