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Identity

Formerly enslaved man's response to his 'master' wanting him back is a literary masterpiece

"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."

GOOD

A photo of Jordan Anderson.

In 1825, at the approximate age of 8, Jordan Anderson (sometimes spelled "Jordon") was sold into slavery and would live as a servant of the Anderson family for 39 years. In 1864, the Union Army camped out on the Anderson plantation and he and his wife, Amanda, were liberated. The couple eventually made it safely to Dayton, Ohio, where, in July 1865, Jordan received a letter from his former owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson. The letter kindly asked Jordan to return to work on the plantation because it had fallen into disarray during the war.

On Aug. 7, 1865, Jordan dictated his response through his new boss, Valentine Winters, and it was published in the Cincinnati Commercial. The letter, entitled "Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master," was not only hilarious, but it showed compassion, defiance, and dignity. That year, the letter would be republished in theNew York Daily Tribune and Lydia Marie Child's "The Freedman's Book."

The letter mentions a "Miss Mary" (Col. Anderson's Wife), "Martha" (Col. Anderson's daughter), Henry (most likely Col. Anderson's son), and George Carter (a local carpenter).

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 Jordon, 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,
Jordon Anderson

Learn more about Jordan Anderson here.


This article originally appeared on 11.03.17.


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Identity

LeVar Burton shares thoughtful reaction to finding out he has a Confederate ancestor

“There’s some conflict roiling inside of me right now, but also oddly enough I feel a pathway opening up…"

LeVar Burton/X (via Finding Your Roots/PBS)

James Henry Dixon was a North Carolina farmer with a wife and children when he fathered Burton's great-grandmother.

The United States has long been seen as a "melting pot," a "nation of immigrants," and a country where people of diverse backgrounds mix and mingle together under the common banner of freedom and liberty.

It's a bit more complicated than that, though, especially for Black Americans whose ancestors came to the U.S. by force as part of the "peculiar institution" of human chattel slavery. Through the cruel system of buying, selling and breeding human beings for generations, many people's ancestral knowledge was stolen from them, a historical reality that prompted "Black" with a capital "B" as an ethnic and cultural identifier for people of the African diaspora.

Curiosity about the varied backgrounds of Americans is the basis of "Finding Your Roots," a PBS series hosted by Harvard professor Henry Gates, Jr. The show has revealed some surprises in some famous people's DNA, including the beloved "Reading Rainbow" host, LeVar Burton.

Burton sat down with Gates to go over what researchers had found out about his lineage, and what they discovered floored him. Burton said that his mom, who had raised him and his siblings as a single mother from the time he was 11, had never wanted to share anything about her own personal history, so he didn't know much about his ancestry.

As it turns out, the man who was on record as being Burton's great-great-grandfather, Louis Sills, was not actually his blood ancestor at all. The man who fathered Mary Sills, Burton's great-grandmother, was actually a white man named James Henry Dixon.

Burton knew Sills when he was a child and referred to her as "Granny." He had always been told that Granny had some Native American ancestry, but she was actually half white, her father being a North Carolina farmer who had a wife and children at the time Sills was born.

Not only that, but Dixon had served in the junior reserves for the Confederacy as a teenager, too young to be in active combat when the war broke out in 1861. So not only did Burton have a white direct ancestor but that ancestor was on the side of defending the enslavement of Black people.

"Are you kidding me?" was Burton's initial response to this news. "Oh my god. I did not see this coming."

Once the news sunk in, Burton thoughtfully reflected on what it might have meant.

“I often wonder about white men of the period and how they justify to themselves their relations with Black women, especially those in an unbalanced power dynamic," Burton said. "There has to be a powerful disconnect created emotionally and mentally. So it’s possible in my mind that he could’ve contemplated it and was conflicted at worst, maybe repentant at best. And then there’s the possibility that he didn’t think about it at all."

