Thomas Fuller — America’s First African Mathematician: An 18th Century Slave Who was a Math Prodigy Known as the "Virginia Calculator"

Math Science History ^ | Gabrielle Birchak

[SeekAndFind]

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, “No, Top, Massa, you for­get De 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.

[Jamestown1630]

Savant syndrome.

[Hambone 1934]

Must be a lie..We are told math is racist

[Jane Long]

Great story. Thanks for posting this very interesting history, the story of Thomas Fuller.

[SaveFerris]

(Savant syndrome.)

Seems like it. Good story.

[FoxInSocks]

And because Eliz­a­beth Cox was not that smart

That’s not very kind.

[packagingguy]

Sounds like an austist. I have one. The math at 6:30 in the morning will drive you mad. Talented folks.

[bhl]

Yeah, if he couldn’t learn to read in 80 years of his life, he was unlikely a genius (IQ 160+) His main talent seemed to be calculating the number of seconds in a date range. Doesn’t say whether he used his talent in bookkeeping etc.

[Jamestown1630]

I don’t pay any attention to ‘IQ’. I think it’s a worthless measurement.

[Deaf Smith]

I only Fuller had been owned by Anthony Johnson.

[lee martell]

In the Blunt Speaking old days, that was called
“Idiot-Savant”.
Nowhere in the article did I read that “Negro Tom” was ever able to benefit in a material way from his fine talents.
I didn’t read that he had a nice home or decent clothing or anything. I mostly read that he was held up for exhibit and amusement like a Dog who can toot Jingle Bells from bike horns. Some things, some social attitudes take time to change, quite a lot of time.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: His main talent seemed to be calculating the number of seconds in a date range.

Actually it was more than that. From the article:

He could ... cal­cu­late the num­ber of grains of corn in a giv­en mass

.... 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

.... she uti­lized him on all areas of a farm for land­scap­ing, home repairs, and cal­cu­lat­ing the crops and ani­mals on the farm.

.... 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.

[Jamestown1630]

Do we know if he was generally happy or not?

[Tired of Taxes]

Interesting story. Thanks for posting it.

[lee martell]

I get the impression that the average adult, black or white did not begin thinking in terms of ‘happiness’ or fullfilment until the Industrial Revolution, 1760 thru 1840.
Until then, basic survival was the name of the game.

‘Happiness’ as it were was said to be best achieved through organized religion.
Upperclasses have always had the leisure which allowed them time to speculate about various states of existence.
This same analogy can also be said about the notion of romantic love.

[metmom]

Reminds me of the movie “Hidden Figures”.

They took liberties with the book when making the movie, as usual, but it was still a great movie.

And when mr. mm and I went to see it, you get one guess of the demographic that was lined up in the theater waiting for admission.

Yup, middle aged and older, white folks who grew up during the space race.

Nary a black to be seen.

[Jamestown1630]

Jeez Louise.

You think people never experienced personal happiness before the Industrial Revolution, or Romantic Love before the Middle Ages?

You have too much book-learnin’, and not enough knowledge of human-beans.

(You must be a machine...)

[lee martell]

Lol! That has been said before.

[Midwesterner53]

Fails to mention who put him on that boat. I wonder why?

[BiteYourSelf]

Yup, sounds like he was an idiot-Savant.🤔