The JCC Celebrates Black History Month: "Letter to my Old Master"

In celebration of Black History Month, I'd like to share the following letter with you. This letter represents former slave Jourdon Anderson's 1865 outstanding achievement in a field near and dear to my heart - trolling. Here's some background on this primo piece of 1860s ownage:

Without further ado...

 

tl;dr

 

Pure ownage.

 

BHM started off with a bang.
RIP Don Cornelius

 

Good response, but are you sure the real troll wasn't the former master asking him to come back?

 

Awesome.

 

then id say the "master" was successfully counter-trolled

 

The real question is how much of this letter is really Jourden Anderson. I remember being impressed by it when I first heard about it in jr. high, but now a few key things come to mind....mostly that it sounds like one of those morale-boosting junk emails you get.

Where is the original letter? And by original, I mean the letter actually handwritten in ink.
The reason I'd want to ask is that the letter as presented is from a book written by abolitionists.

Who wrote the original letter? It's doubtful that it would be written by Mr. Anderson himself, being that he was freed in 1864, and he would have most likely been illiterate. Unless he was a bona fide genius, there was no way that letter would be so articulately written in just over a year.
That being said, a lot of the embellishments might not have been the slave's, but the actual author's. What strikes me the most is the phrase "day of reckoning". A fire-and-brimstone Christian abolitionist would be more likely to use that phrase than an uneducated slave.


EDIT--Have to do it.

[image=http://www.imgpostr.com/images/1279375903503.gif]
Mister Anderson. Welcome back. We've missed you.

 

A couple things. First off, your characterization of "fire and brimstone" Christians seems somewhat off, as such language (and open expression of religious ideology) was far more common then than now. Secondly, the idea that the sin of slavery would meet with special recompense was not at all unique or rare among slaves. Indeed, it was a pretty obvious theme to hit on sui generis, even among the grossly uneducated. See, for instance, this excerpt Isn't God the Captain from the slave narratives collected by the federal government. One of the most popular Union war songs of the entire period was an extended, explicit analogy between Union Army and the wrath of God at the end of time in judgment of the entire world ("trampling in the vineyard where the grapes of wrath are stored"). The question isn't how a slave could come up with this idea. It's how they couldn't.

 

All we know is this....the letter was first published in 1865 in the New York Daily Tribune, and then again in "The Freedman's Book", collected by Lydia Marie Child and published in Boston. We do not know who transcribed it, or how much embellishment it may (or may not) have been given.

Unfortunately we will never know for sure unless someone finds and actual handwritten letter. If such a thing should ever be discovered, it would be worth more than its weight in gold to the historical community.

The best place to start would be the records of Colonel Anderson himself...any plantation owner worth his salt would have had TONS of documents left behind.

 

Was there ever any doubt?

 

LOL. Thomas "A Small Fleet of Rafts With Guns Attached To Them Constitutes a Navy" Jefferson.