Through we don't know the nature of the sexual relationship between Sills and Dixon, sexual violence was a ubiquitous feature of enslavement in the U.S. and the power dynamic between white and Black people at that raises questions about whether any relations could be viewed as truly consensual. Previous episodes of "Finding Your Roots" has unveiled relationships that defy assumptions one way or the other, so that element of Burton's family history remains a mystery. However, Dixon fathered at least nine children and had at least 40 grandchildren, meaning Burton likely has white relatives scattered throughout the country.

When Gates asked Burton how this revelation of having a white Confederate great-great-grandfather made him feel, he said, "There's some conflict roiling inside of me right now, but it, it, it also, oddly enough, I feel, I, I feel a pathway opening up…I believe that as Americans, we need to have this conversation about who we are and how we got here. But yet I see that we're so polarized politically and racially. We're not talking to each other. And so I've been looking for an entry point to talk to white America."

"Well, that door just opened," said Gates.

"Here it is," responded Burton. "Here it is."

Some people didn't understand Burton's reaction, highlighting the complexity of racial identity and the history of race relations in the U.S. in particular due to the reality of race-based slavery. One of the things people love about "Finding Your Roots" is how it opens up entirely new perspectives in people's own life stories, which is a very personal thing.

As Burton wrote in response to a commenter on X, "It is one thing to know something on an intellectual level, another matter entirely to be introduced to an emotional truth that is both surprising and wholly unexpected."

Burton found out a lot more about his ancestry on both sides, including the fact that education and literacy—which Burton has dedicated much of his career to—can be traced back several generations through his father's side. His father left when he was 11 and he didn't know anything about his background, but he actually had educators in his family going back to at least 1880.

Though Burton said it was "overwhelming" to find all of this out about his lineage, he also said he was "ecstatic" to learn it.

"Never in a million years would I ever have imagined that you would find information like this for my family," Burton told Gates.

Watch Burton's entire ancestry being revealed on "Finding Your Roots," starting at the 12:00 mark and continuing again at 32:50:

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Education

Ever heard of 'drapetomania'? Why every American needs to learn about this 'disease'

Dr. Cartwright's 1815 explanation of the "malady" and its "cure" sheds a disturbing light on the "kind" treatment some enslaved people received.

Public Domain

Dr. Samuel Cartwright invented an entire mental illness to explain why Black slaves repeatedly ran away.

If you've never heard of drapetomania, you're not alone. It's a disease that doesn't exist anymore. In fact, it didn't even exist when it was coined, but plenty of people in the Antebellum South believed that it did.

After all, a renowned, well-respected doctor defined "drapetomania"—combining the Greek words for "runaway" and "madness"—as "the disease causing Negroes to run away" in 1851.

Dr. Samuel Cartwright was the first president of the Mississippi State Medical Society and a leading expert on diseases and medicine in the Southern states in the mid-1800s. He was also an unapologetic white supremacist. In a short paper titled, "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race," Cartwright managed to pathologize the normal human desire to not be enslaved and even prescribed a "remedy" for it.

To be frank, Cartwright's explanation of drapteomania, its causes and its cures is a nauseating read, but it's also an important one. Slavery minimizers often try to argue that "not all masters treated their slaves badly," insinuating that the enslaved person's experience wasn't always terrible (as if being enslaved in and of itself is not terrible). But reading a doctor explain how to cure the "disease" of wanting to escape slavery highlights how even "care" and "kindness" toward enslaved people were often deeply steeped in racism.

I'm sharing the four paragraphs that explain drapetomania in their entirety because reading primary documents is a big part of a full education. (If you want the TL;DR version, it's basically, "Holy blatant white supremacy, Batman.")

Again, this came from one of the most renowned doctors in the American South at the time:


"DRAPETOMANIA, OR THE DISEASE CAUSING NEGROES TO RUN AWAY.

It is unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers...In noticing a disease not heretofore classed among the long list of maladies that man is subject to, it was necessary to have a new term to express it. The cause in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away, can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves be located on the borders of a free state, within a stone's throw of the abolitionists.

