Erik Loomis of LGM posted this on Twitter, and it just made my day. It’s a “Fuck you, pay me!” letter from Civil War soldier and former slave, Jourdon Anderson, to his former master. It’s beautiful:
Dayton, Ohio, August 7th, 1865. Printed in the New York Tribune, August 22nd, 1865. To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. (“Henry”) Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir:I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday- School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, “The colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the Provost- Marshal- General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly–and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve and die if it comes to that than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood, the great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
P.S. — Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson
I think I will read this every Memorial Day. I love it that much.
[via]
doofus
One of my all-time favorite historic documents. This deserves to be required reading in every class about the civil war.
mapaghimagsik
Wow, I certainly enjoyed reading that. I need to stop by LGM more often
Patrick
I absolutely loved that, especially the postscript.
sharl
What a great letter, ABL! And given the origins of Memorial Day, an annual reading on this holiday would be quite appropriate.
Bruce S
As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote when he posted this for “Confederate History Month” several years ago, “That last line is the dagger!”
WaterGirl
I have read that before, but it was so good I had to read it again. Every word.
quannlace
Thirty-two years. Jesus.
Sigher
I think this is the liberal equivalent of “evil gay liberal hippie professor dares god to knock him off the platform, then Navy SEAL Republican holding an American flag passes by and knocks him off the platform, and by the way is Einstein”.
MikeJ
@doofus: I first heard it while listening to Blight’s civil war class from Yale. Excellent series of lectures.
the Reverend boy
Every time I read this letter I get choked up. I also never cease to be amazed by the graciousness of Jourdan’s tone in the letter and still he doesn’t pull any punches and says to his former owner “are you effing kidding me?”
AA+ Bonds
Personally, I’d think “the dagger” is right up there at the top, “hidden” (not really) in the middle of the first paragraph
“By the way, I thought I would mention the time you shot a Union POW in this paper of record, now that we are in post-war 1865”
This letter is a pro-level hit piece of the most unassailable kind – the kind based on facts -directed against someone who certainly deserved far worse than that
doofus
@MikeJ: I agree. They are excellent.
AA+ Bonds
In other words, the letter-writer’s payday would be if P.H. Anderson was investigated for the accusations made here about his murder of a captive Union soldier during wartime, and was sentenced to hang by the neck until dead
There is a reason the writer put that part right up at the top
Xenos
Not to quibble, but is this not a better Juneteenth document than a Decoration Day document?
A little Douglass now and then is pretty nice reading, too. Just saying.
Linnaeus
@MikeJ:
Agreed. I see lectures like that and I think that’s the kind of historian I’d like to be.
quannlace
Translation: Though I can’t formally make you a slave again, I’m sure I can find some other ways to exploit you and your family.”
Chad
@Xenos: “not to quibble but isn’t this better to read on “your” day.” Wank off Memorial Day started at the end of the Civil War.
donnah
I’m a lifelong resident of Dayton and had never heard of this story. Jourdon moved his family here when they left Tennessee. I did some reading and found out where they had lived in Dayton and found they lived right here in Montgomery County, close to what is now our Downtown. He and his wife are buried in Woodland Cemetery, which is also the resting place of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Wright Brothers.
Very cool.
doofus
@Xenos: Methinks you could use a history lession
Poopyman
Here’s a little bit of how Jourdan fared later in life.
No signs of the ol’ Colonel, though.
Mnemosyne
@Xenos:
It hasn’t been called Decoration Day since before I was born, and I was born over 40 years ago.
cmorenc
That is such a magnificently articulate, tone-perfect letter from Jourdon Anderson from Ohio to his old slave owner Col. P.H. Anderson down in Tennessee. Jourdon manages the considerable feat of keeping the tone thoroughly friendly and respectful, but here’s the real key: it’s written on a peer-to-peer, man-to-man level with Col. Anderson. Notice how Jourdon weaves mention of his intimate familiarity and concern for the Colonel and his family, in a similar manner a longtime white male close friend of the family might, as a way of emphasizing that he is now a man of equal standing, rather than still a servant who must lace his words with deferential obsequiousness. Jourdon is smart enough to understand that his polite, intimately friendly, yet completely un-deferential peer tone will sting his old master far more deeply than openly angry, intemperate words ever would.
