Thomas Fuller — America’s African Mathematician
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
A great man once said, “It is best I had no learning, for many learned men be great fools.”
This great man was Thomas Fuller. He was born in 1710 in Africa. He was known as the Virginia calculator and Negro Tom.
Thomas Fuller arrived on the United States’ shores in 1724, when he was just 14 years old. Against his will, he was put on a boat and sent to America.
Though he never learned to read or write, Fuller could multiply to 9 digit numbers, state the number of seconds in a given time, and calculate the number of grains of corn in a given mass. He had a mathematical brain an incredible ability to carry out mental math.
Fuller had been a slave for Presley and Elizabeth Cox, an illiterate childless couple who had a 232-Acre Farm in Alexandria, Virginia. Fuller worked as a field hand for most of his life for the Coxes. Ever since he was young, he began counting, adding, and multiplying. There are stories that he taught himself mathematics, which began first by counting to 10 and then to 100. He then counted the hairs on a cow’s tail, which came out to 2872 as recounted by him in an interview. Fuller also counted bushels of wheat and developed techniques for measuring distances and for multiplying these numbers to determine long distances, like the diameter of the Earth’s orbit. Fuller was brilliant! And because Elizabeth Cox was not that smart, she utilized him on all areas of a farm for landscaping, home repairs, and calculating the crops and animals on the farm.
Because of his exceptional mathematical capabilities, many people want to buy Fuller from his owners. However, they refused to sell him. Even when Elizabeth’s husband, Presley, passed away in 1782, she refused to sell him. In 1788, Philadelphians William Hartshorne and Samuel Coates, who were members of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, went to Virginia because they wanted to meet Fuller. At first, they were suspicious of his genius, and so they decided to quiz him. Now keep in mind, at this point when they visited him, Fuller was 78 years old. His memory was already failing, but he was still on top of his mathematical game.
First, they asked him how many seconds are in a year and a half. He answered the question in about two minutes, saying there were 47,304,000. Then they asked him how many seconds a man has lived who is 70 years, 15 days, and 12 hours old. Fuller answered this in less than two minutes, stating that there were 2,210,500,800 seconds. One of the men corrected him, of which Fuller replied and said, “Well, you forgot the leap year.”
Coates commented in this interview that it was a shame that Fuller did have an education equal to his genius. And this is where that first quote comes in, where Fuller said that many learned men be great fools. For me, this quote is so powerful, especially today, as we struggle still struggle with so much unnecessary racism.
What Fuller’s intellect did do was something extraordinary for this country. Fuller was used as evidence that Africans are as smart as white people are. He probably knew what was going on. He was brilliant and insightful. So he probably surmised that he was being used as a tool to advocate for abolishing racism. Nevertheless, Fuller received many visitors in his later years, many of whom were philosophers, academics, and doctors. All of these visitors would arrive, ask him questions, write down their findings, and then go back to the northern states to make their case for the abolishment of slavery.
One of these visitors was Benjamin Rush. Rush, considered the Father of American Psychiatry, was a physician and a chemist. He was also a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Most importantly, he was the secretary to the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery.
Benjamin Rush wanted to see slavery abolished. He believed that Fuller was the perfect individual to make his case. Unfortunately, for Rush, he was up against some influential individuals who had the means and the funds to keep slavery legal. One such individual was philosopher John Locke. John Locke, though he was an Enlightenment thinker, he also owned stock in slave trading companies. So, he had a monetary interest in maintaining the status quo. Though he proclaimed his philosophy for natural rights, he had no qualms writing absurd statements such as, “every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.”[i]
Additional philosophers of this time, like David Hume, who had tremendous power over public opinion with their published works, also perpetuated this belief system. Hume wrote in 1741, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites.” What we have here are very influential white men perpetuating this absurd belief that black people have a different intellect.
