Just perfect.

Damn. I wish I'd known that man.

Need to stop crying.

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.

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 get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson)

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.

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=45660

Reminds me of Benjamin Banneker getting at Tom Jefferson:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h71t.html

Here was a time, in which your tender feelings for yourselves had engaged you thus to declare, you were then impressed with proper ideas of the great violation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings, to which you were entitled by nature; but, Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.

One!

One.

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.

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.

I had never heard of the exchange before college either.

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!

http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/05/06/wednesday-lazy-linking/

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.

*sigh*

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.

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.

Why do you want so badly for it not to be, if you dont mind me asking?

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.

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.

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.

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.

By God, this was a man!

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?)

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.

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.

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."

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.