This letter is a thorough masterpiece of an intelligently understated, yet devastating put-down of his former master.
AA+ Bonds
There will be.
Preach.
jprfrog
@Sigher: Whaaa?
AA+ Bonds
@cmorenc:
Not to mention that the letter not-so-subtly suggests that the local authorities should send the “Colonel” up for capital crimes against a POW
Pretty fantastic, too, how Jourdon Anderson first implies that he would never let his daughters near the place given what happened to other women there, and then asks, all sunshine, whether there any recently-opened schools in the neighborhood for “colored children” to learn “virtuous habits”
This is really a perfect letter in every way
AA+ Bonds
@jprfrog:
He is implying that this letter could not have been written by a former slave, and must have been a fraud perpetrated by a white liberal and perpetuated by other white liberals, to make it seem like black slavery was a bad thing where people got beaten and murdered and raped repeatedly
doofus
@doofus: Oops. Reading comprehension fail on my part. That said, any day and every day is a good day to be reminded of Jourdon’s magnificent response.
West of the Cascades
This is spectacular — poking around on the intertoobz, there’s a nice history of some of Jourdon and Amanda [Mandy] Anderson’s descendants at http://www.daytonhistorybooks.com/jourdon_anderson.html …
Chad
@Sigher: because of course if it was real there’d be all kinds of “o lawdy” “where’s the chicken and white women” if it was written by one of “those” people right?
AA+ Bonds
I find it fascinating that fraudulent majority persecution-fantasy narratives, such as those urban-myth chain letters spread by some right-wing white Christians about demonic atheist professors, etc., try (and fail) to achieve this exact type of “gotcha” authenticity
The difference, of course, is that slavery really happened, and in this case we know what happened to Jourdon Anderson from primary sources
Those contemporary fraudulent narratives, on the other hand, are the business of inventing persecution to compare to the most shocking histories of persecution in the United States, on the premise that those histories are false anyway (since they are so mean to the slave owners, etc.) and are part of a nefarious white liberal psy op that must be countered at all costs
Mnemosyne
@donnah:
If you haven’t been watching the Henry Louis Gates “Finding Your Roots” series on PBS, I think you would find the John Legend/Wanda Sykes episode fascinating as a resident of Ohio. Legend’s family was at the center of a very contentious case in antebellum Ohio where the children of a free black family were kidnapped and sold back into slavery and Ohio sued Tennessee (I think) and Virginia to get them back.
dp
Simply awesome.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Somehow I get the oddest feeling that Jourdan Anderson never got his back wages.
Amazing that there are still people who believe that slavery was something that could somehow have been redeemed. Yeah, but then there are people who think that the president is an illegal alien, so I guess it shouldn’t take me aback…
Marcelo
I was reading it and reveling in Anderson’s insanely perfect “fuck off,” and then I read:
“In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve and die if it comes to that than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters.”
..and then my heart broke. And then I realized it had been breaking the whole time.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
There’s also a wonderful quote from Frederick Douglas (cited by Carl Sagan in The Demon Haunted World). He’s quoting his old slave-owner explaining the facts of life to his wife:
“”Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.””
Suffice it to say, Douglas took it to heart, if not quite in the way the slave-owner anticipated…
Citizen_X
@cmorenc: It is a masterful piece of writing. The gems include not only the postscript, or the by-the-way-remember-when-you-killed-that-Union-prisoner, but also this:
–a perfectly-aimed stiletto of understatement.
