Posted on 02/01/2012 6:45:08 AM PST by C19fan
A fascinating letter has emerged from a one-time slave to his former master in reply to being invited back to work on the farm where he spent more than 30 years in servitude. Jourdon Anderson wrote to Colonel P.H. Anderson in August 1865, explaining that since he had been emancipated, he had moved his family from Big Spring, Tennessee to Ohio, was being paid for his labour and could support his family. According to an edition of the New York Daily Tribune published at the time, Jourdon Anderson dictated the letter to give his weighty and fitting response.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I read this yesterday. The irony the former slave captured in the letter had me smiling.
I wonder if the freed slave learned to read and write. I love how he demanded “back wages”. I doubt most college grads would be able to write like this former slave. Maybe they should post this letter in black majority school to shame the students to value education.
My husband thinks it is a fraud, too. ‘The guy writes like an English major.’
He had the right idea, reparations are from the slaveowner to the slave, not from their great great great great great grand children and people who have no connection to people who were never slaves and have no connection.
I think a huge percentage of people’s ancestors came to America after the end of slavery.
It would be a good idea, except for the fact that the "students" could probably not read it, let alone comprehend it. And the concept of "shame"? Forget it.
Some slaves learned to read and write in the dirt behind the barn, under penalty of a flogging if discovered. Now that education has become an entitlement, it has less value than a pair of shoes.
There is a lot of fake stuff out there.
ping
considering the number of slaves that are descended from the rape by a white slave owner, shouldn’t they be paying themselves?
Conveniently released during an election to stir up the reparations, I mean revenge, feelings.
He wrote better than a lot of educated professionals do today.
Love it! I have read a lot of the dictated and written stories of former slaves in the library of Congress, and there were many by men and women just as sharp, knowledgable and ironic. It must have been so difficult to be in that newly freed generation, the bitterness, the freedom, the social strata...
This poor man spoke of no Welfare at all. He only spoke of the pain of having to work for wages. And there was not even any section 8 housing!
If only he had lived in the year 2000 he could have had all the food and clothing and housing his former master supplied, and not had to perform any labor at all.
His baby momma would not even need him around to help send the children to church and get their education, so he would have been have had even more freedom!
And Mathilda and Catherine, having “grown up attractive”, could have made quite a prosperous living on the streets of any of the heavily democrat districts of the USA (if you catch my drift)
And I bet he never even got his reparations.
Priceless!
The letter was dictated.
But if you read the thousands of ex slave stories that are in the library of congress, you will see the GREAT educational disparity between the former slaves. The historians, to preserve authenticity and the educational, cultural status of each old man or woman, wrote down the narratives as spoken. In dialect or not. So some were in such old time southern slave dialect as to be hard to understand, and to make mammy in gone with the wind sound like he queen of england, but plenty of them used educated speech and a far higher vocabulary and sentence structure than their descendants ever dreamed. The spectrum is very dramatic.
lol.
I have my doubts about the authenticity of the letter. It just doesn’t read like the writing of the times.
No way an ex-slave wrote that, it’s a fraud.
I doubt many of todays college educated basketball players could write that well, much less an ex-slave.
It was real, but Jourdan couldn’t write, and the letter was dictated to someone else who transcribed it.
You can read about it at snopes http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=45660
Also in the comments: “As further support of the authenticity of the letter and its contents, I direct the reader to the 1870, 1880, and 1900 federal censii for Dayton, Ohio which show Jordan Anderson (b Dec 1825 in Tennessee) in a household with his wife Amanda (b Oct 1829 in Tennessee). In the 1870 census, five years after the letter was published, they were listed with four of their children — 19 year-old Jane, 12 year-old Felix (Grundy?), 5 year-old William, and 1 year-old Andrew. Over the years, Amanda had had eleven children, only six of whom were still living in 1900. Three of the children we were living with them 1900, including their 29 year-old son Valentine, a physician. In the years of the censii, Jordan lists himself as hostler, a coachman, and a butler. He cannot read or write, and Amanda can only read, but all of his children attend school in the records shown.
Patrick Henry Anderson Sr., born 1823 in Tennessee, merchant and farmer of Wilson County, Tennessee, appears in the federal censii of 1850 and 1860, with his wife Mary Ann, and his children Patrick Henry Jr., Martha, Pauldin, Timis, Edgar Poe (Allen?), and Mary. The slave schedules of 1860 show him as the owner of thirty-two slaves, including a 34 year-old male who could be Jordan. There’s a three-year old boy who could be Felix and a ten year old girl who could be Jane, but Amanda doesn’t seem to be in the list, unless her age has been mis-recorded. As genealogists will know, slave schedules did not include the names of the slaves, just their age, sex, and whether they were black or mulatto (of mixed ancestry). Notably, seven of the slaves, all of them minors, were listed as mulatto, however the distribution of ages of slaves (in particular the lack of female slaves of the correct age to be mothers) suggest that many of the younger slaves came from different owners originally.
According to other published and online records of his family tree, P.H. Anderson died in 1867. His son, P.H. Jr, the Henry mentioned in the letter, appears in censii in Wilson County as late as 1880.
There are multiple George Carters in Wilson County in the period in question, but the likely one is a carpenter who appears in censii in 1850, 1860, and 1870 in the same township as the Andersons. Before the war he owned two slaves, and each was mulatto.”
I thought the letter was very clever. I doubt its authenticity, though. Just an opinion.
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