A quick excerpt:
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.Read the rest. It's incredible. So much blackness there, and then something of that sense of Southern understatement there also, that whole playing dumb act while driving home a dead serious point. And maintaining a veneer of politness also, even while discussing truly grave matters.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Just perfect.
I was just coming here to quote that. Perfect, indeed.
Now that's the sort of thing that makes you have pick your jaw up off the damn keyboard when you finish.
Oh, to have been there when Col. Johnson opened and read this letter ...
By God, this was a man!
Holy ....
Damn. I wish I'd known that man.
Need to stop crying.
What a wit!
Brilliant. This should be taught in High School English classes as an example of irony.
That is so cool. I love the whole part about where the old master should send the money.
I like the subtle way that indicates "oh, by the way, I know a lawyer."
I am utterly floored by that letter.
I honestly wonder if the bastard had any clue
to be clear, im talking about the master
Jourdan Anderson was a rhetorical badass.
I googled "Jourdan Anderson" just to see if I could find anything about the history of how that letter became public- it looks like it was published in the newspaper. There were a couple of references to the letter, not much, plus a couple of young dudes named Jourdan Anderson on facebook. If they're related to him, I hope they know this story- talk about having an ancestor to be proud of. :)
a little more on it from Snopes:
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=45660
That's one of the best things that I've ever read.
This was my favorite part.
G#D--ned right. Beautiful. I have to agree with colette on this one. The whole letter brings a tear to my eye.
Also
I'd vernture a guess that hearing your wife given an honorific for the first time in her life is reason enough not to go back. The whole letter is one great big middle finger, it warms the cockles of my heart --well if my heart had cockles.
Never underestimate the power of a last name.
I was just coming here to quote the part about "folks here call her Mrs. Anderson." Amazing, amazing letter.
Reminds me of Benjamin Banneker getting at Tom Jefferson:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h71t.html
thanks for that; i'm a little embarassed to admit that i'd never before read either the letter from Jourdan Anderson nor the one from Benjamin Banneker, and that both of them are well, well worth reading.
Shout out to my HBCUs for putting me up on it!
I had never heard of the exchange before college either.
Thanks for this.
Echoes of that In the Heat of the Night--"They call me Mr. Tibbs!"
This is an awesome letter. I especially enjoyed Jourdan's second paragraph -- how he made it a point to mention how his wife, Mandy, is now called MRS. Anderson. Loves it!
OH MY GOD THIS LETTER FUCKING RULES!! I GRANT IT THE GREAT DISTINCTION AND PARTICULAR HONOR OF AN ALL-CAPS BLOG COMMENT!!
One!
One.
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.
I guess that's my favorite part, since this was apparently published in a newspaper. I'd venture to say that in 1865 the statute of limitations was not over on executing wounded Union soldiers.
Oh, man, I hadn't even thought of that.
I loved this so much, I've had it pinned to my bathroom wall for a couple of years. You can see the anger rising to a peak in it and then receding back to the cool mental and moral mastery over his former master.
Southern genteelness always left my cold, and a very uneasy. How could people so refined be so cruel and heartless?
Maybe it's the accent or the sun. This letter is an example
of grace under fire, true wit. I put it up there with Mark Twain
and Oscar Wilde. Bravo, Monsieur Anderson.
That's the good side of southern gentility; Twain and apparently Mr. Anderson were masters at hiding the iron fist in a lovely silk glove.
This letter is quite fake. It was indeed written at the time indicated, but not by a former slave. One notes that the letter, which is a response to another letter, is dated August 1865, when the war only ended on April 1865. It was published in a newspaper and so on, but it was certainly not composed by an ex-slave.
Think about it: why would any ex-master write to a ex-slave when he is the risk of being exposed for killing a war invalid, and being hanged? It seems utterly implausible. If the letter was indeed published, the only thing that would have saved the ex-master from hanging would have been the ending of the Reconstruction, which at the time was still going on.
And I am somewhat puzzled that if an ex-slave wanted his master dead, he would go about it this sort of roundabout way, publishing a personal letter somewhere, because if we were to take the letter seriously, it's fairly clear that the ex-slave wanted his ex-master hanged. Why, he would just have gone to the authorities!
Except in the letter he says he got his free papers in 1964.
As for why a master would write to said slave, the answer is simply "for labor." If that slave was an excellent worker (maybe even foreman) and the plantation has gone to hell in his absence, he might have been arrogant enough to fantasize about his slave coming back home to where he was "treated well" and "fed and cared for" instead of being in that wild, wicked North on his own.