Mnemosyne
@cmorenc:
That’s also the function of this little parenthetical when Jourdan Anderson refers to his wife:
geg6
@Mnemosyne:
This. I watched that and actually thought about this letter, which I originally read over at TNC’s joint. Ohio gets many passes from me from now on just because I am so awed by the lengths they were prepared to go to help John Legend’s family. Truly an amazing story. Had me in tears. Can’t imagine how John Legend felt
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
A group of us are watching it at lunchtime at work, and we all kept saying, “What the hell is wrong with Virginia?”
After that episode, I forwarded a link with the David Blight iTunes U course to everyone since there’s a lot of stuff in that course that you don’t hear about in your typical high school history class.
Violet
An amazing letter. Perfection.
AxelFoley
Ethered.
JordanRules
I’m in awe. Thanks for sharing and thanks to the commenters with more links and info.
JordanRules
I’m in awe. Thanks for sharing and thanks to the commenters with more links and info.
Scamp Dog
A wonderful letter, with the sense of wonder somewhat marred by some of the horrors it implies. I took a moment to Google “Jourdon Anderson,” and it turns out that Google images has photos of Mr. Anderson, scans of the newspaper printing of the letter, and even a photo of the woman who transcribed the letter (apparently Anderson didn’t himself know how to write).
The “Matilda and Catherine” referred to in the letter are apparently Jourdan Anderson’s older daughters, not living with him at the time of writing. Knowing that makes his concerns for Milly and Jane a lot more pointed to me.
MonkeyBoy
Jourdon Anderson’s history says he dictated the letter because he could neither read or write.
The grammar is the letter is quite sophisticated which would be unusual for someone who is illiterate so his scribe must have helped with that. Also the letter is so well crafted (one could imagine Samuel Clemens with a hand in but he was out west then) it must have gone through several drafts.
The Abolitionist movement was mainly organized by literary magazines, so I would look for a literary Abolitionist in Dayton noted for a sense of humor to pin down who helped Jourdon craft the letter. I’m not saying that Jourdon wasn’t responsible for the facts or snarky irony, just that someone helped polish it. I could well imagine Jourdon being locally known for an entertaining rant that he would sometimes perform at a local store or other meeting place and someone offering to help publish it.
[ I an currently reading Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” which is largely based on a “hidden” editing ]
Califlander
So Colonel Anderson was a traitor, murderer, rapist, and thief, jonesing for a return to the “good ol’ days.” That’s no reason to get all uppity.
/snark
sharl
@Sigher: Fear not, Sigher, I have found a letter I think you’ll find more credible and pleasing to your own mind and psyche:
“A liberal muslim homosexual ACLU lawyer professor and abortion doctor was teaching a class on Karl Marx, known atheist.
”Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Marx and accept that he was the most highly-evolved being the world has ever known, even greater than Jesus Christ!”
At this moment, a brave, patriotic, pro-life Navy SEAL champion who had served 1500 tours of duty and understood the necessity of war and fully supported all military decision made by the United States stood up and held up a rock.
”How old is this rock, pinhead?”
The arrogant professor smirked quite Jewishly and smugly replied “4.6 billion years, you stupid Christian.”
”Wrong. It’s been 5,000 years since God created it. If it was 4.6 billion years old and evolution, as you say, is real… then it should be an animal now.”
The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Origin of the Species. He stormed out of the room crying those liberal crocodile tears. The same tears liberals cry for the “poor” (who today live in such luxury that most own refrigerators) when they jealously try to claw justly earned wealth from the deserving job creators. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, DeShawn Washington, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than a sophist liberal professor. He wished so much that he had a gun to shoot himself from embarrassment, but he himself had petitioned against them!
The students applauded and all registered Republican that day and accepted Jesus as their lord and savior. An eagle named “Small Government” flew into the room and perched atop the American Flag and shed a tear on the chalk. The pledge of allegiance was read several times, and God himself showed up and enacted a flat tax rate across the country.
