From Letters of Note:
Using a calendar and some very simple mathematics I’ve just
calculated that exactly 10 years have passed since I first featured the
following letter on the old Letters of Note blog, leading to some 3
million people visiting the website in the space of 24hrs to read about
this incredible piece of correspondence and the man behind it. At the
risk of sounding overdramatic, it was then that everything changed for
me, and I vividly remember thinking at the time, because of the reaction
to this very letter: I reckon Letters of Note may have legs. And it
did. And it feels only right to dust this gem off and send it to you
today.
In 1864, after 32 long years in the service of his master, Jourdon Anderson and his wife, Amanda, escaped a life of slavery when Union Army soldiers freed them from the plantation on which they had been working so tirelessly. They grasped the opportunity with vigour, quickly moved to Ohio where Jourdon could find paid work with which to support his growing family, and didn’t look back. Then, a year later, shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jourdon received a desperate letter from Patrick Henry Anderson, the man who used to own him, in which he was asked to return to work on the plantation and rescue his ailing business.
Jourdon’s reply to the person who enslaved his family, dictated from his home on August 7th, is everything you could wish for, and quite rightly was subsequently reprinted in numerous newspapers. Jourdon Anderson never returned to Big Spring, Tennessee. He passed away in 1907, aged 81, and is buried alongside his wife who died six years later. Together they had a total of 11 children.
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee....
....MUCH MORE