I think your assumption that he wanted his master dead is shaky too, as is the assumption that this would clearly have marked his former master for death. Again, we dont know enough about that master's standing in that community, what his relationship to soldiers and legal authorities were, etc.
Finally, the circumstances of how the letter came to be written and published are also unclear, because the original composer might not have been the person pushing for its publication. Another uncertainty.
I agree, its certainly possible this is a polemic falsely represented as an authentic letter from master to servant. Im a little put off by your rush to judgment "This was quite certainly not written by a former slave, thats utterly implausible!"
I dont want to attribute motives to you, but your burning certainty about this being a fake in the face of so much uncertainty is puzzling.
He got his papers in EIGHTEEN SIXTY FOUR duh, not NINETEEN SIXTY FOUR.
*sigh*
Myles SG,
Your own internet-detectiving logic is incredibly weak. The point of the letter completely flew over over your head.
The ex-slave did not want his master dead nor any other overt purpose. He had moved on with his life. The only real goal Jourdan Anderson had wass to express, using as dry and acid sarcasm as possible, how much of a complete ass his former master was and how much his offer to have the slave come back was just completely ridiculous.
This also neatly answers your first tightly reasoned question of why the ex-master would risk writing to a slave that knew his darkest secrets. The man stupid or arrogant enough to believe that a free'd slave would come back gratefully was either arrogant, an idiot, and surely underestimated the intelligence of Jourdan Anderson.
Seriously, the most annoying guy on the internet is the one who cries "Fraud!" when no such conclusive evidence exists. Especially in this case, when the doubters are mostly refuting the idea that a freed slave could be articulate enough to write such a letter.
That's an argument that says far more about the accuser than the accused.
There's no way this could have been written by a commoner and ex-slave. Clearly it was the work of a nobleman like the Earl of Oxford.
A++ comment, MikeS.
I agree- The letter is "genuine" in that it's of the period, but I would bet that it was written for publication as a humorous piece (with a moral-political message, obviously), by a professional of the genre.
The Snopes page includes teh intro that ran in the paper at the time. The claim by the author was that Jourdan dicatted it to him and it expressed Jourdan's thoughts.
My guess would be that is more or less correct, the guy who wrote it cleaned up the grammar is all.
The tone of Jourdan's comments and the idea that a former slave owner would be so dense to have written to him in the first place is not that uncommon in other stuff you read from the era.
Eric, that claim ("Jourdan dictates it to him...") is, I suspect, an author's gambit to explain the otherwise unlikely fluency of the letter. It's ass-covering.
Of course, it's entirely plausible that the substantive points come from Jourdan. We could list them: I'm in Ohio now, people treat me (and my wife) tolerably well, and thanks for not killing me. But my sense is that the *exposition* is what makes this letter "significant," and if you credit the notion that someone turned Jourdan's raw material into this comedic gem, the way we read it changes entirely.
Here has been a very thorough discussion of the letter's authenticity.
http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/05/06/wednesday-lazy-linking/
Myles,
That "thorough" discussion is pretty lame. The main guy arguing that it is fake has 2 arguments, first that it is too modern in tone, several people point out to him that it was printied in the NewsPaper in 1865, and copies of the originals exist. Second that it is too well written for an illiterate former slave. Several people point out to him that it was dictated by the slave to someone.
The Snopes link above is a far better discussion and concludes that it is valid.
Myles, Im clear on why I subjectively would like this letter to be authentic.
Why do you want so badly for it not to be, if you dont mind me asking?
You must not read Yglesias Blog, Myles is a regular commentator there.
Yeah Im afraid I don't...
And by the way, I was rather unnerved by the menacing tone of the paragraph where the author casually mentions the shooting of the Union soldier and the ex-master narrowly missing the hanging. There is something quite discomfiting about the feel of that sentence.
That was the point, don't you think?
He didn't write it to you, did he? I don't think he's coming back.
Sorry Kat, my post is at the esteemed Myles SG
It says a lot about you that you only seem to be discomfited by white people getting shot at.
Coincidentally, and apropos of an earlier request for Civil War reading recommendations, a commenter on another blog referred today to Benito Cereno, Melville’s 1855 short novel about a rebellion on a slave ship. For tactical reasons, the mutineers maintain the appearance that the captain is still in command. The narrator is a visitor to the ship who doesn't realize that there's been a takeover.