The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day. He died of the gay plague AIDS and was tossed into the lake of fire for all eternity.
Semper Fi.
p.s. close the borders
p.p.s. That ex-SEAL was EINSTEIN.
SHARE THIS IF YOU LOVE FREEDOM.”
Mnemosyne
@MonkeyBoy:
Given how many people from the abolitionist movement dedicated their post-war time to gathering narratives from former slaves and teaching freed slaves to read, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a collaboration or, at a minimum, was edited with the assistance of a former abolitionist doing that kind of work in Ohio.
Can I lament the loss of respect that we have for the art of editing? It really is a skill set that’s not the same as the writing skill set, and yet these days most authors and writers are left on their own to puzzle out the problems in their work. Most great writers had a great editor collaborating with them to produce the finished work.
greennotGreen
@sharl: I didn’t read Sigher’s comment to refer to the sentiment of the letter, just its authenticity which is pretty well documented elsewhere in the thread.
Odie Hugh Manatee
That has to be the most polite and sincere “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” that I have ever read. I’m sure that his former master wasn’t all that happy to see his response. His letter encapsulates so much of horror of slavery but what makes it jarring is that the horrors described are written in such a polite way by a victim of that nightmare.
I would have wanted to kill the SOB.
Thanks for quoting this ABL, it serves us all well to remember the horrors of our past. That and shoving it in the face of the deniers as often as possible is a good thing.
SiubhanDuinne
Have stopped near Knoxville to refresh myself, and just read this (which I’ve seen before, but not for a while). Shortly before I pulled over, I heard Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait” on the radio — which, by the way, is amazingly relevant today, and I’d like to hear President Obama do the narration sometime with a good symphony orchestra — anyhow, it seems to me that Jourdon Anderson’s letter would also work very well as a narrator-with-orchestra piece, and I think some American conductor should commission a good contemporary composer to do exactly that.
Random thoughts from the road…
Mnemosyne
@MonkeyBoy:
Also, too, anyone who thinks that having an editor somehow puts a writer’s authorship into question is an idiot who doesn’t know how the writing process works.
(Not that you or Murakami were saying that, of course.)
Michael Finn
It was a crime in the South for anybody to teach any of the slaves to read or write so I am certain that editors were needed. Many states have entire projects that are dedicated to capturing as many of those stories as possible since so many of them were primarily oral history.
Here is the website to the Southern Oral History Program. http://sohp.org/
My favorite civil war story was a woman who was a slave describing what her masters told her about the Yankees about how they would force the slaves to take up the carts and force the slaves to take the place of horses.
PIGL
This is truly remarkable, and all the more so for apparently being authentic. The document would carry a lot of water even as a spoof or fabrication. How much more it carries when one considers the accomplishments of Mr. Anderson, of the strength and wisdom and the self-educated intelligence that shines through the prose. What an amazing man he must have been, and how wonderful to think that his descendents still live among us. I hope they have prospered. I would much rather claim him and Mrs. Anderson as ancestors than any king or merchant prince.
Thanks for sharing this, I had never seen it before.
sharl
@greennotGreen: Fair enough. Just pissed me off.
After all the good historical verification and fact-checking that has gone on for decades, showing that, yeah, all that bad shit did happen with slavery, I do get a bit pissed off. And if the claim is that there could be no emancipated black person capable of such eloquence, especially given the existence of Frederick Douglass and others, it just ticks me off all the more.
That parodic letter I posted, along with the numerous e-mails of similar tone intended to deceive, don’t hold a candle to it, neither in verifiability nor performance in a “smell test”.
Guess I should chill out, maybe check out some of the links from other commenters, especially to see if there was ever a response from (or arrest of) the former slave owner.
donnah
@Mnemosyne:
I’ll check it out, and thanks. I’ve enjoyed other episodes of that series, but I hadn’t seen that one. It sounds good.