If the white man attempts to oppose the Deity's will, by trying to make the negro anything else than 'the submissive knee-bender,' (which the Almighty declared he should be,) by trying to raise him to a level with himself, or by putting himself on an equality with the negro; or if he abuses the power which God has given him over his fellow-man, by being cruel to him, or punishing him in anger, or by neglecting to protect him from the wanton abuses of his fellow-servants and all others, or by denying him the usual comforts and necessaries of life, the negro will run away; but if he keeps him in the position that we learn from the Scriptures he was intended to occupy, that is, the position of submission; and if his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the sane time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away.

According to my experience, the 'genu flexit'--the awe and reverence, must be exacted from them, or they will despise their masters, become rude and ungovernable, and run away. On Mason and Dixon's line, two classes of persons were apt to lose their negroes: those who made themselves too familiar with them, treating them as equals, and making little or no distinction in regard to color; and, on the other hand, those who treated them cruelly, denied them the common necessaries of life, neglected to protect them against the abuses of others, or frightened them by a blustering manner of approach, when about to punish them for misdemeanors. Before the negroes run away, unless they are frightened or panic-struck, they become sulky and dissatisfied. The cause of this sulkiness and dissatisfaction should be inquired into and removed, or they are apt to run away or fall into the negro consumption. When sulky and dissatisfied without cause, the experience of those on the line and elsewhere, was decidedly in favor of whipping them out of it, as a preventive measure against absconding, or other bad conduct. It was called whipping the devil out of them.

If treated kindly, well fed and clothed, with fuel enough to keep a small fire burning all night--separated into families, each family having its own house--not permitted to run about at night to visit their neighbors, to receive visits or use intoxicating liquors, and not overworked or exposed too much to the weather, they are very easily governed--more so than any other people in the world. When all this is done, if any one of more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good require that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which it was intended for them to occupy in all after-time, when their progenitor received the name of Canaan or 'submissive knee-bender.' They have only to be kept in that state and treated like children, with care, kindness, attention and humanity, to prevent and cure them from running away."

Apparently, the idea that an enslaved person might want to escape because they value their own liberty—literally the idea the U.S. was founded on—never crossed the doctor's mind. Clearly, the "Give me liberty or give me death" rallying cry didn't apply to Black people.

But what's most striking about this paper is how grossly manipulative it is. First, the claim that white supremacy is God's will, which is always disturbing to see written plainly, and then the calculations of exactly how nice you have to be to your slaves in order to "cure" them of the "malady" of wanting to run away from you while still keeping them "submissive" and "governable." The dehumanization of Black Americans, even while talking about treating them with "humanity," is striking.

The other big kicker: This was a medical doctor, so a highly educated man. And it's not like he had zero experience or education outside of the South, either—he attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. Often, we associate racism with ignorance, which is a logical (and often accurate) connection. But this doctor's words are a reminder that, for some people, racism is a conscious decision arrived at through twisted, academic-ish reasoning.

It's also a reminder that we live in strange times. We have the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips and all the resources to understand the horrors of race-based chattel slavery in the U.S., and yet we also have state authorities trying to limit what can be taught about slavery in schools. Even when an accurate history of slavery is taught, the idea that runaway slaves were thought to be suffering from mental illness might only be given a sentence or two in a history book. But diving in deeper, seeing where the idea came from and understanding how it was perpetuated by educated, respected members of medical institutions is really eye-opening.

And it's exactly the kind of thing that should not be ignored, minimized or excluded from education about the U.S. and its history.

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Democracy

Mississippi's 'Confederate Heritage Month' is wrong and needs to end now

Let's talk about why applying words like "honor" and "heritage" to the Confederacy is ridiculous.

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

April Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi

Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi has declared April as Confederate Heritage Month in the Magnolia State, marking the 30th year of this ridiculous and wrong "tradition."

If you're wondering how the state's leadership justifies something so backwards in 2023, here are the three reasons listed for recognizing Confederate Heritage Month in the official proclamation:

1) April is when the Civil War, "the costliest and deadliest" war ever fought on American soil, began. (Um, y'all know the Confederates were the ones who started this costly and deadly war, right?)