Rush was up against this prominent mindset. So Rush presented Fuller as the perfect person to help his cause to end slavery. Rush needed to prove to the community of slave owners and philosophers who supported slavery that Fuller’s intellect was proof that slaves were as smart as those who owned them. Rush decided to publicize Fuller’s capabilities through the many papers that he wrote.
Through Rush’s work, the news of Fuller spread across the northern states. William Dickson also reproduced Rush’s paper in his work, Letters on Slavery. As Fuller’s story began to spread into the southern states, writers would use terms and language slave owners in the South would understand. Thus, the abolitionists used their target audience’s language to their advantage to make a case for Fuller, slaves, and the end of slavery.
Then, Fuller’s story began to spread overseas as international politicians and philosophers wrote about Fuller. They used his intellect as a case for pushing the end of slavery in other parts of the world. Thus, in his later years, Fuller had become an international genius.
However, the end of slavery should not have required the exhibition of a kind, humble, and intelligent man stolen from his land.
Some historians speculate that Fuller came from Africa, where math was a significant part of his education. Writings show that many slave traders and slaves taken from Africa in the early seventeenth century came from an area where the revered Persian astronomer and mathematician Muhammad Ibn Muhammad lived. In parts of Africa, mathematics was prominent, which is not surprising, considering that ancient Greek mathematicians established mathematics and Islam in the ninth and tenth centuries. If it were not for the Islamic translators, much of the Greek mathematics that we know would not exist.
This information leads me to conclude that all too often, we judge a book by its cover. We often judge people by the color of their skin and the accent in their voice. We do not take the time to understand the history of that individual, where they came from, what they know, and the richness of their history. Instead, many people choose to rely on what they have always known and not challenge themselves to learn more to be a better human.
When Fuller passed away in 1790, people from all around the world mourned his death. What I love most is the elegy that was written about him in the Boston newspaper Columbian Sentinel. The elegy reads,
“Died-NEGRO TOM, the famous African Calculator, aged 80 years. He was the property of Mrs. Elizabeth Cox of Alexandria. Tom was a very black man. He was brought to this country at the age of 14, and was sold as a slave with many of his unfortunate Countrymen. This man was a prodigy. Though he could neither read nor write, he had perfectly acquired the art of enumeration. The power of recollection and the strength of memory were so complete in him, that he could multiply seven into itself, that product by 7, and the product, so produced, by seven, for seven times. He could give the number of months, days, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds in any period of time that any person chose to mention, allowing in his calculation for all the leap years that happened in the time; and would give the number of poles, yards, feet, inches, and barley-corns in any given distance, say the diameter of the Earth’s orbit; and in every calculation he would produce the true answer in less time than ninety-nine men in a hundred would produce with their pens. And, what was, perhaps, more extraordinary, though interrupted in the progress of his calculation, and engaged in discourse upon any other subject, his operations were not thereby in the least deranged, so as to make it necessary for him to begin again, but he would go on from where he had left off, and could give any, or all, of the stages through which the calculation had passed. His first essay in numbers was counting the hairs in the tails of the cows and horses, which he was set to keep. With little instruction, he would have been able to cast up plats of land. He took great notice of the lines of land, which he had seen surveyed. He drew just conclusions from facts, surprisingly so, for his opportunities. Thus died Negro Tom, this self-taught Arithmetician, this untutored Scholar!-Had his opportunity of improvement been equal to those of thousands of his fellow-men, neither the Royal Society of London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris, nor even a NEWTON himself, need have been ashamed to acknowledge him a Brother in Science.”[ii]
[i] Farr, James. “So Vile and Miserable an Estate”: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought.” Political Theory 14, no. 2 (1986): 263–89. Accessed June 2, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/191463
[ii] Fauvel, John, and Paulus Gerdes. “African slave and calculating prodigy: Bicentenary of the death of Thomas Fuller.” Historia Mathematica 17, no. 2 (1990), 141–151. doi:10.1016/0315–0860(90)90050‑n.