Mnemosyne
@donnah:
I won’t give any spoilers, but the Wanda Sykes half of things is really fascinating as well. I really like how Gates is able to take people who seem to be disparate and join them together with similar histories.
It’s also funny because it seems as though Sykes and Gates are at least acquaintances in real life since she calls him “Skip” at one point.
JGabriel
Amazing. That letter is brilliant — tragic with a brutally ironic sense of humor, and, where intended, funny as hell. I particularly love the post-script:
.
MonkeyBoy
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Umm, this was a literary creation intended for publication. I doubt it was ever sent as a letter to the former master.
@sharl:
Fredrick Douglas and others were literate and read a wrote a lot. Jourdan Anderson was not so he obviously had help writing this that included editing it for grammar and style up to and including collaboration. Still it is Anderson’s ideas and story.
Full of Woe
Professor David Blight reads Mr. Anderson’s letter aloud to his class in the twentieth lecture of his Yale lecture series, and I really think he does it justice. It starts at 35:57; I couldn’t get the time set properly in the link.
Narcissus
@MonkeyBoy: He could still have read it when published.
Kathleen
@West of the Cascades: It appears comedian Jonathan Winters is related to Valentine Winters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Winters
Kathleen
And I neglected to thank ABL and all of the commenters who provided links. I knew nothing about Jordan Anderson and his letter.
cinesimon
Beautiful.
And this:
“Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.” – is as true now as it was then.
And surprise surprise, the problem is at it’s most pronounced in the south… plus, of course, in the thousands of American-owned factories in developing countries the world over – where, apparently, slavery and indebted servitude is a ‘step up’, according to the majority of political pundits, who of course get their ‘education’ on such matters from the corporations, not from those who actually study the situation as a whole. Because apparently all academics are Marxists. Funny how such nonsense was also believed by the slave-masters of the south, and by dictators the world over – from Roman times to CheneyBush, and hundreds of others in between: Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Franco, Amin, and on & on.
Of course, it’s extremely relevant these days given the sustained & coordinated vicious attacks on academics of all disciplines across America.
In doing this, America’s right wing leadership, PR hordes and constituents of America show their true goals and values. And they trust that most of us simply won’t have a clue about such warning signs.
And frighteningly, they’re right.
Mnemosyne
@MonkeyBoy:
As @Narcissus said, I think the odds are fairly high that Col. Anderson received several clippings of the letter in the mail, whether from outraged friends or not-so-outraged Northern relatives.
I’m guessing those clippings probably did not survive, but given the time period it would actually be more odd if he was completely unaware of it.
Tata
I’m not sure why Monkey Boy keeps saying Jourdan Anderson could not have put together his thoughts in this sophisticated manner, but it’s kind of creepy. A person does not have to have letters in order to tell a good story; storytelling may be the real art form here.
Wes F. in Hapeville
#51 SiubhanDuinne: I’m a composer, and I have suggested doing just that to a conductor friend. Stay tuned (and drop me a note via my website so I can properly give you credit if this comes to pass).
WF
Lyrebird
@MonkeyBoy:
Mm, I absolutely revere good editors, but as someone w/a bit of training in a relevant field, I’d like to point out for any latecomers that the above assumption is way off. Are any of the passages in Homer a bit intricate? They were composed and kept alive orally. In societies where fewer people are literate, you at least sometimes find a lot more time dedicated to spoken art and rhetoric. Who knows (I assuredly don’t) about how much of the “voice” in that letter is or isn’t Mr. Anderson’s, but it’s entirely possible that it is.
Mnemosyne
@Tata:
I think he’s overly influenced by the Murakami book he referenced. I’m not a big Murakami fan myself, in large part because oftentimes his big “insights” fall apart when you actually examine them.
MojoQuestor
@MikeJ:
I also heard this on Blight’s lectures, which I found thanks to a comment on a BJ post well over a year ago. I wish I could remember who to thank for that. At any rate, a great, great letter.