“Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.”

I love Jourdon Anderson and if we were playing the game of “which three historical characters would you like to have dinner with?” he’d probably be on my shortlist. But surely this letter was all over the internet about three years ago. I don’t understand how everybody can have missed/forgotten it.

… all I can think is “Aw, man! Look what you got all over the internet!”

I share Meredith’s nagging worry that’s it’s just too good to be true. But I really hope it is.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has mentioned the letter several times since 2009. When he quoted it in full in 2010 he pointed people to a Snopes discussion. Someone there quotes the New York Daily Tribune quoting the Cincinnati Commercial as saying “The following is a genuine document. It was dictated by the old servant, and contains his ideas and forms of expression.”

Well, isn’t this fun… turns out Mr. P.H. Anderson is a cousin of mine. My Andersons were planters in Arkansas, so that isn’t exactly a surprise.

Here’s another example of an ex-slave who did very well for himself:
http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/history/full-text/NH1983Robt_B_Anderson.pdf
Robert Ball Anderson fought for the Union and then became a successful businessman in Nebraska. He married late in life to a much younger woman, who lived a very long time and was, so far as anyone is aware, the last surviving widow of an American slave and one of the last three Civil War widows. Here’s her obituary from the LAT:
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/sep/26/news/mn-26606

Robert Ball Anderson’s former owner, Robert Ball, was my 4th-great-grandfather. A journalist cousin of mine corresponded with Mrs. Anderson, who sent him a copy of her husband’s memoirs.

This is cool–I bike by the Anderson home at 60 Burns Ave in Dayton on my way to work every day. I’ll stop and check out the house; that area still has quite a bit of 19th C houses still up and in decent shape.

PS= Twain wrote a short essay called “The Humorous Story, an American Development – Its Difference from the Comic or Witty Story.” As he says there, the humorous story is the product of careful artifice that gives the appearance of naturalness. This letter is a perfect example of the humorous story: an apparently innocuous narrator who turns out to be someone different from what he first seemed; the use of misdirection and understatement to devastating effect; the apparently artless yet carefully placed revelations of crucial facts and telling detail. Look at the quote that serves as the caption for this blog post: “Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.” That line is high art. Twain himself couldn’t have done better.

It’s not impossible that a former slave wrote it, but a former slave who could write that line could have had a literary career to rival any 19th century humorist.

PS- I’m not saying that the letter is a hoax. I’m saying that it appears to me at least to be satire, and that the newspaper audience of the day would have understood it as such.

I found a copy of my cousin’s newspaper article- “Black history is everyone’s history”

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0207/p09s02-coop.html

“In 1989, nearly a decade before Daisy Anderson’s death, I sent her a letter asking for a copy of her husband’s memoir. It was the hardest letter I’ve ever written. In the expansive protocols of Southern etiquette, there’s no advice on how to introduce oneself to the relative of a man your ancestor once enslaved.

Several weeks later, Daisy Anderson sent along a copy of “From Slavery to Affluence” in a recycled Sears-Roebuck envelope, along with a small note wishing me well.

Anderson’s book sits on my living room shelf, a daily reminder that black history and white history are but parts of the same American story. It’s a truth worth remembering each February, and every other month of the year.”

How smug we are in our delight at reinforcement of settled opinions.

Reading through the comments, #14 is the one that comes across as smug.

I think you’ll find it’s #15 that is the smug one.

No no, it’s comment #18 that’s really the epitome of smugness, here.

No no, it’s comment #18 that’s really the epitome of smugness, here.

So’s your mom.

The curse of the comment numbers strikes again

Yes, aren’t we all PC and multiculti to regard slavery was wrong.

Were it not for the tireless and courageous efforts of American academics, our nation could easily backslide into the revival of this dreadful practice. By keeping our eyes firmly fixed on the vanquished problems of the past, we avoid the distractions of insignificant current events, such as endless war, extrajudicial killings, and indefinite detention without due process. Self-congratulation is definitely in order.

straightwood, there is no party anymore. We don’t have the conditions to have a Left worth joining today: the Occupy movement is inchoate, Bernard Harcourt’s efforts to support it as an academic more tragical then heroic. Do you propose we forget about the battle cry of freedom, the advent of free labor and equal rights, the time when the Left was very much alive? Also, where were you when JQ was posting about inequality, most of CT about the defense bill, etc, etc?

Goddamnit, bumped out of the smug reserved spot I thought I had by moderation.

PS @15, thanks for that link to your cousin’s article. A counter-balance to the inclination to avoid engaging Tedra’s post.