2) State law designates the last Monday in April as Confederate Memorial Day, "to honor those who served in the Confederacy." (To honor those who did what, now? Served in the Confederacy? So you're not merely memorializing those who tragically died fighting for a wrong-headed, racist cause, but you're "honoring" anyone who "served" that cause? Interesting.)

3) The state wants to "honor all who lost their lives in this war" and "reflect on our nation's past" and "gain insight from our mistakes and successes" and something about "lessons learned yesterday and today," and striving to "understand and appreciate our heritage," and no, none of this makes any sense whatsoever. (If reflection and insight lead you to still honor the Confederacy, you haven't learned a daggone thing, folks.)

First of all, if there's any question about what the Confederates in Mississippi were fighting for, they made it crystal clear in their own official declaration of reasons for secession. Right up top, the very first reason Mississippi listed:

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world."

Alrighty then.

And if that's not clear enough, in that same document, Mississippi's list of grievances with the United States government included that “it advocates negro equality, socially and politically,” and “it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.”

Kinda puts a kink in the whole "the Confederacy was about states' rights, not slavery" argument, eh? Is this the Confederate heritage being honored this month? If not, what is it, exactly?

And let's talk about this idea of "heritage." Mississippi is 145 years old. The Confederacy lasted a whopping four years. Four years is the time between two World Cup finals and less than half the lifespan of "The Office"—hardly something that constitutes a "heritage." Mississippi still talking about its "Confederate heritage" is like someone in their 50s still talking about their high school glory days, only infinitely more embarrassing.

The Confederates were losers, both literally and figuratively. They were on the objectively wrong side of a war, which they themselves initiated, and they lost. There was no glory in fighting a bloody, costly war in order to maintain the institution of slavery. There was no honor in officially documenting racist beliefs about Black people and enlisting troops to kill fellow Americans in defense of those beliefs.

The fact that the Confederates believed so deeply in their cause that tens of thousands of them were willing to die for it doesn't make it right or OK or honorable. It actually makes it worse. Creating a mythology that there was some kind of righteousness in their fight might may make their descendants feel better, but it's fundamentally dishonest. They were on the wrong side of a war that shouldn't have been fought in the first place.

Any time Mississippi puts its racist history on display like this, people say, "Well, it's Mississippi, what do you expect?" I get the impulse, but we should reject that knee-jerk response, wholeheartedly.

First of all, it's not "Mississippi" doing this. Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents in the country. In the 1920s, Mississippi actually had a Black majority. Yet the state has elected an unbroken string of white governors—65 of them—since its founding. Does that seem a teensy bit…statistically unlikely, all things being equal?

Of course, things have never been equal in Mississippi, which is the whole point here. It's not "Mississippi" clinging to the Confederacy like a security blanket, it's the people in power in Mississippi. Specifically, it's the white politicians who have maintained power through decades of voter suppression tactics, ranging from poll taxes and literacy tests to sneaky legislative structures to blatantly violent intimidation, that have disenfranchised the state's Black voting population.

Does anyone seriously think "Confederate Heritage Month" represents the overall will of the Blackest state in the union? Let's call it what it is—an exercise of Mississippi's steeped-in-racism power structure and a not-so-subtle way of saying, "We're still in charge here."

As for what we should expect from Mississippi's leadership? Better. We should expect better, more, sooner and faster. The state has shown, in the removal of the Confederate flag from its state flag and the willingness to change school names to stop honoring Confederates, that it is capable of letting go of heroic fantasies about the Confederacy. This is a conscious choice it is making, which shouldn't go unchallenged.

If the state wants to demonstrate that it truly has "gained insight" and "learned lessons" from the past and "understands its heritage," it should stop recognizing the Confederacy with words like "tradition" and "honor" and acknowledge the tragedy and horror that it caused. It's way past time to be honest about that history and stop pretending "Confederate heritage" was ever something to celebrate or take pride in.

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