That is simply breathtaking in its pointedness and sly humor. Also in its poignance.
The parenthetical mention of how his wife is addressed brought a weepy twinkle to my eye, but I gasped out loud when I got to his assessment of back wages. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when Colonel Anderson read this missive! One wonders how many veins popped in his forehead as he made it through that staggeringly ballsy yet dignified middle portion.
That's what really gets me, though--the dignity of it. "You want me back; well, fine: here are the terms. Let's discuss this as equals."
It's beautiful, beautiful. This plus your post on Forrest have made this a banner day on the TNC blog.
I knew, and I mean that I absolutely knew, from the very first post when you mentioned the Blight lectures that there would be a post on that letter. The only way that could have been better moment in recorded history is if Matthew Brady had taken a picture of Col Martin's face as he read the I'm surprised the Yankees didn't hang you sentence.
You've listened to them all, I assume? I have to tell you I've been blown away a few times by his stories--I wish there was a way to chop up and clip some of them. There is this incredible one, where he talks about a Virginia slave who escapes, as his mistress is fleeing South.
Her last words to him are something like, "Now, you'll be with us in the morning won't you John?" And he just looks are her and says "Yes ma'am." Then he goes to the hotel (where he's hired out) and takes all the black workers to the roof. They have a toast and can see the Union armies coming across the river. And he tells them, "Now get out of here. But don't get to far from Union lines."
Incredible.
I have the last two left. I think that I may be saving them for a rainy day.
I know that story and if my memory serves correct its the basis of about half of the book A Slave No More. You are thinking of John Washington and his story actually gets better.(spoiler alert?) After Washington tells those guys to head north and stay to the union lines he goes and visits the Union camp itself and, of course, John's feeling pretty damned good about the Union so he starts bringing them food and I guess the he was a hell of a good cook. So he gets hired by the army (his first job) and works his way up quickly and ends working for one of the generals. In the best bit he's riding alongside Union officers and pointing to them all the houses belonging the the heaviest of Confederate sympathizers and watching them be arrested and hauled off on horseback. I cannot even begin to imagine the satisfaction.
Yeah it's from A Slave No More. That's on my list. I expect to get to it sometime in July.
Oh, damn. I know what I'm listening to this weekend.
The letter is read in lecture 20 if I remember correctly.
Incredible stuff. It's so easy to identify with Jourdan Anderson and almost impossible for me to understand what the Colonol was thinking. Did he think life in free states wasn't so different? Did he buy his own bullshit and think black folk needed a master to be happy? Or was it just a long shot worth the price of a letter? Crazy
I've read several history text books (high school level) from the early 1900's and 1920's, and, for the most part, although the texts admit there were "a few" bad plantation owners and overseers, they mostlyh present what they saw as a positive view of the "good ole days" of slavery in the sense of slaves being well-treated, well-fed, and thus being loyal to their "masters."
If the people who wrote these textbooks could believe this, I can only assume the slave owners shared the same world view. It seems to me that the mental shift needed to accept that owning other humans is a good thing is just a short jump from thinking those humans enjoyed being owned and thus would welcome being able to come "home."
Honestly, it's all sort of sickening to think about. And sad.
Similar willful blindness is evident in the romanticized fiction and literature addressing that time. I read or watch Gone with the Wind or Song of the South and I'm almost viscerally struck by how obviously happy the black folk are with their lot. Civil War passes and everyone goes right back to Tara, working joyfully for Ms. Scarlett as if nothing had changed. That's heavy mythmaking in action.
Great writing is so often timeless, and this letter fits the bill. I love this thread, as well as the thread posted at Snopes above. The cool thing is that I bet that the letter provoked similar thought and discussion when it was published originally, as evidenced by the fact that it was reprinted several times.
Not many people are aware that this is the first recorded PWNage in American history.
I went and found that course that TNC mentioned earlier, and have listened to it on podcast for the past week. My wife found it dry, but for me, it was riveting. I was telling her about this letter, but I could only paraphrase it. Well I just went through reading the whole thing aloud, and we were absolutely floored by how this ex-slave came off at his former master. Talk about being pwned. . . . . Great find on that course Ta!
Holy crap, that's stranger than fiction.
I think it's not unreasonable to wonder whether the letter was actually written by a former slave.