Tim Wilkinson wrote: The curse of the comment numbers strikes again

Yes indeedy. If people would just use the comment number’s url rather than its number, we would not get comment number rot, the equivalent of link rot.

(Smugly, he wrote) Take a gander at the source for this here comment to see how it is done. (And let me hope that I’ve not overlooked anything!)

The curse of the comment numbers strikes again.

We are all comment #18.

where is it written that reminding ourselves of one historical injustice prevents us from studying other injustices?

So much to do! Reminding ourselves of historical injustices is quite a chore, and would benefit from some organization. How to begin? Perhaps we should start with safe, comfortable topics that don’t make anyone uneasy. Our current President is living proof of the importance of the triumph of the civil rights struggle, so reminding ourselves of the evils of slavery is a great feel-good issue that reinforces our admiration for our WAR LEADER.

By contrast, the signing of the bill enabling military detention of US citizens without trial, a revocation of human rights respected since Magna Carta, would be a very awkward topic. It would be downright rude, if not unpatriotic, to challenge the supreme authority of our intelligent, eloquent, and inspiring minority President. Why remind people of inconvenient injustices when there are so many convenient ones available?

Well I screwed that one up. I meant this.

there is a war against al-Queda

This “war” is not the “War against Al-Qaeda;” it is the “War Against Terror,” a ridiculous, but highly successful, invention justifying the continuation of Cold War era defense spending. The definition of “terrorist” is so elastic that it can be extended to include any activist considered dangerous by the US Government and its corporate owners. Like the “War on Drugs” there is no foreseeable end to this conflict.

The notion that the United States is effectively under indefinite wartime rule by Presidential decree, with the President empowered to arrest, torture, and kill at will is so profoundly repugnant and surreal that Obama apologists must be functioning under some kind of self-hypnosis.

We have been stripped of our liberties and we are told that it is all just a misunderstanding about some silly formalities. We are told that only THEY will be arrested, tortured, and killed without trial. Trust the Dear Leader; he would never do anything wrong to one of US.

Another thing to love about this letter is the final paragraph’s balancing the question “if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane” with an expression of his desire “to have them form virtuous habits.”

I’ll be raising my children to be better people than your children can ever hope to be.

I’m grateful for about 99% of the things I’ve read you write, Bloix, but… nah, nevermind, I should just say thank you also for your concerns for my possible lack of inner luminosity; for the record, I certainly was perfectly well aware of that, and was taking it as presumed understood and moving on to say that the point of the latter half of the paragraph, talking about education and virtue, is to draw the starkest possible contrast with the first half, talking about rape and exploitation, and the contrast is quite well-constructed, IMO, and a properly devastating way to end the letter.

but what are the great moral struggles of our time, and what are we doing about them?

At least in the US? One possibility is securing the right of African-Americans to vote in the face of a massive push to once again disenfranchise them. One might want to push back against those who claim that there’s no more discrimination in this country, or to underscore how the failure of Reconstruction is still polluting our political process. The era in which the letter was composed hasn’t completely left us.

A lovely little epistle indeed.

I find the presumption that a former slave could never have been so, er, articulate to be more than a little patronizing. A keen wit is not dependant upon either income or literacy – in fact, some might argue that it is more of an impediment than an aid to its development.

As for its harmless irrelevance, well … you’ve got an awful lot of people of colour in prison for drug offenses which are just as common among whites (who miraculously seem relatively immune to police attention), one in four African-American children is living in poverty today, & Tom Tancredo can still get a huge round of applause from the Good Ol’ Boys by fondly yearning for a return to means-testing at the polling stations.

It seems to me that there is less effective resistance to foreverwar, which I guess is why piped up.

If it makes you feel any better, the resistance to disenfranchisement isn’t currently all that effective, either. It’s the Whack-a-Mole problem that occurs when dealing with a political system where, amongst the ruling class, the leftmost acceptable point is neoliberalism, the median acceptable point is vicious psychotic theocratic Randian dumbshittery, and the rightmost acceptable point is CPAC’s fascism-in-waiting. And a touch of the same effect as has gone on with the contraception issue: it’s actually possible to budge the needle on that one, while senators from both parties stampede to vote for keeping Guantanamo open or the NDAA. Perhaps it’s partly weariness that keeps the focus on things where it’s previously been possible to get some agreement, such as that slavery was morally abhorrent, or that violence against women is a bad thing.**

**I bring that up because the latest target of US Senate Republicans is renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. See “vicious psychotic theocratic Randian dumbshittery” above. So yeah, it gets harder to find time to push for revocation of AUMFs.