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.

It was under these unpromising circumstances that little Benjamin grew
up, his destiny being apparently nothing more than to work on the little
farm beside his poor and ignorant parents. When he was approac