First, consider where the letter was published: the Cincinnati Commercial and the New York Tribune, both Republican papers which had been outspoken in their anti-slavery views. Horace Greeley's Tribune was actually attacked by mobs during the 1863 draft riots because of its support of Lincoln and its association with abolitionism.
Second, newspapers in the 1860s were openly partisan and had not yet embraced the "objective" outlook of professional journalism. It was considered perfectly acceptable to polish the facts in order to serve a political purpose.
Third, remember that the North was deeply divided politically (Lincoln's re-election in 1864 was far from a foregone possibility) and representatives of the Republican Party--particularly its liberal and radical wings--were vigorously arguing for a post-war settlement that would guarantee the rights of citizenship for free blacks. Others in the North would have been perfectly happy to turn back the clock to slavery, quasi-slavery, or an arrangement in which the civil rights of blacks would be sharply circumscribed.
My sense--and here I agree with Rich in PA--is that the letter is a humorous rebuke to Democrats and timid Republicans, likely written by an editor at the Commercial.
Read the Snopes page. The guy certainly existed, as they've found his grave. I guess it's possible that someone used the name of some freed black guy, and then wrote the letter. But I think it's more likely that the slave dictated it. Also, we should watch the presumption of illiteracy among slaves. Most obviously were. A sizeable minority were not.
Apologies for sounding a bit pissed, but I find Miles has taken what little patience I had for this.
Didn't we all have to read about Frederick Douglass in school? What the hell did they teach you, seriously? And plenty of illiterate slaves had their words dictated-- Harriet Tubman and Sojuner Truth seemed to do okay. And that's just off the top of my head, with people I learned about in elementary school.
(Also, of course it was published in anti-slavery papers. What pro-slavery paper would have run it?)
Ditto.
I'll admit I'm no expert on this subject, but I think assuming no former slave could have dictated this is incorrect. I've always been amazed by Civil War letters of common soldiers, many of whom were completely uneducated poor whites: they are models of erudition. It was a different time in terms of use of language, and a very smart person who is able to listen might have a great gift of self-expression, even if he or she didn't know how to actually read or write.
So no, it's not unreasonable to wonder, and many people have done that. People have even seriously researched it. So far, it has not been proven definitively that this letter was not composed (is that a better word than "written" for this, in the case that it was dictated and perhaps edited?) by former slave Jourdon Anderson.
But honestly, I'm not sure how much I care who wrote it. Take it as fiction: is it somehow less brilliant? We see the truth in it.
It was an age of letter writing; everyone got practice at communicating in this way, and so got better at it. Since the telephone became a regular thing, it was natural that our average letter writing skill would diminish. (I was thinking about this this week when someone used Civil War letters as a way to prove how far our educational standards have fallen....letter writing hasn't been seriously practiced by most people for decades.)
True. I have seen some letters these days by graduates of Ivy League colleges that read as if composed by eighth graders.
Mr. Shrimp and Deborah -
The few soldiers' letters I've read do seem to be very well written. Helped, I'm sure, by a desire to document each day for their families - just in case. This letter was less urgently written. Jourdan could easily have just ignored the Colonel's letter, but he had some stuff to say, and clearly spent time thinking through his reply. In the Snopes thread linked to above, someone questioned whether an illiterate person could put together such a cogent letter. I think that question has a flawed premise. In 2009, there may be some justification in thinking that an illiterate adult ended up that way because of low intelligence or a severe lack of effort, and we don't have much of a frame of reference for the idea of a smart, motivated and witty person who is also illiterate. That wasn't the case in 1865.
To me, the shift in tone with each new paragraph reinforces the idea that these are the genuine thoughts of a real person. In the first paragraph, he's talking about the past, reminiscing and showing that complicated relationship with his former master that TNC described. In the second paragraph, he's talking about his current life, and the pride and hope for the future are palpable. But the third paragraph is all business. Maybe the transcriber's voice takes over a bit there. I can certainly imagine Jourdan going to the person who transcribed the letter for him with the idea of back wages, but not having the words or numbers to express it. Some parts of that paragraph may not be his voice, but if not, it is clearly a sympathetic and trusted collaborator.
All this leads to the dagger of the last paragraph. The comments there seem almost random at first, but I think the basic idea is, "The War is over. I won. You lost. Suck on that, you miserable piece of filth."
"You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood"... Wow if that doesn't get to the heart of it. One hundred years later the answer was still, at best, "grudgingly, some minimal ones".