Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that 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 Colonel 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 that 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 twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks 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, "Them 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 Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, 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 were 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 twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have 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's 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 poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come 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.
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.
Is there a copy of the letter that P.H Anderson sent to J. Anderson as well? The one requesting that he return I mean. I'm sorry that I can't really answer your question but I gotta say that was a fascinating read and would like to look into it further if possible.
I actually have a copy of this letter as part of a wider collection of 50 or so transcribed documents that I'm currently working with. It is a fascinating letter, but one that has received scant scholarly attention to date - somewhat surprising given the great interest in the dynamics of relations between planters and their former slaves in the immediate post-emancipation period. Before I address your question, I should provide some context.
As many readers may have noticed, this is a very well written, well-articulated letter. I'm afraid to report that it was not written by Jordan Anderson himself - Jordan was almost certainly completely illiterate, and we know from a copy of the letter that was sent to the New York Tribune in the same month it was published that it had been dictated to someone else. Sadly, we know not who wrote the letter, or in what kind of relationship they had with Jordan. That makes it difficult for us to verify much about its contents. Fortunately, we can verify with confidence Jordan's existence; census records very much confirm that in 1880 there was a Jordan Anderson and an Amanda Anderson living in Dayton, Ohio, and they were still alive by 1900. Given that the letter was published after the end of the debate on abolition and copied to a newspaper at the time, and that it correlates with details of Jordan's life, it is reasonable for us to assume that it was authentically dictated by him, though we can never know what his own words were and what were those of the writer.
Our most famous record of the letter, and the one which was most widely circulated, is a copy that appears in Lydia Maria Child's The Freedmen's Book. Child was a well known and often controversial abolitionist and rights activist who edited the now-famous Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs; her 1865 book was aimed entirely at the free black population and was intended to be a source of inspiration and guidance for the newly emancipated ex-slaves. Proceeds from the book were to go to spreading it further and to providing for the establishment of schools that would teach black children. This was the context within which it was circulated. The book does not seem to have gotten very much traction or attention; it appears only in a handful of periodicals as far as I can tell.
The only meaningful reference to the text of the letter that I am aware of comes from a very favourable review, which heaps praise on Childs for her work in the "instruction and improvement" of black people, by the New York Daily Tribune in December 1865, where the reviewer remarks:
One of the most poignant things in the volume is a letter from a freedmen to his old master, written as he dictated it, and showing a quiet humor spicing a strong sense of justice which is quite refreshing.
And that perhaps captures quite well how this would have been received at the time - poignant, more than significant, and read only by a very small number of even literate people. Those who had resisted abolition were very unlikely to ever encounter this letter or think anything of it; those who did go out of their way to encounter the book would have either been black themselves or seeking out literature that reflecting their ideas and notions. Furthermore, though it might seem striking in how Jordan simultaneously shows deference to and contempt for his former master, it does not stand out as being particularly radical when you consider that there was already a huge body of slave-authored and slave-dictated literature available, much of which had been scathingly critical of the slavery establishment. It is significant to us in that it is a potentially rare example of direct correspondence between ex-slave and ex-owner in the very immediate post-emancipation period, but the ideas and sentiments expressed in it are much more common than you might expect.
As such, the short answer is that the letter would probably not have been received at all by much of the public; it simply would not be the kind of thing to capture the imagination of the people like some more notable, comprehensive and commercially successful slave narratives did. For those who did encounter it, there wasn't anything overwhelmingly radical about its character - it is in many ways very much in the same vein as many other letters and narratives from the period. One of the ways in which it does stand out most to me, though, is the effort to attach a decided value to all of the labour undertaken during slavery, and a request for compensation - even though Jordan and his author would have surely known it would never be granted, it is still a fascinating insight into what some ex-slaves felt about their service in retrospect.
I am a little bit pressed for time at the moment, so I'm going to leave it there and not take it beyond your original question about public response. I am however absolutely happy to field other questions or expand on anything I've said here when I have a chance to address them.
I've always wondered if this letter was genuine
Is there a credible source for it?
I saw this letter come up multiple times in the last few years (i think first from an article by Coates at the atlantic). Can anyone tell me why this letter received more popular attention recently especially since other commenters have noted that it historically hasn't recieved much attention.
I hope this doesn't violate the 20 year rule