Numeracy and Self-Making: Recovering the Calculations of Former Slaves in North America

A 1770 runaway advertisement in Virginia warned that the fugitive slave John Wilson could “read, write, and cipher very well, so that he is every way well qualified to attempt passing as a freeman, and, probably to get out of the country.” Wilson’s contemporaries recognized numeracy, not just literacy, as essential both to slaves’ practical pursuit of freedom and to their self-representation as free men.

It is seldom noted that the most famous ex-slave in North America was not just highly literate but quite numerate as well. Frederick Douglass wrote in 1846 that as a slave he had “acquired a knowledge of figures, and learned the multiplication table, frequently the sand being the only place I had to practice on.”  Writing with his finger in the sand or, as he elsewhere recalled, with chalk on “the board fence, brick wall, and pavement,” Douglass “acquired, unknown to [his] master, a considerable knowledge of the English language, writing, and arithmetic.”

Black numeracy left fewer traces in the archive than did the well-studied phenomenon of black literacy: unlike Wilson and Douglass, many former slaves were numerate but not literate, and arithmetic was often practiced mentally or orally rather than on paper. Moreover, few curators or historians have valued what paper scraps everyday quantitative processes did generate. As the example of Douglass’ computations in the sand shows, the calculations of slaves in pursuit of freedom could easily disappear. Indeed, slaves, fugitive slaves, and free blacks often intended to conceal their numeracy. Yet by recovering evidence about the role of arithmetic in black self-making in North America, this paper contributes to a history of numeracy from the bottom up, reaffirming Patricia Cohen’s portrait of early Americans as a “calculating people” and pointing to the prominence of black figures in that picture.